Beau’s Play

Four years ago, Beau was born and made me a father.

This series is Beau’s Play, where I explore his creations with my own. Far before we become adults, as society shapes us we tend to lose the act of play. When becoming a parent we have to rediscover play with our children. It is frightening to bring up a child in an uncertain and often dark world, and the future of this world benefits from this discovery of play. As adults we are obsessed with tidiness and children create a mess when they are in the depths of discovery, but there is beauty in the chaos of the creative, unlike the chaos of the world. Creative chaos from play is the antidote to the entropy of the modern world.

My recent work is documenting my son Beau’s play by creating still life reductive wood engravings and oil paintings of his left behind toys, games, experiments, and creative play. This work is sought with the potential to capture the beauty of the aftermath by capturing this moment in time with reductive wood engravings. Reductive wood engravings have a physical impact, creating the art by physically carving away a piece of wood that is finite, one color at a time. I carve with the intention of letting the texture of the wood and feel of the tools inform my piece. Part of the modern world is the ability to take a photograph for a memory at any time, where we let photographs make the memory for us. One of the benefits of art is the slowing down of the creation of the memory, hence my tendency away from photorealism.

There is a limit to the amount of prints that can be made, just as there is a limit to childhood, being young and free to play. Once the wood is carved, these memories are set on paper with ink, and in my muscle memory of the practice of carving and creation, more permanent than the memory of crayon or photograph.