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Nice driftwood lamp sculptue by Hudson river artist Earl Johnson
$750List Price
About the Item
"This is a nice find," he says, teetering on a log to get his arms around what looks like a dinosaur egg. It's a round ball of wood, big as the base of a snowman, sanded smooth during its voyage from somewhere else to here — the trashy shore between a swanky night spot and its gated boat docks.
"Wherever it came from," he says, "it came to shore trying to find a place to rest."
Wherever Earl Johnson came from, he's making art out of these river finds and stirring up the local art scene as the "Drift Woodsman." He'll take this latest find home, power wash it, set it on the garage roof to dry, then add a glass table top or a lamp or another piece of wood to it. He might just lacquer it and let it be.
Earl pulls out a flier from the gallery. "A Medley of Sculpture," it says, and there's his name, the last on the list: "Earl the Drift Woodsman."
Not bad, he says, for a Brooklyn kid who grew up finishing floors with his dad, branched out into carpentry, then headed here to get away from the city.
No fine arts degree. No high-brow hipster connections. His is not an artist's pedigree.
Earl, 49, says he's just a fisherman who one day saw something in a washed-up hunk of wood. "It got hooked on my fishing line," he says. "When I reeled it in, I saw two owl eyes staring at me." He showed the "owl head" to his fishing pals, who called him crazy.
Earl later found a driftwood body and wings for the owl. He mounted it on another piece of wood, glued marbles in the hollows that looked like eye sockets, and called it "Mr. Hoo."
Now Earl sees things in the driftwood all the time, the way other people pick out clouds. He also finds rusted metal gears, made delicate, almost lacy, by the rust and the tide. He picks up busted chandeliers. With the river's slime rubbed away, the glass twinkles like gemstones.
He arranges the debris into fantastical pieces of furniture or sculpture. A couple months ago, he assembled some of them in the front of his shoe repair shop on Beacon's Main Street, a drag busy with coffee houses, antique shops and small galleries. Folks brought their worn heels in and stayed to marvel at the curious shipwrecked forest in his store.
The director of the Howland Cultural Center wandered in one day and invited Earl to add his work to the summer sculpture show. Earl doesn't know what to expect next. "I thought nobody would see what I saw in this wood," he says. "But I guess I was wrong."
- Dimensions:Height: 24.5 in (62.23 cm)Width: 26 in (66.04 cm)Depth: 8 in (20.32 cm)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:1990 s
- Condition:Newly wired but made of recycled lamp and driftwood.
- Seller Location:Palm Springs, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: U0805268350400
About the Seller
5.0
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1stDibs seller since 2007
446 sales on 1stDibs
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