Statements from the Artist...
1. Once, when I was a boy, I don’t remember how old, but let’s say 10, some friends were visiting our home in rural Pennsylvania, and while my parents showed them to their car, I took out my crayons and colored the pointed-stone border of our living room fireplace. I’m not sure what my intention was, probably just to add a little color to the brown of the stones. When my parents came in, I was given to know in no uncertain terms that that was not an acceptable action. I was not given paper to draw on or otherwise encouraged to pursue artistic activities. In fact, I was scolded for defacing the fireplace.
This is the only artistic endeavor I can remember from my childhood, outside of the structured efforts in 9th grade art class and print shop and doodles in the margins of my class notes. I was smart and did well in school. I was not athletic or coordinated, nor did I otherwise show signs of talent. In college, of a mandatory choice of one art history class or one music theory class, I chose the latter.
So, after 30 years of sculpting; after identifying myself as a sculptor and focusing my life around that identity and its pursuits; after years of working at full-time temporary and permanent jobs to attempt to pay my bills while I sculpted; after loves lost and loves never fulfilled; after bankruptcy, self-doubt, failure to control the economic course of my life; I, with only a few, random art courses years after I had started to sculpt, consider and call myself an artist, and submit my work to you, the public, for evaluation.
2. I think I have photographer’s eyes. I am very aware of and interested in the visual world. I see overall scenes, but somehow with emphasis on elements, collections of elements, focusing somehow at a certain level, dwelling on elements that affect me. The hills, but especially the play of light on trees and grasses. The tree trunks, branches, leaves. The light, and less light, which is shadow.
Photographically, not like the impression which a painting is, but literally--the thing as it is.
3. My sculpture seems unrelated to this aspect of my artistic sensibility. Light, space, obscurity, yes, but perhaps more in the presentation of these qualities in a real thing in itself, the presence that sculpture, a three-dimensional thing, is. A rightness, a realness, that makes itself felt without need of explanation.
4. I carve statues from single blocks of stone. I start with a piece of material that interests me for its color, shape, and intrinsic features. Before I begin working I may have a general mental conception of a form or gesture, but I rarely model an idea in any material. I try to enter into a dialogue with the stone, removing material here, shaping it there, until I have a sense of an evolving ‘entity.’
To me, this ‘entity’ may be inanimate, like a book, which would lead to a mostly formal, perhaps decorative, statement, or it may be like a being dwelling in some universe of the subconscious, with a life and history embodied in it. The sculpture ceases to be a block of stone and exhibits a personality.
5. Obviously the resultant metaphors are ‘valid’ and interesting to me, but they might be more obscure to an objective observer. My goal is to create an idiosyncratic image that will yet be acceptable to and responded positively to by someone examining the work. The piece should seem ‘right,’ should be ‘believable,’ even if it is not clear what it ‘represents.’
Easton was born in 1945 in rural Pennsylvania. In 1968 he received a B.A. in Chemistry from La Salle College in Philadelphia, and in 1970 he received an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Oregon in Eugene. In 1989 he made the traditional sculptor’s pilgrimage to Carrara, Italy, where the tradition of marble statuary continues from Roman and Renaissance times.
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