Bit by bit... — Lichtenbergianism

Last week in Boston, my Lovely First Wife and I had an entire day on our own before our flight home left, so we hopped on our Ubers and went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. [Note: Pack Up & Go will schedule an activity each day for you based on your interests, but they leave you plenty of time to do as you will.]

The exhibit space at ICA is small but choice, and one of the artists on display was Damien Hoar de Galvan. From the ICA website:

Damien Hoar de Galvan (born 1979, Northampton, MA; lives and works in Milton, MA) has developed a unique output of painted sculpture made primarily from recycled wood for nearly 20 years. His sculptures range from smaller tabletop objects to larger wall-sized installations. Some of the wood Hoar de Galvan uses is reclaimed from his time as a preparator at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, and from his father’s carpentry projects, which he began in the 1970s as an immigrant to Massachusetts from Argentina. Hoar de Galvan recently completed a sculpture-a-day series over the 2024 calendar year and plans to incorporate recycled wood from ICA installations into new works.

If you haven’t already clicked through the links above, here are a handful of the hundreds of pieces on display:

Are these not absolutely intriguing? It might be tempting to pass over his art as mere “hobo art,” something that someone with no skills or access to materials would slam together over a can of pork and beans one night by the fire — but even a second look shows you how wrong that would be.

As I joked with the docent there, it’s as if Cy Twombly had woodworking skills.

First, a sidebar: In my never-to-be-written book, Lessons from the Folk (parts 1–3), one of the Ideas on which the book expounds is that given sufficient materials and time, humans prefer the ornate, the baroque, the over-the-top. I think we can see that Idea playing out in Hoar de Galvan’s work.

So many pieces! And so precisely fit together — it’s enough to make you forget how “haphazard” the piece looks. (If you haven’t clicked through to his website above, do that now.) I can easily see how each of these daily pieces might have taken an entire day to do — although even as I write this I can see that he must work on several pieces at a time, what with the cutting and gluing and clamping, and his one-a-day rate must mean that he finishes a piece every day.

Hoar de Galvan is a trained, highly skilled, professional artist, but I would put him along the same scale as such citizen artists as Ferdinand Cheval or James Castle or Howard Finster: an æsthetic that seeks to engage your eyes with a lot:

howard finster: note “without any training” (click to read more)

What’s my point here? It’s a point I’ve made repeatedly over the years: Just do it. Use the materials at hand. Pile it on. Go nuts. Explore the medium: cardboard, wood scraps, magazine pages, etc etc etc. Keep adding to it until it delights you. And if it doesn’t work — throw it out. I’d love to know how many pieces Hoar de Galvan has tossed over the years!

After all, as our lessons from the folk tell us, we create because we’re human. MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT.

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Lichtenbergianism