I’ve always been fascinated by the myriad forms, textures and shapes of natural objects. I like art too, but there’s something about nature that hooked me early and hard. These things are endlessly fascinating; look closer and you see more, but no two are entirely alike. Effortlessly, Nature performs infinite variations on her themes. I feel that if we, as artists, are searching for the sources of beauty—and that seems to me what art at its best is about—then the obvious place to start is with Nature. Of course, I’m not the first artist to feel this way; from the beginning of art in the Paleolithic age, artists have tried to come to terms with the natural world that surrounded them, by replicating and modifying the things they observed. If art is considered mathematically, as a set of problems to be solved, then the forms of Nature are the axioms, the “givens” with which we must start with if we’re to come to an answer.
I started out in art by sculpting in ceramics and learned how to cast in bronze at the University. The process of making molds was fascinating to me, although it was considered incidental to the art of sculpture. I started making molds of all sorts of things, but what I liked most were natural objects. Fortunately, I was allowed to make molds from some of the objects in the departments of anthropology, geology, and paleontology; this jump-started my collection, which has since grown to include hundreds of molds of animals, minerals, and vegetables. I started combining these wax castings into sculptures, trying to make things that seemed all of a piece, like they had grown together naturally. I coined a term for this: Juxtamorphs, from Greek and Latin words for forms in close conjunction.
From the technique I had worked out for bronze, I was eventually able to extend my range to include other castable materials, like ceramics, plaster, paper pulp, and a new technique I developed which I call Sculpted Paint. This involves painting directly into the mold of a composite assemblage, and building up a skin in layers. It results in a strong and colorful but lightweight object that preserves all the detail of my master model. I got together with some other artists working along similar lines; we started showing together as the Juxtamorphic Art Movement.
Although I was exposed to computers at the time, I wasn’t interested in them; they seemed good for manipulating words and numbers, but I didn’t see their potential for making art. This changed in the early ’90s, when I started seeing what was being done with image-manipulation programs like Photoshop. I had done some 2-D collage work, and this seemed the perfect means of producing them, without the tedium of cutting out pictures with a knife and the mess of pasting them up. I learned to do this, but 2-D graphics just didn’t have the excitement of sculpture for me. I liked making real things, not just pictures of them. With an early 3-D program, I figured out how to make some simple forms and cover them with photographic textures; this was more interesting than making totally flat art, but still the only way to realize it was to make prints. I wanted to make sculpture this way, but everybody told me that this wasn’t possible, at least not without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars I didn’t have.
Then I heard about a guy in Hollywood who had a 3-D laser scanner that could capture the surfaces of any object placed on its turntable, and was able to get a few scans done from models—castings from natural objects—that I sent him. Unfortunately, every program I tried to open them in would crash or return an error when I tried to view them. Finally someone told me about a program, then in its pre-release beta testing phase, that might be the sort of thing I was looking for. Rhino made a lot of things possible that were just a dream before. I was able to open up my scans, and also to manipulate them in various ways: mirroring, scaling, cutting them up and reassembling them with parts of each other—this was my dream come true. Now, inside the computer, I could give my virtual models treatment similar to what my wax models received, but there it ended. Only in the 3-D environment simulated by the program on a 2-D computer screen could my combined objects be viewed.
But in the 1990s, computers were steadily becoming more powerful and widespread, and entrepreneureal manufacturers of hardware and software were taking note. A newly-introduced piece of software from the Netherlands, DeskProto, designed for non-machinists, became the route I found to connect the designs I was able to make in Rhino with the small cheap CNC mill I got to carve them out with. I’ll never forget the moment of triumph I felt, when I was finally able to see the crudely-carved but undeniably faithful copy of a scanned-in mollusk specimen, reproduced in wood, which proved my concept could work.
I soon got some scanning equipment of my own, first a Microscribe arm, that allowed me to capture forms by clicking on points in space, along the surface of the objects, creating curves that became surfaces. This was good for fairly simple forms, that didn’t have much texture I was interested in. The next scanning tool I got, one of Roland’s touchprobe scanners, although slower, was great at capturing fine details that the Microscribe couldn’t get. Then Roland came out with an inexpensive laser scanner, enabling me to collect surfaces all the way around an object, instead of only from one side. This came in handy, since I was just getting into 4-axis carving about then. With a rotary fourth axis, it’s possible to make sculpture in the round, since the workpiece is rotated as it’s being carved. The 4th axis is also useful for making rolling molds, like ancient cylinder seals, that can be used in ceramics, which provides a way to make larger pieces of art using small-scale machinery.
While the scale of a virtual sculpture is theoretically fluid, since the model can made larger or smaller as desired, in practice, it is constrained by the size of machine one has to work with. On my miniature CNC mill, the largest 3-axis part I can make is about 30 cm by 10 cm; the largest 4-axis part is about 30 cm by 7 cm in diameter. So I started looking around for a larger machine that would give me more capability. CNC machines come in two basic types: the router and the mill. Routers cut soft materials, like wood and plastic, and they tend to have short vertical axes to maximize their rigidity, so the things they produce are basically flat, with little vertical depth compared to their length and width. Milling machines are designed for cutting metal, so they are much more rigid, but the depth to which they will cut is constrained by the travel of their Z or vertical axis, as well as the length of the cutting tool. Although I purchased a CNC router and retrofitted an older-model milling machine with a modern PC-based controller, which increased my capability considerably, I kept dreaming of being able to make much larger pieces.
Since I could not find any machines on the market that would give me the ability to cut these large pieces, at least for a price I could afford, I decided to build my own. Starting with some surplus automation modules or “actuators”, which have the mechanical parts—ballscrews, slides, motors, etc. already mounted, we built a steel framework to carry them rigidly and provided a rotary table and tailstock for making large 4-axis parts. At this point, this machine is just about complete, but I haven’t yet cut any parts with it. It should make it possible to transcend the scale barrier, and carve some fairly large pieces, at least in foam.
At this point, most of my efforts have resulted in fairly small-scale work, using machinable wax, which can be molded for casting in other materials; wood, which has interesting color and material properties of its own; plastic, which can be clear, white, or colored; metal, which although slower to cut is useful in ways that other materials are not, since very long thin pieces will still be structural; and ivory nuts, the seeds of certain palm trees, which are hard enough to cut very smoothly and hold fine detail. Combining carved parts with cast parts gives me a wide palette of effects to choose from when constructing composite pieces. It seems like most of what I end up making are components, pieces of some larger thing that I may or may not have a clear vision of when I make the parts. It’s a lot like the process of assembling the individual pieces from natural forms; I can pick and choose from these units in order to construct a larger assemblage.
For me, the advent of inexpensive computer-enhanced 3-D scanning, haptic modeling and CNC production techniques came at just the right time. It opened up new possibilities in the sort of work I was committed to already, increasing the sorts of forms I could deal with, the ways I could approach them, and the types of materials I could use. As an assemblagist applying for large commissions, I was stymied by the nature of my workprocess, which required me to work with full-sized parts. When a model was called for, the best I could do was a necessarily inaccurate sketch. Now, since I’m working in a scale-independent medium, I can produce a maquette that is accurate in everything but fine detail. At the other end of the size spectrum, my efforts in jewelry and objets d’art have been boosted by the availability of specialized CNC mills with high-speed spindles, and by addititve Rapid Prototyping machines that free the design from the limitations of the milling technique; now pretty much anything I can model can be realized in solid form, in a waxy material suitable for lost-wax casting. I really feel like an explorer who, after slogging through jungles, cutting my own trail, has come upon a vast and untouched territory, which calls out for discovery and further development.
