Thursday Salute to Originals: Sketching with a Band Saw
What are your favorite tools for sketching? A fine-tipped black Micron? A svelte mechanical pencil? Most drawing items are compact enough to stash in a few inches of space, but rarely is a power tool considered as a drawing instrument – especially one as imposing as a band saw.
James McNabb sketches cityscapes using a distinct method of shaping wood with his own choice of “drawing instrument”. Using a band saw, McNabb repurposes scrap wood into buildings ranging from 3” to 16” tall. The monuments are assembled into larger pieces, organically taking shape into cityscapes and skylines.
Instead of stretching across a flat horizon in traditional skyline fashion, these groups are then turned upside down as tables or morphed into circular forms. McNabb describes that he did not set out to create city scenes; he rather serendipitously began cutting into scrap wood and soon found that as a collection, the forms took on the familiar shape of the NYC skyline he loved to observe as a child growing up in a New Jersey town. The sculptures are decidedly an outsider’s view of the city, focusing on the massing and profile of buildings from a bird’s eye perspective.
McNabb’s sculptures are at once ordered and unruly, general and detailed. The mass of the city is all-consuming (perhaps in reference to urban sprawl?) and while inspired by the artist’s background, carries no formal reference to certain cities. With the assemblage of forms triggering associations to the city in general, the viewer is then invited in to examine the details – How was it made? How does each piece relate to the whole? What does it mean?
As frequent sketchers, sticklers on quality and craftsmanship, and lovers of wood materiality, we have great respect for those – designers, artists, or novices – who are able to separately incorporate these into their design processes and finished products. But McNabb presses the envelope further by combining unorthodox tools, artistic methodology, and classic materiality into one streamlined and sophisticated entity. Performing as a uniquely charged tandem, McNabb melds destructive power tools, fleeting sketching, and natural wood into a wholly expressive piece that embodies meaning in every nook and cranny. In this “city full of splinters”, we salute every interpretation and inspiration that the piece and its process may generate.
Sources: McKnabb & Co Studio, Treehugger