Sculptor homestead full tour: 50 years building Utopia

foreign both my wife and I quit our teaching jobs and we came up to rebuild 1812 Russian Orthodox Chapel what year 1973 and then uh Margie got a job at the local school and we just stayed like everybody starting out you can't afford land and but eventually you saved enough to buy some raw lands yeah this was raw lamb yeah so this is uh what I call the sculpture yard it's like out of a storybook yeah have you taken the peak up let's see this tall lookout tower there's a ladder that goes up inside there oh wow you want to go first a second okay good then I'll break all the cobwebs out of here we're going into the tree trunk yeah that's one of the really wonderful things about this experience in here wow in the hole it's really great yeah it's so I don't realize there's room for truth and arrest pads right here so this could be two beds yeah you could yeah I've never done it but and then you can stand on this and poke your head out the top okay great obviously there's tree down below and this is well this is copper over wood yeah okay okay wow it does feel like you've exited from the trunk of a tree just you see the eggs in the nest over there huh to the right oh yeah there's a nest is that is the nest part of this structure is it connected yeah oh like a nickel's nest an eagle's nest this this piece is called Lookout it's a big chunk of Redwood on a steel frame what you see is what you get you know what did you start off with what inspired this the the big piece of wood of course yeah when we were trying to load it is a giant loader and had tongs and he couldn't grab it finally he stuck his Fork right into the middle of it and started to pick it up and I thought he's going to break it and then I said if it breaks we need to find out so I said shake it you know and he shook it in the back wheels of this loader came off the ground and back down like that so we decided Well it's strong and then put it to use so did you think okay let's build kind of a shelter in the top well you know this was an excuse to use the Trias I realized they can Hollow it out and actually pass through it and I've raised it up so you could get underneath it and and then I needed a destination you know a good idea a destination that's funny so the idea is it's a treehouse I guess yeah it it's sculptural but it feels habitable yeah and it's explorable kids kids like it you're welcome and uh yeah yeah have you spent any time inside like it's just working on it you actually come up I mean it is it does have I mean you know you could feel it here too you know it's like it's kind of like this little cave you know Echoes sounds and yeah so you can see the lines of just basically rows of uh two by four stacked on topics with a corbel stacking and then cladding over the top of that but you probably didn't think it would become this when you first saw the piece no no uh it was like this is an amazing piece of wood can we get it on a truck and when we got it here I just spread things out and start cleaning off you know so I get to know Pieces by trying to get down to solid wood so for you sculptures are not something passive that just are there you can do things with them well I mean if for example this piece right here uh this planting piece right here that was done in 1981 and it was at the Oakland Museum for 35 years the decision to actually put climbing rungs on that piece my daughter was three at the time but uh there was like should I do that will it be a liability you know will the art World call it art or just a playground but your eye travels over the piece much more because of it and I'm glad I did yeah foreign did you plant these Gardens yeah actually The Orchards what we planted first it was pretty wooded we cleared first and then we could afford apple trees how long ago those are 40 years 40 years yeah and at the time it was fairly affordable to buy 30 years ago everything was affordable to buy compared to now yeah but you and then you decided to build yourself yeah I'd seen so many artists say oh man I'm going to build my house and they they drift out of the studio for 10 years going just building their groovy house and it's like but I really didn't want to be out of my studio so we we took a year back structure it was our daughter's uh bedrooms but we didn't finish until they went to college yeah the I originally the idea was to have a house and a tower and a small cultivated space in between that relationship of water Terror to a farmhouse or the temple to the Pagoda the space in between things is sometimes as important as the buildings themselves you know the the gate was in or old Muni polls from San Francisco that my neighbor had and he says do you want those I go yeah and the next day he came back he said maybe I shouldn't have given those to you you know and John's notorious for not doing things too quickly so I said well how about whoever uses them first and he says okay like that I I got started this house is more you might say more human skill than an industrial scale built on three foot intervals instead of four three foot instead of four foot center this six foot instead of eight I mean it's just it's just a little idea I had in my head and tried it yeah six inch not eight inch or four inch three inch Rafters not four inch you know three by three purlins it's just wonky there are a few places where because a hallway is three foot it's actually not that gracious it's a little cramp so it doesn't work all the time but I never said I was perfect you know just right here it feels a little narrow and it's kind of odd to have a bathroom so close it's like two people don't get to walk in together you know it's just because this is three feet wide yeah yeah and normally it would be easy four or five or six okay so this is four and a half here and uh oh wow yeah that's it's huge so yeah tell me about building your own house you had a blank slate no no you think you finish your house and you think you're done and then eventually you you redo a floor or you remodel a kitchen or things like that so it you know it's it's work in progress but it's all I mean or a lot of what I mean because you see wood ceiling all wood Beams I mean wood floor it's yeah I'm kind of yeah and there's copper to be seen too here you know what a nice Nook oh yeah do you get in sitting there uh yeah that was a thought or a tea room but nobody does I mean the grandkids sleep there and they play around yeah so we finally put a bookshelf in there because we never sat in there and says might as well make use of it yeah so you just carved it attractive it has an inlay of harder wood in the bottom and that's the traditional way but the rollers are nicer and this is this is kind of nice to this where's the is there a switch now yeah it's yeah it's no it's actually my magnetic uh personality you know can you can you do that any in any part I'm doing it no you have to touch the metal something conductive yeah so there's a ground that yeah how do you have that idea it's actually you guys doing work at the Asian Art Museum and one of the guys supplying stuff there this is a palm tree base inverted and he said I've got these palm tree bases why don't you take one home and see what you can do with it you know and and I went okay I'm gonna take it home and I thought well if I were to make a lamp I should make a lamp that's so so complicated that it couldn't just get ripped off you know so I made one and I realized like who cares if it gets ripped off I don't want to make lamps you know and then and then these these things this table it's copper and uh you know it's also taking a log and tapering so you get you get all the textures of grain it's flawed in the middle but it doesn't matter because actually I haul it out so it's not so heavy nice piece of wood and this is a great for grandkids because they can jump from they can just run across from couch to couch you know and they do wow so there's nothing sacred about the art he does they let them play well there's one broken slat in here that from from the kids jumping on it so that I had to tell them they couldn't jump on that anymore did you make your own couches this couch yeah yeah actually these are from the historic wine Vats from Fountain Grove which was a utopian society back at the turn of the century since then they've all burned that big fire burned everything but a friend of mine had permission to salvage his stuff and some of this was in my studio before the fire happened and I turned him into the yeah I see some of these Joiner you do with the furniture I also see something similar in your sculptures yeah yeah you know mortise and tannin is sort of a tradition of wood and and pleasing to me yeah did you do the the kitchen cabinetry yeah what kind of what is that that's a walnut top oh it's beautiful and did it come from somewhere salvage or was it no actually uh I milled it when I was in Davis and the table too you milled it because you had access to Milling equipment you know back then Walnut was just being jerked out along the roads and it was just yeah I like these cabinets as well the doors copper yeah this is copper scrap silver plywood there cabinets originally had fur plywood but uh we replaced the doors so the Walnut doors I built yeah how about the copper sink all right yeah it looks great but it's hard to keep clean you don't want one do do you like doing the Practical stuff yeah you know making a beautiful home for one's family is really the best thing to do you know and uh because you're living in your art yeah you know my wife was a teacher and she wasn't an artist but she appreciated and having family that's sharing what you've made yeah yeah it's special I love this yeah it even got painted out once you can see there's sort of traces you know we have to decipher it foreign this was to be bedrooms we hadn't planted as a scranny in it or an apartment but when we finally finished it we put a little kitchen in too so now can you rent it out or something we could I I just like I don't really want to you know it's nice to have it when uh for the holidays you know everybody will be up here and kids camp out on the floor and it's good yeah big beans too yeah that's that's a nice story that when I was building the building I thought I could really use a couple of big beams so I called a friend that has this portable sawmill I said hey do you have any beams he goes well I don't know I'll go out and check I said I need some six by you know twelves you know and and uh and he came back he says no I don't have it do you have any logs like well I do yeah he says well come on and he came up that same morning and he milled these things and we installed on the same afternoon it was just like just like that yeah the diamond plate uh windowsills are pretty nice too yeah oh they are so why put diamond plate on a windowsill because it looks good and actually windowsills are really difficult wood window seals they get all the Sun and they always just kind of get funky and these are more bulletproof you know yeah and this copper is is done with hand tools sinking into sheetrock you could take a four bar tool and you you put a piece of sheetrock down and copper on top and then you just strike it and it sinks into the sheetrock and leaves a raised pattern so that's a technical secret I probably shouldn't as as we all know like ideas are free it's just who uses them best that counts did you then the wood were you just buying Lumber oh yeah yeah I buy lumber yeah yeah I didn't know everything was no it almost looks like one of these cavities you have to see some places where you go skiing or uh yeah it's very cozy very yeah yeah there are those glamping tree houses and things this was my attempt to build a small Sacred Space tonight with the materials as well or that helps yeah it did I actually was working on this Sea Ranch Chapel and the contractor he had Apprentice in Japan so he actually is the one that brought Japanese tools kind of into my consciousness one day after we were at the end of the day you kind of go back and go ah yeah it's looking pretty good and tomby said you know someday I'd like to build a temple a small Temple and I was like me too so this the idea came first I built a temple and then I worked on lots of sketches for probably 10 years but nothing really and then the materials for this building showed up there was one big chunk of wood that all the posts came out of and quite remarkable dense very dark old growth redwoods so I was able to take this large kind of fractured log and just freehand cut Timbers and then with a stash of Timbers measure them and figure out what I could build with it yeah so free hand cut that's important um yeah that that when there's a knot the the Grain and the saw follows that and I let the sun exaggerate that aspect of the woods so originally I had spoke shaves almost hand plane smoke shaved as a hand planning process some of the posts and and they got so smooth they just lost all their Vitality I had to go back and put this ads texture so there's there's some texture in there that's important you can't tell how old yeah I mean it is it's it's 20 years old but no it feels like it could be hundreds yeah yeah and the patent of the is it copper that's turned that yeah the copper there was a copper roof on a house up the coast that started leaking right after they installed the copper and they spent eight years trying to fix it finally they just tore the copper off and the contractor called and goes do you want this copper I was like yeah so for a while I was calling this a tea house for lack of a better term and then I read a beautiful poem by Elizabeth Herron and my sister my wife Margie I think maybe I'm building a poetry house mostly because nobody knows what a poetry house is and everybody knows what a tea house is and there's all these rules for tea house there's no rules for poetry house so yeah so I called Elizabeth up and she ended up writing a long poem in parallel this is her handwriting and we with felt pens took lines from her poem and tagged the whole building under the substructure so the roof the walls and the floor covered with poetry That You Don't See and the only place that is revealed is in the paper of the lantern poem is a cyclical and covers Four Seasons is the Poetry house for the nameless Monk Is how Elizabeth starts the Poe's house is a winter dream in of absent fruit sleeks red skin and crisp sweet meat waiting for the hand the tongue the teeth remembered and imagined an apple tree in Falling Rain soaked black bark imagine apples remember apples one apples And So It Goes so here we see the table it actually we've had eight people around here so this actually uh it it takes forever but it it eventually winds down into the floor Bobby University yeah they are just okay so it's kind of right right you can see there's a big Acme thread underneath there but uh it looks like it would just go down but it takes a long time but that's good nobody gets trapped you know so it's a meditation become [Laughter] kids love to sit in here and get spun around that's cool this is six foot by nine foot it would be a three matte teeth space if you were doing Japanese tea yeah um and if you were doing a traditional tea uh you'd want a flat floor and during the uh holidays we put a futon in here and my daughter will will use this as a as a place to sleep so uh or you could bring this down and put a yoga mat in here you know at the same time it's just a wonderful place to uh gather with a group of friends and have a dialogue in them yeah yeah right like it feels close enough that you're not this long table that's but then you could yeah you know probably eat people around easily yeah yeah and it's kind of it's kind of cozy then yeah you know so it really is kind of a poetry house I mean besides the Poetry in the space it's also for reading or thinking yeah yeah every project there's that first line really that first line of a novel is also a poem you know and three words on a on the idea for a piece of sculpture or is a poem that sort of Kernel of beginning and where does that come from it comes from from an empty moment something arrives you know I've sort of thought of this as as the empty space where attention resides that's okay the way you peek through the windows is quite special the way light is when I hit to it but also the glass is not conventional either it's called Baroque glass why did you decide to go with it texture and light but privacy wow wow it feels like you framed this view yeah no and frame views I mean that's the classic sort of that whole Zen view is that little window that's more precious than the picture window you know is that Christopher Alexander's yeah Zen view pattern yeah pattern language is a wonderful I refer to it all the time yeah so the idea that a five-sided building means that I I pretty much don't have to fit into if I were in a gridded typical architectural site with you know Square buildings or walls or things like that there's no need to align because it doesn't fit a grid so I think that's an advantage for this building I built the building up in the yard and then I exhibited it and then it came back home and I created it as much space as I could for it here I love the way this rolls what's it all is it just a track there are rollers underneath actually one of the Elizabeth's The Poets favorite sounds is the sound of the doors I kind of she likes that sound and then of course as it comes to an end the so I mean you can feel also how you know closing this down has a different kind of feeling and then uh because a lot of recycled materials the the Green Glass those are wine bottles stuck in copper pipe that does not look like a wine bottle I'll take that as a company yeah you said there's always a second door usually there are two in a tea house which this is a poetry house but the idea is to have two doors to not end up with a right-handed building or a left-handed building and then just layers of space you know ways to approach your building from different sides it's the same it's a mirror image actually yeah there's a wonderful Mandala on the back wall here which is the only wall that doesn't either have Windows or doors in it it's also an abstract floor plan of the building okay so here so this is probably the most beautiful Foundation I've ever seen it's Copper River laminated beans again because I was making a building that didn't have a permanent site I needed to figure out how to how to take it apart and move it about and put it back together and the building comes apart right here that that joint so this Center rectangle is one unit and then the two halves I figured it out that it would fit on a truck and the roofs come off and five lower panels in the upper roof and I've often described my work as a cross between Shinto shrines and Stonehenge you know so that I mean Shinto shrines is this attention to detail and refinement and and Stonehenge is just just that sort of sense of mass and energy so any of the details are just part of ornamentations actually the finial on top is actually where I rigged the upper roof from when I pick it as a utility as well it's not just Purdy what's particularly important is is the scale of the Timbers and the scale of the building there normally you would think they're way too big for this small building but but they're not I had to build it to find it I had to do the work you know and it took three years it did take three years but it wasn't like constant three years it was just like I need to get some more materials I better get a job again you mind talking about the cost I tend not to keep track of costs or hours you know it's like how do you price Redwood that you price it at a what old growth Redwood would be paid for now or no you just it was given to me this house one of the reasons I built this is because I've had a number of people interested in the Poetry house but it it needs to have some sort of daily attention and so when somebody goes well I got this piece of property like here maybe I'll put it out there and we'll use it every now and then I go no you could have one of these you know tell me what what do you call this I'm calling this an old fence zendo so basically it was the materials that inspired this yeah yeah so so a big pile of materials came in and and uh uh and I thought well I could build a nice little building and I sort of need something to offer in lieu of a poetry house and and uh so I did all this Redwood came from Lucas Valley rec center and it was just old 60s Redwood con Hart but it has just a nice patina of color and I you know did enough to try to leave some of the original circular saw marks and then clean it up at the same time and then maybe I was a little extravagant with the copper paneling it's a detector of it it's actually embossed over industrial grating it's a nice process and then after syncing it with a rubber mallet it gets cinched with a needle scaler which gives this pecky quality which you can see how this this door is smooth you can just feel a difference once there's a texture in it it feels denser and I think more alive and then and actually the roof material is all from Recon fence posts so you know it's amazing you find these Old Redwood posts and if you cut them open they're actually pretty amazing wood it's largely old fenced material except for of course the Walnut floor and so how large is this space this is eight by fifteen with some tapered ends something like that and big enough for e sleeping even uh yeah I mean as with the Poetry house this moves up and down so it can be flat and use it for a futon or yoga or something like that but you can also raise it up and drop your feet in the well and then use it as a place to share food right I mean there's some little storage containers in the floor there and actually that timber in there is crosses and it's what I use to rig the building when I pick it up the roof comes off and and you know I can put it on a trailer and move it and all of that are your motives the way you are working with things coming from your place here like that your surroundings or yeah no I think I think actually I I I I I've said a number of times that that I've almost never sold a piece of sculpture to anybody that hasn't been here the thing you have in your doors I've never noticed it it's just polycarbonate roofing I used to have glass in here and and wood panels on either side but as you get older you just need more and more light you know but everyone has its own character there's uh so mostly Redwood here yeah this is a white oak everything is about the textures and I'm sort of a junkie for material so I I tend to start with materials there's a lot of big chunks of regular here and I bring in 100 tons at a time and so you know semi truck Worlds at the time sometimes I can I walk around my hot you know look at the yard and go like I must be crazy why am I doing all this you know and then I'll go to an artist studio and I'll look around see all their beautiful work and I go well maybe I'm not crazy enough you know if this piece is called moon circle but uh during covert we did the celebration of life here for my wife and we set this up to uh so we're in a big circle it was nice foreign energy that's my website that's what sculpture is about there's an interaction I think there's a resonance between those that's one sound and that's sort of the test it's like you look at something like do you feel it you know well then it's working you know you can understand it by both by the density of the work but also by the surrounding of the trees and and uh you know I'm very fortunate to live right where I do

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 158,200

Keywords: sculptor utopia, handbuilt compound, owner built home, wood worker, carpenter, sculptor, salvaged redwood, salvaged redwood home, livable sculpture, modern treehouse, handbuilt furniture, poetry house, teahouse, north coast, sonoma coast, sea ranch chapel, sculptors homestead, handbuilt homestead, 50 years in the redwoods, cazadero, california, shinto & stonehenge, shintoism, wabi-sabi, regionalist sculpture, vernacular sculpture, primitivism, master builder, shinto

Id: Ws-X-SV5TmI

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2022