Ernest "Popeye" Reed By MARIDEAN HUTTON
work of art can be understood as a dialogue between an artist and his or her material. In this process, a new work is brought into existence as the artist's creative vision and skills interact with the nature of the medium. The American sculptor William Zorach wrote that "A work of art is always, in a sense, autobiographical." Background and experience dictate the differences in the ways artists approach making art. Variations in how they handle their tools affect the way the material behaves in their hands. The control is not entirely theirs, however, because the material, especially when it is stone, tends to talk back.
In the field of American folk art, relatively few sculptors have tried to
talk with stone. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gravestones were generally bas-reliefs, sharply cut but shallow, as suited the nature of the slate from which they were often made. Their makers were craftsmen, carving to meet a need and usually following formulas or basing their work on two-dimensional woodcuts and engravings. Some fully rounded heads or animal figures, many of them created by unknown artists, have been found. For a number of reasons, including access to materials and local artistic traditions, sculpture in stone by self-taught artists has been less common in comparison to the amount and variety of work done in wood and other mediums. I Stone is the most obdurate of all the sculptural materials, slow to respond to the tool and almost completely inflexible. Mistakes are seldom forgiven by the medium; the difficulty of making corrections may necessitate the sculptor's altering his entire concept. Carving too deeply into the block or boulder may shatter the stone and destroy the work completely. Yet the very slowness with which this material responds protects the sculptor against sudden errors, and when well handled, stone imparts to the sculptor's vision a dignity and sense of strength that in my opinion is possible in no other material. The works of William Edmondson, Ernest "Popeye" Reed, and Ted Ludwiczak, a newly recognized artist, are very dissimilar. Exploring the differences in the sources of their vision, their acquisition of skills, and the audience for which these artists sought to create leads to a greater appreciation of the rich variety of self-expression that can be found in folk sculpture.
SPRING 1996 FOLK ART 47