Senior artist and sculptor Carl Gordon is staging a major retrospective named Tangle Wood. Jomarie Lanza visited today to see the long sweep of his output over the past 15 years.
After 46 years of carving, beginning at the age of 19, Sculptor Carl Gordon, put up 15 of his wooden pieces for display in an open exhibition at the Bliss, titled "Tangle Wood." The intricate pieces emerge from different types of wood that Gordon has worked with over the past 15 years in preparation for this retrospective exhibition. He says it all started when he began sketching as a child, and quickly moved over into carving and three dimensional art.
Carl Gordon, Wooden Sculptor
"I've been preparing for this exhibition for the last I would say about 15 years there around. And since then I've just been storing up my art pieces."
"It's funny because ever since I was a child I used to love drawing, I used to love to draw. And the way I got into it is my uncle, me and him. We grew up in one family and he was very good at drawing. I wasn't. And one day I took his drawing book to school pretending as though it was mine and my classmates saw me drawing but what I was doing was I was actually tracing over his drawings."
"And when I got through doing all of that a few of them still wanted me to draw for them but what happened was I had to remember what I had seen in the book because I had to take back the book that same day."
"And I started drawing and I realize that the drawings I was doing was similar to what was in the book, and I just kept on doing that and ever since then I just started to pick it up."
Gordon has worked with different types of woods over the years. From mahogany to ziricote, he spends months carving out the souls of history, people, nature and anything he says he can see coming out from within the wood, taking shape and telling a story.
Jo-
"More or less how long does it take you to prepare one piece?"
Carl Gordon, Wooden Sculptor
"Well different pieces have different times, different time limits. And some of those larger pieces would take me like four or five months depending on the piece."
"Sometimes one piece would take me like maybe six seven months some of the other times a piece would take me less depending on the size of the piece you know and I have a piece in the middle there that took me at least a year and a half to complete but like I said you know If I had been working on that particular piece on a daily basis I wouldn't have took so long."
"Sometimes it's not me that chooses the wood, sometimes it's the wood that chooses what I would see in the wood, the wood suggests certain things to me and then I would go about and start working on the wood. And majority of the times how I would get my ideas is that I deal with nature a lot i love looking up in the sky and the formation of the clouds, it always helps me to put my things together and to me I feel like I had a photographic kind of memory and I think it's because what ever I see I never forget."
One particular piece, titled Black Struggle, is inspired by the hardships of a mother he knew and watched growing up, a character who he says grappled with poverty and survival.
Jo-
"So there isn't one that's more meaningful to you than the rest?"
Carl Gordon, Wooden Sculptor
"Well this particular piece here that we are looking at presently because I knew that woman ever since I was a child and I saw how she struggled to feed her family. She only had one leg and she had a crutch under the arm where the leg was situated you know and she always had her produce, her basket with fruits on her head. And every morning religiously I saw that woman pass me by to go and take care of business. And I see the struggle in which she was putting things together so I captivated her features, I captivated all the concepts of her features to put in that piece of wood so that's the way it is presently. This particular piece I spent a whole lot of time to put together, you know."
Gordon's pieces are all for sale.
The Exhibition opens at 7:00 pm on August 24th at the Belisle Art Gallery, Bliss Centre.
