Wounded Warrior

Awards: 2nd Place, 2012 Art Alliance Figurative Show

Tree: Eucalyptus, Santa Clara, CA

Dimensions: 20" x 23" x 8"

This sculpture has perhaps the most interesting story of all my works. When I first started collecting wood to sculpt into bowls in 1992, I saved anything I could get my hands on, including some rough “blocks” that remained from an arborist having cut down a huge eucalyptus tree. These blocks had been in a junk pile for several years and were quite weathered. I made one of my first bowls out of one of the chunks, but as my work evolved, and I decided on a signature trait of a natural edge to rim my bowls, I relegated the eucalyptus to a cutting block for chainsaw shaping of other pieces. One thing led to another, and in 2004, when I was sorting through my log pile to throw out badly cracked logs and select an interesting one to start another sculpture, I looked at this eucalyptus block differently. I stood it up on one edge, with the hollow on top, and thought that it was thick enough to carve some 3-dimensional shape to reveal what I knew from my very early bowl to be really pretty brown grain.

What you see in the final sculpture is mostly cleaning up the weathered surface; I left the two weathered hollows—probably from large pinched branches that died back and fell away when the tree was removed. I chose to sculpt surface features that followed the grain around the piece, since there was no other “natural” edge present. As an aside, most of the finishing work was done in Americus, Georgia, in the evenings at the Habitat for Humanity woodshop where I worked as a “snowbird” for 5 months in 2006. The sculpture began to give the impression of a human torso, sans head and arms, of course, as a samurai warrior after a fierce battle. The surface sculpting may be the rippled muscles or topography of light armament. At any rate, the name has stuck, and it is one of my favorite sculptures, mainly because it was rescued twice from junk piles.