One of the aspects of Native sculpture that most appeals to me is the way our artists link earth and sky, summoning spirits of the winds straight from stone. This is as true of our ancient carvers as it is of modern ones: It’s not the modern, high-tech carving tools that accomplish such feats, but the ability to coax the spirit of the stone into other forms.
One of the carvers whose work we’ve long carried is Randy Roughface (Ponca). He’s married to a woman of Taos Pueblo, but we know him as the nephew of one of the truly great warriors of our era, a man we called brother. Randy has taken his family’s activist tradition in the direction of art, and he does so with reverence for history and the old ways. His specialty is what the Native art market calls “vintage-style” carving, a contemporary echo of an ancient traditional practice. Today, carvers have power tools at their disposal, allowing them to add detail to their carvings in ways unavailable to many earlier generations of Native artists. Such detailed work, enhanced by high-end equipment, makes for beautiful, ultra-realistic carvings, but sometimes, too much adornment obscures the spirit of a piece.
Randy eschews the newer ways, preferring instead to focus on the stone itself and the spirit within that seeks to emerge.
Vintage-style carving places the focus squarely on stone and spirit, with only the barest of lines and minimal detail to delineate a work’s essential identity. Randy has proven to be a master of the style, and in recent years has expanded his body of work beyond the horses that were his initial interest into a wide array of animal beings: Turtle, Buffalo, Elk, and, of course, Eagle.
Today’s featured work, an eagle carved out of local Pilar slate, is a perfect example of both the vintage style and Randy’s skill at it. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site:
This vintage-style Eagle rises out of a chunk of Pilar slate to call to the spirits. Carved by Randy Roughface (Ponca), the finish is smooth like soapstone, an an unusually soft red color smudged with the more typical gray. Stands 4.5″ high by 3″ wide at base (dimensions approximate).
Pilar slate
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The raptor perches on a rocky outcropping in a way that makes him seem to emerge directly out of the stone itself. His body is one long angled line from upturned hooked beak to tailfeathers, with only the faintest lines of demarcation between beak and face, head and body. What makes his identity unmistakable are the powerful wings on either side, smoothed into two cold flat ellipses of near-oval shape. What is not clear from the photos is the graceful inward slope between the wings, or the talons that grip the rock from the front.
What is also not clear from the photo, although the description makes it explicit, is the feel of the stone. Pilar slate has a distinctly silky texture, like soapstone, seeming to feel both wet and dry simultaneously. It’s the sort of material that, once felt, is irresistible: You feel compelled to touch it.
This incarnation of Eagle, slate-gray edged with soft reds the color of dusky brick, the shade of our thunderheads at sunrise and sunset, seems especially well-suited to his role as messenger and intermediary with the world of the spirits. When you touch him, you almost feel as though he is about to spring onto the winds, straight from your hands — and that when he does, he will carry you with him, into the light beyond the storm.
~ Aji
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