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.

Anima, the Barn Owl, and the Threshold Beneath the Wing

I’ve had a bit of time recently to return to another barn owl project, and as often happens when I work with this form, it’s pulled me back into deeper reflection. Not just about anatomy or gesture—but about why this animal continues to surface in human imagination, across cultures and eras.

The barn owl feels less like a subject and more like a metaphor that predates us.

Across history, the owl has occupied a complicated and often contradictory role. In parts of Africa, owls have long been associated with witchcraft and shapeshifting, seen as emissaries between worlds or forms assumed by practitioners who move unseen. In other traditions, particularly within early Western esoteric and fraternal symbolism, the owl becomes a figure of hidden knowledge, night wisdom, and watchfulness—sometimes even linked, symbolically, to darker or more ambivalent forces.

There are interpretations that connect the owl to Molech imagery within early fraternity symbolism—often pointed out in discussions of the American dollar bill, where the owl is said to hide in the folds and corners. Whether literal or symbolic, these readings speak less to historical certainty and more to the owl’s enduring association with secret knowledge, thresholds, and power held in silence.

What’s striking is how far back this goes.

The earliest known appearances of owl imagery appear in Mesopotamia, and possibly even earlier. The most well-known example is the so-called Burney Relief (often linked to Lilith), where owls flank a winged female figure—an image saturated with themes of night, sexuality, sovereignty, and the liminal. In these early contexts, the owl is not softened or romanticized. It is potent, unsettling, and deeply tied to the unseen forces of the psyche and the world.

This is where Anima continues to live for me.

In Jungian psychology, the anima represents the inner soul-image—the intuitive, unconscious, feeling aspect of the psyche. It is not polite. It does not speak loudly. It appears in symbols, dreams, animals. The barn owl, nocturnal and soundless in flight, feels like a perfect carrier of this energy: perceptive without display, powerful without aggression.

As I worked on this piece, my attention kept returning to a small but essential structure: the tarsus.

In the anatomy of the barn owl, the tarsus is the quiet pillar of balance—the slender segment that carries weight, absorbs stillness, and allows the body to remain suspended between earth and air. It is a place of grounding rather than motion, often unseen, yet essential.

Though it shares no linguistic origin, the word tarsus echoes the ancient city of Tarsus, a historical crossroads where philosophies, religions, and inner traditions converged. The parallel is symbolic rather than etymological—but meaningful nonetheless.

Here, the tarsus becomes a metaphor:

a threshold between movement and rest,

between the visible and the unseen,

between instinct and awareness.

Like the owl itself, this form occupies the liminal—rooted firmly in the physical world while oriented toward the silent, the nocturnal, and the intuitive. The strength lies not in force, but in steadiness; not in flight, but in what makes flight possible.

In returning to the barn owl, I don’t feel like I’m repeating myself. I feel like I’m circling something ancient—something that keeps revealing itself slowly, layer by layer. Perhaps that is the nature of Anima itself: not something to be solved, but something to be approached with patience, weight, and listening.

Tracing the Heavens – An Owl in Stone

The thoughts and feelings that come with the artist’s life are important, but every so often I need to pause and reflect on the process itself—how a sculpture is actually made.

Recently, I’ve been immersed in a new piece that revealed its name to me long before I finished carving it. That’s a rare occurrence, and I take it as a sign that the motivation and meaning were already clear before the final details emerged.

The journey began about two months ago when I stumbled across a piece of stone from one of my two trusted stone dealers. It was an odd block—strangely colored with strong fracture lines running in different directions. For most carvers, that’s a definite “no.” Fractures can spell disaster, unless met with careful intention, planning, and a little luck. But I can’t resist a challenge, and I had already bought a similar stone just weeks earlier.

Around the same time, I came across a hollowed knot of cherry wood in a specialty wood shop. For $35, it seemed destined to become the base of one of my signature owls. The block sat waiting in my studio until, one day, I came across a photograph of an owl in an unusual pose—elegant, youthful, stretched upward. It reminded me of my daughter, and I knew instantly: this was the form I needed to carve.

To work out the posture, I sculpted a small plasticine model over 3.5 hours. From there, I scanned it using a lidar app on my phone and imported the model into a 3D program. Having a digital version I could rotate freely gave me a reliable reference alongside my sketches and collage of owl images.

Equipped with a new facemask, a 7” Makita grinder, fresh hand tools, and a custom carving table, I set to work in the studio. The first stage was intense—the grinder raising so much dust I could hardly see until it settled, even with my dust collection system running. Step by step, I shifted to finer burrs and cutters, slowly shaping the fragile stone into something true to the vision.

At this stage, I’m confident in the form, though there’s still a great deal of work ahead. What began as a discarded stone and a forgotten block of wood is taking shape as Tracing the Heavens—a sculpture whose name arrived before the carving was even halfway done.

I’ll share more as the owl emerges from the stone.