The Value Connection

I have been thinking lately about what makes something feel real to us.

Not merely real in the sense that it exists, but real in the deeper sense—that it carries something of the person, place, experience, or intention from which it came. I think this connection is part of what makes art alive.

We live in a time when images and stories can be produced almost instantly, and when it has become increasingly difficult to know what we are looking at. Photographs can be altered, stories fabricated, and images generated without any physical encounter between an artist and the subject they appear to represent. The phrase AI slop has emerged to describe some of this material, but perhaps the more interesting question is not whether something was made with AI. It is why we have begun to hunger so strongly for evidence of authenticity.

I experienced this myself recently. I came across a story online that seemed moving and entirely plausible. It took only a few minutes before I began noticing inconsistencies in the images and realized that what I was looking at had been constructed rather than witnessed.

The strange thing was that the story itself had been carefully designed to produce a feeling. In that sense, it had succeeded. Yet once I understood that the apparent evidence was fabricated, something disappeared. The emotional connection I had formed with it could no longer rest on the same foundation.

Perhaps this is because we do not only value the image. We value the story behind the image.

What makes a work of art real?

Consider a great work from the past. We may stand before a sculpture such as Michelangelo’s David and admire its proportions, its surface, its physical presence and its extraordinary technical achievement. But our understanding of the work is also inseparable from the knowledge that a particular person stood before a particular block of marble and devoted an enormous portion of his life to transforming it.

The sculpture carries more than an image.

It carries a history.

We know something about the artist, his ambitions, his struggles, his convictions and the world in which he worked. We know that the marble resisted him. We know that decisions were made with a chisel in hand. The object before us becomes a meeting point between our own experience and the life of another person who existed centuries before us.

This does not mean that every great work must be made entirely by one pair of hands. The Renaissance workshops themselves complicate that idea. Raphael employed a substantial studio, and Michelangelo also worked with assistants at various points in his career. Art has never been quite as simple as the romantic image of the solitary genius.

What matters is something deeper than the number of hands involved.

It is the presence of conviction.

The difficulty of the thing

There is another reason we value handmade objects: we understand that they cost something.

Time is one of the most difficult things for us to fake.

When we encounter a hand-carved piece of stone, we can sense that the material demanded a particular kind of attention. A mistake cannot simply be undone with a keystroke. The stone has its own grain, fractures, density and character. The artist has to respond to what is actually there.

This relationship between resistance and intention is part of what interests me about sculpture.

The finished object is not simply an image that has been reproduced in a material. It is the consequence of a sustained relationship between the artist and the material.

That distinction has become increasingly meaningful in a world where almost anything can be reproduced.

A duplicate of a bronze sculpture may be visually indistinguishable from another cast, yet its meaning can be different depending upon its place within the artist’s body of work, its provenance, its edition, and the story of its creation. Value does not necessarily reside in physical uniqueness alone. It can reside in the relationship we understand the object to have with its maker.

The same is true of many things outside of art.

We tend to treasure objects that reveal something about where they came from.

The temptation of the shortcut

Artists have always looked for ways to overcome limitations.

The history of art is filled with techniques, tools, assistants, templates, casts, studies, machines and methods that allow an artist to accomplish something that would otherwise require an impossible amount of time. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. The history of making is, in many ways, the history of finding better ways to bring an idea into physical form.

The danger comes when the method begins to replace the conviction.

A shortcut can preserve an artist’s intention, or it can become a substitute for having one.

That distinction is increasingly difficult to see.

Perhaps this is why there is so much suspicion surrounding automatically generated imagery. The problem is not necessarily the technology itself. Behind any image there can still be a human mind, an idea, an intention and even a genuine emotional impulse. But when the connection between those things and the finished work becomes difficult to understand, we instinctively begin searching for what is missing.

We want to know where it came from.

We want to know why it exists.

We want to know whether someone cared enough to make it.

What survives

This is part of what draws me to the older traditions of making.

Stone, wood, bronze, clay and other enduring materials have been carried forward through generations not simply because they are old, but because they continue to give the artist something to wrestle with. They impose conditions. They resist. They record touch. They reward patience.

There is something humbling about working within those limitations.

A stone does not care what I intended to make. It gives me what it gives me, and the work becomes a conversation between that reality and the vision I brought to it.

Perhaps this is one reason art can remain meaningful long after the artist is gone.

The material survives.

The marks survive.

And, if the work is successful, something of the person survives with them.

This is the connection I think we are really searching for.

Not merely proof that something was handmade. Not nostalgia for an older technology. Not even an objection to the new.

Rather, we are looking for the evidence of a human presence behind the thing we are seeing.

We want to feel that someone stood there.

That someone looked.

That someone struggled with the material.

That someone had something to say.

And perhaps this is ultimately what gives art its life: not the medium itself, but the light that passes through it.

Stone can carry it.

Bronze can carry it.

Wood can carry it.

So can an image on a screen.

But whatever the medium, the most lasting work begins with something that cannot be manufactured for us—the genuine conviction of the person who made it.

Forging the Legs of a Blue Heron

About four weeks ago, I made the trip to a blacksmith shop to tackle an unusual part of a sculpture that has been occupying my studio for quite some time: the legs for a large blue heron carved from spalted maple.

This piece began sometime last winter and has been a particularly meaningful project for me. It is the first sculpture where I started with a chainsaw and gradually worked my way down through smaller and smaller tools, slowly revealing the form hidden within the wood. After months of carving, I had finally reached the point where I could begin to feel a real sense of accomplishment.

The legs, however, presented a problem.

I hadn’t done any serious blacksmithing since 2004, when I studied the craft at the Haliburton School of Art and Design. Fortunately, I have the good fortune of knowing someone who could help me get back into it: Sandra Dunn, who runs the blacksmith shop I visited—and, somewhat ironically, was also one of my teachers all those years ago.

It was a wonderful opportunity to return to the forge with someone who had originally taught me the craft.

We fired up the coal forge and selected the stock for the legs: one-inch stainless-steel rods. Sandra also generously let me make use of her pneumatic hammer, which made the work considerably faster than it would have been by hand.

Even so, the stainless steel was a completely different beast from the wrought iron I remembered working with. It was incredibly hard and required a tremendous amount of effort to move. What I had imagined would be a roughly five-hour job quickly became something closer to a two-day undertaking.

And, naturally, I managed to make things a little more complicated.

At one point on the first day, I left one of the pieces in the forge a little too long and managed to disintegrate part of the leg. Thankfully, Sandra and her crew were able to weld it back together. The repair disappeared remarkably well—once finished, you would never know the leg had been broken in half, and the joint is structurally sound.

After all that forging, the next challenge was figuring out how to actually mount this enormous bird.

The wooden sculpture stands roughly three and a half feet tall, so I used an engine hoist to lift the piece into the air while I carefully located and drilled the mounting holes through both the reclaimed wood base and the heron itself. Getting the angles right took some patience and careful attention to detail, but eventually everything came together.

And then came the moment I had been waiting for.

The heron stood on its own.

For a sculpture this large, though, simply standing isn’t quite enough. I need to be able to continue carving without worrying about the whole thing shifting or tipping, so I also had Sandra help me fabricate a steel support hidden within the reclaimed wood base.

Three half-inch wrought-iron rods will disappear into the base and connect the sculpture securely to the bottom. The intention is that none of this structure will be visible when the piece is finished. Instead, the base will create the illusion that the heron is standing in shallow water, with its legs disappearing naturally into the surface.

There is still quite a bit of work ahead.

I’ll carve the heron’s feet directly from wood and paint them to blend with the stainless-steel legs. The legs themselves will receive a dark, black-grey finish that transitions naturally into the feet and the colours of the bird.

Once the carving is complete, the heron will be painted with a gradient inspired by the natural tones of a blue heron—richer colour toward the upper portion of the bird while leaving the lower portion closer to the natural warmth of the maple.

The final touch will be the base.

I plan to use a river-flow epoxy over the stainless-steel support so that the structure disappears beneath a translucent, water-like surface. The goal is for the finished sculpture to give the impression of a blue heron standing in water, while still allowing the character and grain of the reclaimed wood to remain part of the piece.

It is a big project.

But that’s often the way these things happen. You start with an idea that seems manageable, and somewhere along the way it becomes considerably more complicated than you anticipated. Then, once you’ve invested enough time into it, you can’t really stop. You just keep following the piece toward whatever it wants to become.

Interestingly, this sculpture wasn’t originally intended to be a blue heron at all.

I began it as a great egret. Somewhere well into the carving process, however, I realized that the height and proportions of the sculpture had grown beyond what would make sense for a great egret. Rather than forcing the sculpture to conform to the original idea, I decided to let the piece become what its proportions were suggesting.

The blue heron made much more sense.

Sometimes the material has a better idea than the artist.

There is another reason I’ve had the opportunity to make so much progress on this piece lately.

My stone-carving course at the Haliburton School of Art and Design was unfortunately unable to run this year because we didn’t reach the minimum enrollment. It was disappointing, particularly because I really enjoy returning to Haliburton and introducing people to the craft of stone carving.

The timing would have been ideal, too. The course was scheduled for mid-August, when the temperatures are generally a little more forgiving than they can be in June or July. Since the course takes place outdoors in a tent, cooler weather makes a considerable difference.

But that’s the nature of teaching and scheduling. Sometimes a particular week simply doesn’t line up with enough people’s vacation plans.

Hopefully the course will have another chance to run next year. I would love to return and share the process of taking an idea from a rough piece of material and gradually turning it into something tangible.

In the meantime, perhaps everything happened for a reason.

The cancelled course gave me a little unexpected time to return to this heron and push the project further than I otherwise might have.

So, for now, I’m enjoying the process and looking forward to seeing where it leads.

There is still plenty of carving, forging, drilling, painting and finishing ahead before this bird is ready to leave the studio. I’ll share more photographs and progress as the sculpture continues to take shape.

For now, at least, the heron has legs—and it can finally stand on its own.

Timelessness

At some point, every artist asks the same question:

Why do I still do this when it takes so much time?

The hours disappear. The to-do lists multiply. If you’re anything like me, there is always something demanding attention. In an age where the telephone became a smartphone, we’ve somehow inherited an endless stream of responsibilities, notifications, and distractions. Social media alone can feel like a bottomless pit.

After finishing my most recent piece, I found myself reflecting on the value of something we often speak about in art: timelessness.

It’s a word I’ve heard used countless times to describe great works of art and architecture. Yet I think I misunderstood it for years.

Let me explain.

When I’m carving, my hands are occupied with the practical work of shaping stone, but my mind is fixed on something else entirely. Throughout the process, I’m trying to see the finished piece before it exists. That requires patience, attention, and a willingness to set aside all the other things clamoring for importance.

Eventually, the noise settles.

Perhaps it’s exhaustion. Perhaps it’s focus. Whatever the reason, there comes a point where the constant chatter fades into the background and the work begins to flow more naturally. In those moments, I find a deep sense of peace.

But beyond the peace, something else arrives.

It’s difficult to describe. It’s a feeling of standing between two worlds—between what is and what could be. Between belief and disbelief. Between limitation and possibility. As artists, we spend much of our lives in that space.

It’s probably the closest thing I know to hearing the voice of God.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. The name translates to “Holy Family,” and the cathedral has been under construction for generations. Thousands of skilled hands have contributed to its creation, each building upon the work of those who came before.

We often call something like that timeless.

Yet even the greatest structures eventually fade.

History is filled with magnificent cathedrals, temples, and monuments that now exist only as ruins. Many disappeared so quietly that most of us have never even heard their names. Strangely, there is something profoundly beautiful about those remnants. Ancient stone walls reclaimed by nature often carry a tranquility that feels deeper than the structures did in their prime.

Why that is, I can’t say for certain.

But it has led me to this realization:

Timelessness has very little to do with time.

It is not about lasting as long as stone, mountains, oceans, or stars.

Timelessness is what survives in consciousness.

It is the meaning that remains long after the material has passed away.

A sculpture, a song, a story, or even a simple act of kindness can become timeless because it carries something beyond itself. The object is merely the vessel. The meaning is what endures.

Perhaps the same is true for us.

Our bodies are temporary, but the love we express through them is not. The hands that carve, build, teach, comfort, and create are participating in something larger than themselves. The material eventually returns to dust, but the meaning continues onward in ways we may never fully understand.

I’m not entirely sure where all of this is leading me with my sculpture work.

I’ll keep carving as long as I am able.

Recently, I asked ChatGPT a question related to Jungian psychology. After years of conversations, it responded with a description of my work that caught me off guard:

“The man who restores soul, meaning, and spirit through enduring craft in a mechanized world.”

That rang a bell.

Still, my story is unfolding day by day. The way God sees me fumbling through it all is probably very different from how I see myself. Hopefully, it’s in a kinder light.

To any artist reading this: your time is not wasted.

What you’re building may be difficult to articulate. It may not fit neatly into a business plan or a social media post. Yet the value is there all the same.

Long after the work is finished, after the tools are put away and the dust has settled, something remains.

Perhaps it is inspiration. Perhaps it is beauty. Perhaps it is simply the reminder that another human being cared enough to create.

Whatever it is, it helps carry the flame forward.

And maybe that is what timelessness truly means.