Media not just as a means of creation, but a source of inspiration

A few days ago Daniel showed me this video and ever since then I have been thinking about it. In it Josh Vogel talks about his connection to wood and how it relates to his work and the process.

I practically grew up in the woods, there used to be a pine tree in my backyard that me and my sister spent most warm days and even a few cold days in. We would climb up in it and find one of the many spots to sit in it and read or look out into the field or woods (depending on which spot we were in) and just imagine different worlds. That tree was our castle and I’m sure if it hadn’t been severely damaged by the ice storm a few years ago, I would still be spending a majority of my summer in that pine sketching.  I grew up 15 minutes from Bernheim Forest near Clermont, KY and on special days when we weren’t in that pine tree we would pack a lunch, load our dog up in the truck, and spend the day hiking. In recent years this habit has stopped as my sister hasn’t spent a summer at home in quite awhile and now, but I still try to continue this myself. Especially when I am need of inspiration.

Creating things with natural objects has been something that I have done since I can remember as in the evenings my dad would often let me and my sister each take one of his pocket knives and whittle a stick. We didn’t do anything other than peel the bark off so it wasn’t really an artwork, but this was my start of creating something and developing a connection to the media. While  trips to the beach were very seldom in my childhood, on the rare chance that we happened to be at one, I would almost never swim, (I’ve never been much of a fan of it) I would always create sand castles. I think this was the beginning of my love for clay as it was creating 3 Dimensional objects with a muddy substance.

I spent a huge part of my childhood outside with bare feet developing a connection to the Earth and now I create artwork with Earth. For some reason even before I took 3D design my freshman year I knew that I wanted to work with clay. It is like I already had this connection with my medium that had developed many years ago and it was just there waiting for me to act upon it. Whether it is true or not I’d like to think that my childhood had an impact on my medium of choice.