A review of my recent posts might suggest my miniature rustic sculpture output is turning "critter-centric," what with all the little rocking horses and reindeer I've been posting. That's not really the case, although my rocking horse production has increased the last two years since I have been teaching my miniature rustic twig rocking horse workshops at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Before I do those workshops I make an effort to gather bigger pieces of driftwood than I normally use for furniture that will work as horse bodies, necks and heads when cut to appropriate lengths. In my workshop there might be 8 people including me building horses, and if we all started from scratch with raw trigs I would need to bring an enormous amount of driftwood, so I preselect and assemble 11 or 12 horse body-neck-head combinations. Occasionally I find a body-neck-head in a single piece of wood, but usually I glue a head to a one-piece body and neck or glue a one-piece head and neck to a separate body. Sometimes I use 3 separate pieces to make the assembly. I also precut rockers and the little flat pieces of wood that separate the rockers and upon which the horses' feet will stand. I do this pre-assembly to save time in my 3-hour workshop, and to avoid needing power tools in class to shape the rockers. Once they have seen how it is done and made a rocking horse in my class, any participant will be able to gather their own materials and make another one without any help from me, but probably not in less than 3 hours.
I start the workshop by showing 2 or 3 samples of my own rocking horses (which will be added to the inventory of my work for sale at the Longbranch Gallery later) and talk about materials and tools. Then I invite the students to select their head and body assemblies and rocker assembly parts. I bring more of these than needed so everyone gets to choose and no one gets stuck with the last one. Then I choose from the leftover materials and spend half an hour or more demonstrating how to add legs, rockers, eyes, ears, mouth, mane, handlebar and tail before turning the class loose to build their own.
Afterwards I bring my demonstration model home and finish it, and since I have a couple more pre-assemblies started, I'll probably finish those for the holiday shows and sales around Chicago. So my output of critters has increased, but it's still only a fraction of the total, much outnumbered by furniture. When I started working with driftwood twigs back in 2006 I only made critters if I found a piece of wood that was already shaped like an insult comic dog smoking a cigar, for example. The little reindeer I posted last Christmas was one of my earliest critters. His head and neck was a single piece of driftwood, and so was his body and tail. I just combined them, whittled his ears, and added legs, antlers, peppercorn eyes, and a star anise seed nose for instant
Rudolph.
Here is a more recent example where a beach find demanded to be both furniture and critter.
I call this
Throne of the Bat King. I found the piece of Lake Michigan driftwood that forms the back and part of one of the chair's back legs with a small bat head
already growing out of its top. I just added lead fishing weights for the eyes and pinecone petals for ears and a bit of wood above the bat's left eye. I constructed the rest of the throne out of big gnarly driftwood chunks and decorated it with a desert rose mineral formation in the middle of the chair's back and a couple pieces of Atlantic seashell I found in the sand at Cocoa Beach.
If you want a
Throne of the Bat King you had better buy this one, because I will never find another piece of driftwood with a bat face growing out of it.
Throne of the Bat King will be in my next exhibition,
date and location to be announced. at Arts On Elston Gallery in Chicago September 27 and 28. See post above for details.
Throne of the Bat King
miniature rustic twig chair
by George C. Clark
Lake Michigan driftwood, pinecone petals, lead fishing weights, desert rose stone, seashells
height: 10.5 inches
