About Allen
i’m an artist, but before the pandemic i had a straight job in los angeles sending emails and fussing over spreadsheets. during the first lockdowns i picked up a piece of wood and started making shavings, for lack of any idea of what to do with myself. i ended up with a spoon. i left my spreadsheet job and moved to the woods.
in the intervening years, non-material human creative work has been all but condemned by the generative algos hyped by tech supplicants as “ai.” while a lot of my creative work and training had been in the use to digital tools and processes, to put effort into digital art now is to feed that effort into a chipper-shredder.
so, why wood? the “woodenness” of the work evades the above-mentioned art-killer robots. wood has inherent beauty. every piece of it is unique. wood undergirds our planet’s capacity to support life. it offers an infinite craft challenge which never gets old. practicing the craft connects me to the history of our species. so, there are a bunch of reasons for my choice of material.
the fact that every piece was once part of a living being guides every project i undertake. my work doesn’t intersect with the timber industry. no trees are cut to feed my operation. salvage, driftwood, windfalls, and gifts are my sources. around 95% of the material i use comes to me for free or by barter. if you buy something from me, you’re paying for the labor. and the shipping, i guess.
i seldom work from templates or drawings, so every finished project is unique in its form. the material has a say in each decision i make about its every contour. a project is the sum of those decisions, made one at a time, to honor the material and give the piece a productive life in somebody’s kitchen or studio or decorative display.
my purpose in the shop is to make objects that are beautiful, useful and honest. that’s sorta where i’m at with my thing.
