Category Archives: Art

I stopped making my Cedar Spirits (later re-named Forest Folk) because my contact with the underlying archetypes had become blurred by the bustle of the marketplace.

Now, I do like the marketplace. Selling artwork is enormously gratifying. But I haven’t yet figured out the balance between pure art (making things that one feels driven to make, regardless of whether they interest anyone else), and commercial art (making things in response to marketplace demand.)

This is a boringly typical dilemma, faced by anyone who likes to make art. I’ve bounced back and forth in my variegated art career, producing some purely commercial work (custom-designed business cards, signs, drawings of people’s houses) and some purely personal (oil paintings, abstract raku clay vessels, porcelain mosaics). I have a little bit of skill in WAY too many media, and the result is confusion. The curse of the dilettante.

There are definitely artists who succeed splendidly in both arenas: by pursuing their own strong vision, they create unique works of art which have natural charisma in the marketplace. I hope to be one of those artists after this studio-building, sorting-out phase.

My Forest Folk arose from a lifelong sense of kinship with trees, and also from ancient myths of green man, wood wife, and horned god. There was never anything cute about these archetypes. They are wild and fierce and undomesticated, even dangerous. Yet, the Forest Folk figures I created had become disturbingly quaint and my customers were using words like “adorable” and “charming”.

So, I stopped making them. I have to figure out how to bring forth the original raw archetype which moved me in the first place before I can begin again.