I know, I know; it’s not even Halloween yet. Believe me, I know. Although the ghosts and goblins will put in their appearance later this week.
But while the retail sector pushes the “holiday season” up every year needlessly, artists have little choice but to keep the calendar firmly in mind. For many, the winter holidays provide the single largest percentage of their income for the year. More to the point, the creative process takes time, and those with an established client base find themselves flooded with requests at the last minute. Throughout the year, they have to build up an inventory of work suitable for holiday gifts, so that people can shop in the early weeks while they keep their noses to their studio grindstones filling late commissions.
And so, since we’re five days out from November, we’re going to switch gears here on Mondays. From now through the end of the year, Mondays will be devoted to items that make great holiday gifts: mostly smaller pieces, mostly under $200-$300. Some will be well under $100. Most of this series will feature pieces by the other Native artists whose work we carry, although you might occasionally see some of Wings’s own work here, too.
I’ll choose the pieces to be highlighted as I usually do, which is to say, by Spirit’s guidance or personal whim, whichever explanation appeals to you more. Today, the piece that has spoken to me insistently since last night is the one pictured above, and so I’m heeding its demand to be given more prominent display here on the site.
It’s one of the three newest pieces by our friend Randy Roughface that we acquired from him earlier this fall. Randy hews to the old style of carving: all done by hand; no power tools. Some in the arts community (non-Natives, all) refer to the style as “primitive”; that’s a word we neither use nor allow to be used to describe our artists and their work, for what I hope are obvious reasons. The proper name for the sort of work in which Randy specializes is “vintage-style” carving, which features broad, sweeping lines and shapes, form that arises organically out of the stone rather than fighting against it, and an emphasis on the subject’s inherent identity and spirit, rather than on a superfluousness of added detail. It’s less polished (in both senses of the expression), but it places the emphasis on the spirit in the stone. From the description of this piece in the Other Artists: Sculpture Gallery here on the site:
Alabaster comes in a diverse array of colors and shades, sometimes several combined in one chunk of stone. The chunk of alabaster that here gives birth to Eagle is an example: Shades of bright orange and soft lime green swirled gently into white give the stone the appearance of sherbet. Rendered in a deliberately rough-hewn vintage style by Randy Roughface (Ponca) this strong and sturdy spirit bird perches upright, wings just beginning spread as though ready to take flight. Eagle stands 4″ high by 2.5″ across by 3″ deep (dimensions approximate). Another view shown below.
White/orange/green alabaster
$155 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love this piece. It’s just so perfect: respecting the integrity and identity of that beautiful stone, yet with a fully-formed identity of its own, and a powerful sense of motion in the gathered wings. It’s a heavy little thing, too — small, yet solid and substantial.
And that stone! Originally, Randy worked mostly in sandstone and Pilar slate, both readily available and thus relatively inexpensive. In recent years, he’s been branching out into other stone media: sometimes using simple found rock; other times, acquiring pieces like this one that are mined elsewhere, yet are still iconic stones of the Southwest. Most of the alabaster used by our carvers comes from either Colorado or Utah, and I suspect this little block was pulled from the earth of the latter, considering the color variation.
I’ve written about alabaster on several occasions already, most notably, here, here, and here. As I said about the stone in the second linked post, featuring a brilliant orange alabaster medicine bear sculpture by Mark Swazo-Hinds:
It’s a form of gypsum, and it comes in a variety of shades, from nearly pure white to ivory and beige; from a soft pastel pink to a deep rose to a putty color shot with brick red; from palest peach to the fiery shade you see here. There are other colors, too, depending on the region where it’s found and the other minerals present, but these are the ones I see most commonly used by Native artists in this part of the country. Both Colorado and Utah are reliable sources of alabaster, but I’m told that this shade and quality of the orange form is best found in Utah.
It’s a soft stone, and an absorbent one, making it easy to work with but also delicate. It’s one reason why it’s useful to do as Mark does and limit the actual carving as much as possible, letting the stone itself speak. It’s sturdy and stable enough to survive in sculptural form, but of course, it needs a safe and stable place to reside. Like most sculpture (and pottery), its fragility is an inherent part of a piece’s value, hence the need for special shipping arrangements.
And as I said just last Friday, in a post featuring Justin Gomez’s alabaster bear fetishes:
Alabaster comes in a diversity of colors: the plain white alabaster ranges from the color of snow to dark and dusky grays and putty-colored taupe shades. Some contains multiple shades in a single block of stone: white; orange or pink or red; even green. Pink alabaster appears in swatches of near-white pink, in opaque shades that are solidly, unquestionably pink, and in semi-translucent forms the range from dove gray to deep maroon. The same holds true for orange alabaster, which can appear clearly orange and slightly glassy[.] [I]t can also manifest in lacy striations . . . , giving it the look of agate or Mexican onyx.
In Randy’s eagle, those colors come together in an unusual way. The main stone, the host rock, is basic alabaster — the white form, although this chunk is actually putty-colored. But in contains inclusions (sometimes called matrices, as we discuss every week here on Turquoise Tuesdays), of alabaster in other colors: not simply other shades on the spectrum that might be called “white,” but wholly different bits of alabaster, in blocks brilliant orange and wisps of a soft but intense green. And the sense of incipient flight gives it a bit not only of Eagle, but of Hummingbird and the Water Bird, as well: messengers all, creatures of Spirit.
Perhaps taking wing to carry Spirit’s blessings, and your own holiday wishes, to someone you love?
~ Aji
