Fitzhugh Karol

Posted on June 13, 2009 - by pokate

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In the last 24 hours I’ve spent time with two friends who are in the contemporary art world – one an old friend and one a new friend. Through the course of conversations with them both I was reminded about where I came from in an educational sense. I went to Skidmore, which I chose because it was the only school that allowed unfettered access to their art buildings 24/7. They also had a great metalsmithing program and what proved to be an even more essential fiber arts workspace. I came home from brunch today and ended up poking around to find some of the artists whose names I could remember from college – some older, some younger, some I knew, some never knew me. Fitzhugh Karol is the first one I remembered, though only his firstname, it took me a minute to find him – he’s also now working in wood as opposed to his original ceramics – he was one, as he was older, who never knew I existed.

Obviously I’m into the scale he’s working in here.

A lot of his pieces, including his RISD thesis, are these fin or wave-like forms. On his site there are more photos of them installed in different rooms – I think they’d look awesome in the meadow in New Hampshire.

Reminds me of a Brancusi.

I like the way he describes finding wood as a medium because he just didn’t have a kiln – it’s interesting to see how artists adapt to changes like that. I often say I don’t do metalsmithing anymore because I can’t have a blowtorch in my apartment in New York but who knows if I would have turned to smaller works likes needle felting, crochet, and beading anyway somewhere along the line.

Some of his pieces remind me of the works of a carpenter who was a friend of my family’s when I was younger, Dave Conrad. He created, in addition to most of our Boston house, little miniature worlds inside split rocks or geodes. Fitzhugh’s older works, from 2005, were little miniature clay house worlds.

Reminds me of many things, houses in Cinque Terre, old Native American cliff dwellings out West and more.