She Wood

Growing up in the mid and late 1940s and 50s in rural east Texas gave me a sense of being in the lap of nature. I played along creeks and sand bars, in woods with canopy cover, and I would hide in secret places in thickets. There were pastures and some plowed ground. I sometimes walked after my grandfather while he "geed" and "hawed" his way behind a big plow horse pulling a middle buster. I would stomp clods and hurry to stay caught up.

It was a make do world where the "will of the wisp" was always close at hand. My parents were children of the Depression and knew to make it you had to get there early with the will to work. I learned how to make a crosscut saw glide through post oak. I made all kinds of things like wagons, carts and bridges, cattle pens and loading shoots, horse barns and corn cribs. I used axes, mauls and wedges, all tools of rural America. I also made things that had no use other than that people liked them. I got psychological rewards from my parents and their friends, they called me the "wizard." Making things came to me almost by osmosis. But I never thought of it as art, I did not call the things I made art. But then in my early twenties I found out it had a name and there were thousands of people out in the world that did it. The amazing thing about this was that what one person made did not have to be like what somebody else made. By definition this was true self-expression.

From the Old Growth
2022
Redwood burl, basswood, fir, oak and stainless steel
240 x 264 x 264 inches

From the Old Growth (detail)

So then, the things I started to make and call art were out of the materials I grew up using and made with the tools I already knew how to use. The sensibility was set, I just made art about what I was. Does that sound too simple, I guess in one way it does, but I will give you an example of something that gives it credence.

When I got to a point where I was going to New York to really look at art, what I was seeing was gridded streets, gridded buildings with gridded windows and doors, everything was gridded and so was the art, the grid was king and was haled as "international." It did not take long for me to realize that I did not fit into any art "ism." Linda Shearer, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum and absolutely the nicest person on the planet, put my sculpture I saw a man with shovels in his hands, scooping fire from the sky at the very top of the Guggenheim in 1977. When you stepped off the elevator, there it was overlooking the cavern, out and below.

The sculpture was made on the side of a mountain near Taos, New Mexico. When the great Boston collector Vera List stepped off the Guggenheim's elevator and saw it, she immediately went downstairs and outside to a phone booth, called me and bought it for $5,000 over the phone. The sculpture went to her museum, but is now in the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.

Big Split Oak Flower
2023
Split oak and stainless steel
125 x 117 x 26 inches

Block
2024
Post oak and gum
45 x 48 x 48 inches

I have nothing but good and positive thoughts about that exhibition and those times. A year or two after the Guggenheim, I showed two wooden figures in a room at the Whitney Museum of American Art alongside a little Jasper Johns painting and a Donald Judd grid on the wall. It was just the three of us and I thought I had made it. But the real lesson in it was "don't drink your own kool-aid." Glory is fleeting, every day is new and every day you are starting from a new beginning.

Recently, I got three phone calls that changed my trajectory. My nephew Phillip was elk hunting down in Ruidoso, New Mexico, and drove by a man's house that had a redwood burl setting in his yard. He turned around and went up to the man's house and asked him if he would sell the burl, which was 11 feet in diameter and weighed 16 thousand pounds. I bought it from an iPhone photograph. The second phone call came from my daughter Ruby, who saw a post oak burl for sale up near Lufkin, Texas. I bought it and had it trucked to my studio. The scales on the crane that registered exact weight said this burl weighed 24 thousand pounds. The third phone call came from a friend who was driving back from Utah. He passed a field down in the Gunnison River valley near Grand Junction, Colorado where he saw a cottonwood log lying in a field. I bought this one as well. It weighed 36 thousand pounds and was a little over 11 feet across. So here I am, looking at chunks of wood the size of school buses. My mind is on fire, hard work is the name of success and I am about to finish over a dozen sculptures that are too big to fit in anybody's house, or go through any normal doorway. All of them coming directly from the very soul of my beginning in east Texas. Yeah, that's my blood down there.

Howling Wolf
2024
Post oak and gum
94 x 48 x 49 inches

Watching
2024
Live oak from LBJ Ranch, cedar base
47 x 22 x 22 inches

James Surls is an internationally recognized artist and one of the most preeminent living artists in the United States. Born in 1943 in Terrell, Texas, Surls graduated from Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1966 and from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1968. He taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas from 1968 to 1976, then moved to Splendora, Texas, with his wife, the artist Charmaine Locke. He lived in Splendora for a little over 20 years, and founded the Lawndale Alternative Arts Space at the University of Houston. Lawndale was a thriving artist community where he continued to teach and encourage and where he produced a large body of work. Surls currently resides and has his studio in Carbondale, Colorado.

His sculptures, drawings and prints, which reflect his unique sensibility to natural forms, are in major art museums and public and private collections throughout the world, including the the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; Republic of Singapore; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.