About
Drew Langsner

A WORK IN PROGRESS

By Drew Langsner
I’m one of those people who have been making things all my life. (Born L.A. 1942) As a kid I often prefer to make things, rather than earn money in order to buy something. Sometimes this was artwork. My parents always had art supplies available for my use. I enjoyed weekly art lessons with Adalaide Fogg and Mary Gordon for a year or so before my 13th birthday, instead of studying for a bar mitzvah. In college I majored in anthropology but gravitated to painting and sculpture for graduate school. After the M.A., my friend Jay Beckwith and I invented and improvised a 3-year partnership building children’s “adventure playgrounds.” We utilized salvaged wooden beams, tree trunks, recycled conventional playground equipment that was cut up and re-assembled, exhaust pipe seconds, fero-cement, segments of stone columns from a Spanish monestary. I was pretty good at working all these materials – welding, using concrete, fiberglass, spray paints, etc.

One approach to making art that was bypassed in art school was carving wood (or stone for that matter) with a mallet, gouges and chisels. Among my friends, no one ever thought about those old ways of making art. But somehow my background in anthropology also kept me interested vernacular crafts. I always liked things that are handmade, using natural materials and relatively simple hand tools.

Jump 10 years. I began carving bowls (and spoons) in 1977, when Swedish woodworker and teacher Wille Sundqvist visited our farmstead in the mountains of western North Carolina. Wille is a master of the traditional Scandinavian forms, which he has personalized in a very refined way during a lifetime of carving. I really like the fact that these bowls are started by felling a tree, followed by cross-cutting a log section which is then split into halves. All done with simple tools – a chainsaw (although a 2-man cross cut saw works fine), steel wedges, an iron maul and an axe. The bowl is initially hollowed with an adze, an ancient tool shaped something like a large very large gouge mounted crosswise on an axe handle. The adze work is refined with gouges. Traditionally, bowl carvers worked for a smooth surface. They didn’t want to leave tool marks (tracks). The outside is shaped with an axe (quite unbelievable, until you learn how) and then smoothed with a type of hand plane called a spokeshave. All this is often done with freshly cut, green wood.

By 2000 or so my bowl carving production had greatly slowed down. I was very busy creating new chair designs, most particularly my Hearth Chair Project, where each pieces represented a new re-design on a similar theme. I also felt that I had taken the “up-side-down” bowl work as far as I cared to take it. (At least for the time being.) In addition, I was doing far more teaching (and sailing).

I’m interested in what is visually interesting. In this perspective, the thing of a thing becomes irrelevant. These are views, not things. Interesting views can show up anywhere. In nature –frequently — or manmade. (Of course, I’m very aware that we are part of nature, so the distinction is for convenience.)

Manmade can be art, or not. That also doesn’t matter. What matters is that the view is interesting, sometimes amazing, to look at.

The things from nature that I paint – which are almost exclusively wood in different states – are painted partially to disguise the fact that they are bits of wood. I’m both honoring the woodiness of the wood, and hiding it. So that the viewer will look at the view, as just a view. The art is no longer a bit of interesting wood.

These painted sculptures are also meant to be looked at tacitly, with your hands and fingers. Blind people might say ‘Let me look at that’ and then run their hands all around an object, seeing something much better than many visually not-impaired viewers.

Natural views. Why does almost anyone enjoy and appreciate a great view, or some flowers, or for that matter, a rock? I’ve thought about this throughout my lifetime. The same anyone who appreciates a random rock may walk past an object that’s basically identical if it’s in an art museum. It’s a good question.

We can come offer many similar examples. Where I live — in the mountains of western North Carolina — there’s a very nice, although not spectacular, view almost anywhere I take the time to look. I look out our windows every day. It’s a wonderful view, always interesting, and renewing. The window glass has dividers — not functional kind that hold separate small panes, but the contemporary kind put inside a double wall thermal, just for looks. The view through any individual pane is invariably interesting.

I’m now looking at the window as lots of little pictures. Each one interesting and somehow attractive. I’m looking at a cultivated magnolia that is just now developing tiny buds on the twig ends, our yard with raggedy grass and shrubbery, and a mountain side about one mile from here. Different panels display different pictures; some are just twigs. (I’m writing at the very tail end of winter, so leaves haven’t started to emerge from the deciduous trees and shrubs.) All are appreciated.

The magnolia was planted thirty years ago. And I trim it back almost every year. How it grows is never-the-less how nature wants that magnolia in that circumstance to grow. It can’t grow differently.

Any rock also got to be what it is because it could only be what it is with its history of pre-historic formation, and everything that happened to it until now. In any one situation that rock can only do what that rock can do. Nothing else.

In this perspective, the view and the rock are perfect. I think that’s one reason why we like and appreciate views and rocks. We humans admire perfection. Maybe an artist is someone who strives for perfection, at an endeavor, or lifestyle. Maybe that’s why we admire watching highly skilled athletes, or listening to genius musicians.

Or, look up at the clouds, or a starry night. Or into a microscope.

I also have an idea that my sculptures should be a little mysterious. I’m wanting the sculptures to look like they are something found in — or part of — nature. At the same time, they are obviously not be natural.

‘This thing has to be man-made.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Art. To be looked at. Picked up. Enjoyed in some way. Hopefully loved ten years from now’

Perhaps I’ll still be around to find out.

‘Nuff said. For here, anyway.