email marciaSwilson@verizon.net
MARCIA SANDMEYER WILSON WOODCARVINGS
In March 2005, a Connecticut art dealer listed on ebay a 1983 Pug Bank I had carved. Here are some of the photos. It is such fun to see my old friend again. It looks just as good as when i made it!
I carved this bank out of pine boards, laminated with yellow glue, carved inside with a rotary rasp, outside with sanding discs until it was very smooth.
The legs are made from big wooden dowels, carved with the rotary rasp into little feet. I woodburned the space between the toes.
The mouth is drilled, as is the rear end.
I woodburned "hairs" all over the body, then painted it with "paint markers" and flat oil paint, but used shiny black enamel on the nose, eyes, and ears.
I sold it for about 1k thru a gallery in Fairfield Ct. called "a Thousand Words," but that gallery has been out of business for years now.
My name is signed with a woodburning tool. "I was made by Marcia Wilson 83"
The photo on the right shows my woodcarving of a whirligig called "The American Spirit"
that I sold
this fall to the Noyes Museum in Oeanville,NJ.
My boyfriend did the mechanism. The arm w/ the flag moves up and down and the dancer twirls
three times for every time it hops up and down. I discuss more about my woodcarvings
further down this web page.
My newest carvings are these two sisters,
finished in February 2000. They are very small, only 12" high each. I made them for
the Small Works Show at the Old Church Cultural Center in Demarest, NJ but they never
got accepted into the show which just goes to show you can never predict what kind of
things a judge will like. The piece that was accepted was a little mermaid carving.
These sisters are carved out of black walnut but their arms are mulberry because I have a mulberry tree in my back yard. I can buy the carving wood anyplace, but when it is time to make arms, I have to go into my back yard and cut some curved branches off of a tree. The arms are attached with rubber bands, by the way. The reason why my "dolls" are so often painted is because I can't have dark walnut heads and torsos with white mulberry arms. I painted these ladies with oil paints. I think I used enamel from cans-- Rustoleum is one of my favorite brands-- but sometimes I add paint from my oil painting pallate.
I photographed these little carvings on some table pads that I found on the curb in my town on trash day-- my favorite time to go "shopping." The bases of these little ladies are made from oval pieces of plexiglass screwed into the bottom of the wood.
I sold the sisters as a pair to a Philadelphia artist and her lawyer husband.
Below is a woodcarving of a mermaid mantle clock that took a long time to make, mostly because of its size. Little figures can be whittled on my lap but this one took a mallet and gouges and I had to stand a lot of the time.
The carving is made of glued up basswood boards. It is my fourth
mantle clock in the shape of a woman. Each one has been larger than the one before;
I plan to reverse the trend with the next clock, if i make another. By the way, I gave this
clock a breast reduction recently and will replace this photo with a newer one soon.
This mermaid has a tail with many scales that are not visible in
this photograph. I used a combination of carving and woodburning to make them.
I finished the clock for a two person show with a woodcarver named Susanna Bergtold
whose work I admire and
collect. Our show was held at the Old Church Cultural Center
in Demarest NJ in February 1999. There are two links to her work at the
bottom of my web page.
Here is a photograph of the mermaid
clock in progress in my studio, which used to be my dining room. I look a
little glassy eyed but that
is because this photograph was taken at 11 p.m. and I like to retire at 10.
Another piece I finished for the show is a a whirligig called "the American
Spirit" now owned by the Noyes Museum in Oceanville, NJ.
The movement of this whirligig
is very complicated and would not have been possible without the engineering of my boyfriend.
The arm holding the flag moves up and down. The dancer on top of the woman's head
rotates and jumps up and down.
There is a lot of gearing
inside the piece because nothing
rotates or jumps in the same sequence. The dancer, for example, jumps three times for each
rotation. The arm holding the flag pumps up and down in a different tempo. I think the boyfriend
said he had a lot of reduction gears. There are also a lot of counterbalances. My boyfriend
made all the metal parts himself on a lathe and a milling machine. I told him to put lucite
windows in the sides and in the middle of her back so people can see the mechanisms.
The paddle wheel, by the way, is made of balsa wood because the boyfriend said it worked
better when it was lightweight.
Here is a photo of
me and the boyfriend taken at the opening of an art show in February 1999.
When I first heard that the Noyes Museum had a call for entries for a whirligig show
I had never made one before. I looked at folk art books and saw that some whirligigs were just
standing figures with paddles for arms. So I took two of my unfinished doll carvings
and told my engineer boyfriend that I would cook supper for a change if he would turn
my dolls into whirligigs.
He attached paddles made from 1/8-inch 3-ply plywood to the ends of arms
I had carved from branches of trees in my back yard.
The arms are connected by a stainless steel rod that passes through teflon
bushings in the shoulders. The arms are attached to the rod by brass fittings that
have setscrews in them. My newest whirligig is a patriotic woman
waving a flag up and down
while a striped cheerleader twirls on her head. The boyfriend has made a series
of pulleys and gears and counterweights and a little crankshaft inside the skirt of the woman.
note from 2010: When I had my NOYES MUSEUM show in 2002 I contacted the doctor who had purchased the carving of my boyfriend's head. Alas, he had given it away and forgotten the name of the person to whom he had given it. So this carving is perhaps lost forever.
I got the idea of this bureau chest from
the memory of a shape in an advertisement that looked like a
circle on top and a square on the bottom. I grabbed a piece of hemlock
wood that was 2" thick and 24" long and sawed it out on my bandsaw, quite
crudely. Then I glued on a big nose from a piece of the same scrap lumber,
using a knot hole near the top as the right eye. This shape amused me so
much that I decided to make it three dimensional, and planned to glue
three hemlock boards together. However, the chest seemed too boring, so I
decided to cut out a rectangle from each board before I glued it together,
to leave space for a drawer.
Making the drawer was quite tricky because
I'm not much of a cabinetmaker, but i managed, using 3/4 inch plywood and
a router table. Getting the drawer to fit in the cavity was an
"impossible" task because I didn't have a straight line in the sculpture,
but my boyfriend the engineer devoted a Saturday afternoon to
straightening that out for me. The knobs invented themselves. I
finished the sculpture with a rotary rasp, powered by a large air
compressor. I decorated the surface with deep woodburned patterns,
executed with the "hot knife" from Colwood electronics. I painted it with cans
of alkyd enamel from the hardware store, mixed with tubes of oil paint colors.
I am quite pleased with the personality of this bureau box;
if I had known she would turn out so nicely I would have used better wood.
Miss America
carved from a section of a split log, wood unknown, but it carved nicely. Her
arms are attached with a rubber band, so they move. She is mounted on
a large turned base, part of an old porch pedestal, which i covered with
white gold leaf. She is
finished with my usual oil paint, mixed with house paints to speed
drying time and add a nice sheen to the paint. She is owned by a
Philadelphia lawyer and his artist wife and along with two of my other
sculptures, the statue was in the Miss America
exhibit at the Noyes
Museum that ran through December, 1997 in Oceanville, NJ.
The other two
sculptures of mine in the
show are a little Miss America finished in 1996, and "My Mother as
Miss America" finished this year, showing her in a two piece polka
dot suit with open toed ankle strap shoes. Actually, my mother
never wanted to be Miss America. I think she wanted to be Queen of
England instead because you get more perks with the position.
I was thinking of the broad smile and
polka dotted bathing suit in a folk art painting by Elias Ruley
when I carved this sculpture from a piece of basswood. I love her
confident smile and geriatric figure.
I
sold this piece to a children's book illustrator and doll collector named
Denise. Her
husband calls her "the famous Denise" because she has illustrated 65
books. He said their favorite part of the sculpture is her shoes.
I started making these jointed
dolls after buying wood from the widow of a local woodcarver. She
had her son saw up basswood boards for firewood, so I acquired
short pieces. In order to make a decent sized carving, I came up
with the idea of constructing jointed dolls.
The joints are pegged
together with dowels. The arms and legs move separately from each
other because of a screw and a washer strategically placed on one side by
my boyfriend the engineer.
I went home and
carved my own version of an icon out of the lid of an oblong maple box,
about 12" long. I
plan to finish it by adding gold leaf to the background. My mother is
wearing her bathrobe and holding
our bull terrier, Betsy, the dog we had until I was about 7 years
old.
I got the idea of a glass window from a postcard of an Upper Volta "power figure" that
had shells inside and looked really spooky.
The postcard was sent to me by another artist, Susanna Bergtold.
This figure is the
second in a series of women with windows, following "womb
with a view." I sold Womb with a View to a Russian artist and his wife
and this one was sold to a dancer, who wants to sell it, if anyone is interested.
In February thru part of April 2002, it is in my two person show
at the Noyes Museum in Oceanville, NJ.
Nude mantle clock carved from basswood, 36" wide, sold in
1993 to owners of a depression glass/antique store in Lambertville, NJ.
This is the second of three mantle clocks I made. The first was sold
to a curator of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, and the third was sold to the owners of an
exercise club near Point Pleasant, NJ. The clocks got larger each
time. My last mantle clock is the mermaid photographed elsewhere on the page
and that one is about 4 feet wide. It's time to reverse the trend and
make them smaller.
I took this
photograph from my booth at an art show in South Norwalk
in August 1998. This little girl is
looking at a statue of Miss New Jersey whose base is made from table leg
turnings. Her arms are movable, attached to each other through the
shoulders with a rubber band. Visible also are the backs of
jointed dolls of a
pirate, and a man in a plaid shirt with a cowboy hat. I take it as the
highest compliment when
children like my artwork because it is made by the "child" within
me.
Cat and Dead Bird Woodcarvingfrom a small piece (5 by 10 inches) of 3/4"
basswood, painted with oil base
enamel from the hardware store. This piece was inspired by a carving
of a leaning dog by Susanna Bergtold, one of my favorite artists. I
made a "leaning cat," only I had to have a "reason" for my
cat to lean, so I added the poor dead little birdie and put a
satisfied grin on the cat, because that's the way my cats look
after they've deposited a dead bird on my back
porch. This relief was routed out with a huge machine I bought
from Mr. Hanke, a retired wood engraver who closed his studio
in Bogota, N.J. about 20 years ago. I believe
the machine is called a radial arm pin router. It weighs 1800 lbs and
took 9 men to carry it into my basement, after removing the basement
door.
The router was originally designed
to cut away waste from zinc
plates for newspaper cuts, but Mr. Hanke used it to route away boxwood
for his wood engravings. I use the router to "get into"
the wood and then do the rest of the carving and woodburning with hand
tools.
Head of Clown was routed from a piece of common pine
and carved by hand after that.
Night Ride is another small (about 5" by 9") basswood plaque, carved
and woodburned and painted, and framed in some old wood I found on
the street. I have used this image before in etchings, sometimes
with a man riding the horse. I don't know where it comes from --
someplace in my subconscious, or perhaps a memory of that fairy
tale called the Tinder Box where a princess rides at night on the
back of a giant dog. I have made a few etchings with this same
type of theme, sometimes with men, one with a woman.
Some of my mother's ashes are behind the round glass
lens. Around
the edge I woodburned, "I used to think of my mother
as a queen who had
to be obeyed." And on the bottom I wrote her maiden name:"Katharine
M. Hubler
1907-1991." The plaque is basswood [from the linden tree],
5 by 10 inches by 3/4 inch thick. I added a wide frame made
from old door moulding that looks pretty good. I gave this
carving to my daughter and she hangs it behind the
door of her bedroom so that she won't frighten visitors. My
grandchildren, however, have taken their friends to visit the
bones of their great grandmother. "I'll say one thing; your
grandchildren are not going to forget this sculpture," says my
daughter, who is photographed below with one of her favorite dogs.
My grandson and my daughter with their miniature dachshund Teddy.
They live in Hilo, Hi where my daughter breeds and sells dachshunds.
How I Got Started Woodcarving
Somebody once emailed me asking how
I got started woodcarving so here are my thoughts on the matter.
The first time I tried woodcarving was
in 1964. At that time I was a copywriter at W&J Sloane furniture store in
nyc. They had a wallpainting on barnwood there of what I later discovered
was a Swedish wedding scene. I really liked the theme, possibly because
I was having an affair with a married Swedish doctor at the time. But that
was back when I had hormones. I sketched the wallpainting on the back
of an envelope: a man and a woman
in a carriage with big flowers falling all around them. After I got home
I painted it on
my drawing board but the result was sort of flat and disappointing. Soon
afte I broke up with the Swedish doctor and my ex husband came around to
visit our daughter. I told him that I had an idea that the drawing board
would be much improved if I carved around the painted shapes, and I handed
him a linoleum cutting knife so he could show me how to go about it. I
asked him to try and carve a line
around a painted flower in the lower right hand corner of the board. He
worked steadily for about 30 minutes, and then I saw that he had not just
cut a little line around a flower, but had removed about 1/2 inch of the
background so that the little flower stood out in relief, and he had added
a stem. I worked on the board, off and on, over the next ten years, using
any tool that I found-- razor blades, xacto knives, a linoleum cutter.
Knives were all too dull and I did not know how to sharpen them. The wagon
wheels, which had flowers inside them, became very very deeply carved,
almost thru the board. that's because I kept making mistakes. of course,
i did not carve the board full time; I had during that time 3 husbands and
3 children to raise. but by the time I finished, i knew a little bit about
woodcarving. In 1970 I met a marvellous woodcarver named Dan Pressley.
My first art show was his last, because he was suffering from stomach pains
that turned out to be cancer. But I bought nine of his pieces and had a
chance to study them and learn how beautiful narrative woodcarving could
be. I have never achieved Dan's skill in carving but I am honored to have
known him. In 1975 I moved from NYC to my home town of Leonia, NJ and
discovered "adult ed" classes at local high schools. In 1977 I took
"Whittling and woodcarving" at Ridgewood HS with Henry Imp, who started
his class with sharp knives from the Warren tool Co. in Rhinebeck, NY, and
little basswood blanks of whales. I rejected the whale shapes but took a
rectangular piece of wood and carved a man with a hat and his tongue
sticking out. I had not planned that, but the knife kept making mistakes
around his mouth. However, it may not have been such an "accident"
because I was rogue student. I "cheated" any way I could. For example, I
bought two wooden basswood circles from Henry and shaped faces on them,
using a dremel tool with a sanding attachment. I burned out the tool,
because the flap sander was too big for it. So I started to learn
something about power tools as well as knives.
The rest I have
learned over the years from other woodcarvers such as David Fooks of
Pennsylvania, who taught me how to sharpen a knife by telling me he uses a
hard felt polishing wheel.
I embrace a woodcarving of my boyfriend, carved from
laminated pine boards. It sold in 1994 to a teacher at Columbia University and I still miss it.
The head is hollow and opens up to reveal a mirror in the
top half, and writing inside the lower half. The writing is every
negative thing that I could remember my boyfriend saying during
the first few years of our relationship. (Beware of saying negative things
to an artist with a long memory.) The drawer in the lower half opens up
to reveal a heart that says, in gold letters, "Mom." I thought
I could carve another piece like this any time I liked but realize
too late that certain sculptures can't be repeated.
Here is a photo of me and the boyfriend taken in February 1998.
It shows what he really looks like.
Chest of Drawer shown with a second prize
ribbon ($1,000 prize) won for the work in my booth at ARTSCAPE in Baltimore July 25-27
1997 and was in the 1998 NJ Crafts annual at the Noyes Museum in Oceanville NJ.
I carved this box out of hemlock-- a poor source
of wood because it split along the growth rings and I had to fill it with lots
of marine epoxy. The drawer opens.
Here is a photograph taken in November 2001 of a satisfied customer
in North Salem NY holding
a woodcarving I made in 1998. I don't think I ever titled the carving
but it looks like a variation of my Aunt Louise.
Bathing Beauty on a Pedestal,
carved from basswood in 1996. Movable arms. Casein and oil paint
finish. Mounted on a fluted antique pedestal, probably from someone's
front porch. I sold this lovely carving to a man and wife from Weston,
Ct. and I still miss her. They bought her so quickly that I didn't even
get their name and address. When I sell something I often try and
replace it with an even **better** version. So my next project
after this were two bathing beauties that I turned into
whirligigs and sold very quickly.
Miss New Jersey Shore
is another woodcarving with movable arms. She was in the 1997 Crafts
Annual at the Morris Museum in Morristown, NJ.
My
Boyfriend as a Clown is a jointed doll that was also in the Crafts
Annual at the Morris Museum in 1997. He is carved from basswood but his
arms are from my mulberry tree.
My Mother as Empress of the World is
carved
from maple, about 12" high. It is painted in casein and oil, and
the
details are woodburned. I got the idea of doing this piece from a
class on "Icon Making" at the Newark Museum last year. It was taught
by a Russian teacher who burned incense for atmosphere. I did not sign up
when I realized
that students had to copy a xerox copy of an icon stroke for stroke,
according to traditional methods.
He's Mine at Last
woodcarving, sold in 1994 to an artist/dancer, contains a carving of a my boyfriend
as a worried naked man inside the glass window in her
belly. She is made from laminated pine boards, woodburned, polychromed
with oil paint and paint markers, and 22k gold leaf.
Girl Looking at my Dolls through
the Display Case.
Reliquary Plaque of My Mother as Queen
