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Five guys serve up art at Prince Frederick gallery
Friday, Oct. 16, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
John Schaffner's "Spikes, Spires, Stalks, Stripes and Spines" is planted in a box of wood chips and rocks at CalvART.
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John Schaffner makes wood sculptures that look like playful creations from another planet. The St. Leonard artist is inspired by Joan Miro, the Spanish surrealist. He likes to look at his paintings and envision the images in three dimensions.
David Wardrup, also known as the Happy Wood Turner in Owings, worked for the U.S. Army for 22 years and for the U.S. Department of State for 19 years. His functional pieces possess a ceramic smoothness and shine that's all natural. "I won't use any coloring on wood," he says. "You don't need to. It's pretty enough as it is."
Painter Rex Miller began working with oil in the 1960s, but the 81-year-old Solomons resident did not get serious until the '90s. Deeply moved by water and the Chesapeake Bay, his scenes are vivid yet slightly impressionistic. "I get so interested in the emotional impact of the painting, that I put in only the detail that is necessary to enhance the message," he says.
Painter Carl Wood of Lusby shares Miller's passion for water. He, too, started with oil. In the last five years, however, Wood has discovered watercolor. Initially, he painted scenes in painstaking detail, but he's learning to let go. "Watercolor does certain things on its own," he says, "and I want to be able to do those things."
Ray Bogle's raku and stoneware pottery typically has an elegant, bottle-like shape. He marks each with a wood stamp; most, as well, are cut through with what almost looks like a lightning bolt. Recently, he and Wardrup started collaborating: Wardrup makes wood inserts for Bogle's pots.
These are the five male members of the CalvART Gallery in Prince Frederick. These are the Five Guys.
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Schaffner opens the door to his circular house in the woods (400 steps from the bay) and invites a visitor into a studio that fills exactly half of the first floor. "I've been working on that thing," he says."
That thing, one of Schaffner's new wood sculptures, looks like a palm tree from another planet, or maybe even the crowning piece of a death trap, as the top section of the tower of plywood is covered with knitting needles reminiscent of spears. It's called "Spikes, Spires, Stalks, Stripes and Spines."
He has a band saw, a cutoff saw, plenty more saws and a drill. He also has a sanding area that is enclosed by curtains and equipped with an exhaust system that carries out dust.
Schaffner met his wife, painter Luray Schaffner, at the Columbus School of Art and Design in Ohio. They were married after she graduated in 1962 and moved to Springfield, Va. in the late '60s. They would come to St. Leonard on weekends; when a property went on the market, they bought it, and the house was designed and built five years later. The Schaffners have been living here for 11 years, about as long as John has been retired from an industrial design firm. In the '70s, they were founding members of the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria.
Luray's studio takes up the other half of the first floor. John enters it, looking for an old model of the house she designed. He convinces a cat to hop out of a closet, finds the model and shows it to the visitor. "I guess you would say it's one of our first collaborative pieces," he says.
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The Happy Wood Turner is behind schedule. He has wine holders and cheese plates to finish before a wine festival in two days. His T-shirt and sweatpants are covered with wood shavings, and he's so busy at the lave that a visitor enters his shop, a shed behind his house, unnoticed.
Wardrup sees his visitor, removes his mask and grabs a vacuum that sucks the shavings and dust off his clothes. He has another shed behind the shed where he stores wood, filing blocks of cedar and honey locust away like a receptionist files away documents. He has to treat each piece of wood with wax and wait at least a year for it to dry.
Wardrup first worked with wood in high school shop class. He picked it back up in 2005, the year he retired. When his military career was beginning in the fields of Vietnam, did he fancy himself ever becoming an artist? "I think the stereotype about artists is they're flakes," he says. "They're weird; they just don't fit the mould. Then, of course, the same misnomer comes to specials forces. You figure these are the guys you keep locked in there, you open the door, throw in a piece of meat, close the door."
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For Miller, painting first proved to be therapeutic during a divorce. He remarried in 1979, and did not have much time to paint again until the early 1990s, when he retired and began to take classes at the Torpedo Factory.
He grew up in Baltimore and went on to study engineering at Johns Hopkins University. After graduating, he worked at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. He went on to attend the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology and worked for the Bureau of Aeronautics and, later, the Atomic Energy Commission. For 16 years, he walked from his home in southwest Washington, D.C. to his job at NASA. "I had a wonderful career," he says. "I was able to work on something that was fascinating to deal with. I never had a routine job." Because of that, Miller says, there was no way he could cope with a boring retirement: He needed something that would provide serious intellectual stimulation like his career did.
Miller's home in Solomons, where he moved to in 1997, is full of his originals and reproductions. He works in a room on the top floor, where light streams through the window onto an easel. Sitting in a chair in the living room, Miller notes that Winston Churchill was a painter. "Painting is like running a government," he says. "You have to have a strategic vision of where you want to go. The first requirement you need is a design … so I know design. It's my discipline, and I apply that discipline to my work."
"We're going to refinish the basement, so pretty soon I am going to have to work from here over," says Wood, marking off the territory for his future basement studio. Like Miller, Wood's home in Lusby comes with a view of the water.
Near a mat table, on the ground, Wood points to a back brace he had to wear after his second surgery, which only happened several months ago. He served in Vietnam with the U.S. Army. When he returned to the United States, he was trained in parachuting; though he never had to do it in combat, Wood did more than 300 jumps.
"Want to see what I looked like in the Army?" he asks. He guides a visitor to a picture taken in 1969. "You know, you jump out and the parachute opens and it stretches you and you decompress when you hit the ground," he says. The effects of that are still with him.
Wood started painting again about five years ago. He first started in his 30s, in the 1980s, and even went to school at the Torpedo Factory. After the Army, he made a living as a wood worker, making cabinets. Now he's painting full time.
He has a knack for natural elements — forks of lightning, dark clouds 20 layers of paint deep — that seem to be launching him into less representational realms. It's hard to find a single painting of his, though, that's not connected to water.
"Yeah, pretty much," he says. "That's what I paint — what you feel, what you know. But my art's changing, so I don't know. The art in the gallery is a little different, so we'll see where it goes. I'm trying to kind of just let it flow."
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Bogle grew up near San Francisco. He joined the U.S. Air Force in 1979, just hours after graduating from high school. During his senior year, he took a ceramics course for the credits.
In 1980, he got a job at Andrews Air Force Base, where he remained until 1999 and was a member of the Air Force One crew.
When he arrived at the base, the arts and crafts center, much to his surprise, was amazingly equipped. In fact, Bogle remembers the center had something like eight potter's wheels, none of which were being used. In 1984, he started to buy his own equipment.
His studio has several kilns, a wheel, a table where he lays out slabs (it takes them a week to dry), a slab roller, mixes for glazes and boxes holding 25-pound bags of clay.
For a raku firing, Bogle uses a trash can. He places it in the yard, props a burner on a brick and sends the fire through a hole cut at the bottom. The inside is lined with ceramic fabric and will heat up to 1,800 degrees in just 45 minutes. After that, he removes the pot with a long pair of tongs and places it in a pale, a reduction can, full of saw dust.
"You have to trust the process," he says. "Often, you can know that you generally will get this effect. But, often times, with copper, there's this cool crackle right in the right spot."
Bogle likes that. He likes not having total control.
Since retiring from the Navy, he has worked in computers, and he likes to come out here for a couple hours each night and work at his own pace on the pieces he wants to make.
Three years ago, Bogle got the nerve to bring some of his pottery to CalvART. For 25 years he had been critical of his work — self-conscious about his art.
The gallery's members were impressed and invited him to join.
Now he feels like his time has come.
If you go
The "Five Guys" show will continue at CalvART Gallery through Nov. 8. Hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. The gallery is at 110 Solomons Island Road, Prince Frederick. Call 410-535-9252. Go to www.calvertarts.org.
