Cherry Wood Skull

Wood is sourced mostly from Cornish gardens, some recycled foreign woods are used for their durability. Turning in to reveal the dark heartwood in a bowl made from the whole diameter, lighter sap outside, hollowed within. Now put to dry for months, then sanding as many grades as needed, add Danish oil for food safe protective finish. A bowl form seems best to represent trees integrity, thin or thick, graceful, or robust as a tree may be, practical for fruit or salad or as wild and random for the beauty.

Local  trees from Cornwall tell universal stories of life in their grainy brown like old photos, from before you were born. Saw chisel and plane and lots of sanding refine the form. Yew elm larch apple cherry and gingko all have their different texture and colours to show. 

These works offer a point of view of nature, that trees share our vertical landscape. Trees have radial form reaching out and upwards, the way of all life. Trees as companions since the stick and stone age.

Osho

Found Osho as a spiritual master in 1983, so a meditative life arose then.

Since that time have spent four years in several communes dedicated to sharing his vision, in Europe and India. Then more years traveling through West Europe, settling again in Scotland many years ago and since 2003 in The Lizard, Cornwall.

For me creativity arises out of meditation, and art is the expressive play of form with that which is formless. Thus the highest art form is in allowing oneself to melt into the formless, to disappear as a someone.

In this view the ‘form’ of artist is the fool dancing on the edge of the abyss, just a last game before disappearing, another play at being something, anything, awhile longer. There is no meaning to be sought in such a play, it is more an invitation to share a dance, take a chance.

Hence what influences my art is nothing, the void, emptiness, silence, death, and how to allow such presence amid the myriad forms of life. We tend to choose those forms that cloak and disguise such awareness. Meanwhile, the door of Nature is always open, life and death one inseparable whole, and wood has become for me a many levels mirror of my dance.