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There's a saying in the art world that goes, "If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it heavy." The carver Steve Tomashek works small and and keeps the weight of his pieces to a couple of ounces, instead. Most of the creatures he carves could fit in the palm of your hand, and some stand no taller than a half-an-inch. Tomashek gets more mileage out of a single plank of basswood than some woodworkers get out of ten thousand board-feet of mahogany. Working wood way at the far other end of the scale from monumental timber framing and boatbuilding, Tomashek is a miniaturist--he does tiny carvings of animals and people. Ordinarily, just the thought of cute, saccharine little miniatures is enough to make my teeth hurt but Tomashek's carvings, mercifully, contain no sugar or artificial sweeteners. Some of them, in fact, are the furthest thing from cute; ruthlessly satirical, they are nothing at all like all those Little Bo Peeps and bunnies and wet-eyed cocker spaniel puppies that have always given me the creeps. His work, though it is often truly adorable, is not the demoralizing stuff of kitsch. It has closer affinities with the books and paintings of medieval bestiaries, with the acid art of political caricature, and with Japanese netsuke, those miniature carvings, often fanatically detailed, that ornament the sashes of kimonos. One of Tomashek's business cards reads, "Thomas Little, Itinerant Sculptor of Miniatures," a line that proves to hold hidden meanings, not unlike the painted detail of Tomashek's carvings themselves, some of which doesn't begin to reveal itself until you scrutinize his work up close. "Thomas Little," to begin with, isn't just some name pulled out of a hat: the name Tomashek means "LittleThomas" in Czech. Tomashek's forebears are Czech, Swiss, German and Italian, which is to say that his family tree has roots in countries with especially rich woodcarving traditions. Tomashek's father is a carver, and so was his grandfather. Meanwhile, the description, "itinerant" is the truth, for Tomashek plies his trade wherever he happens to be, sitting and carving in coffee houses in Minneapolis (he is based in the Twin Cities), or outside in the park, under a tree, or on trains, travelling around Europe on a Eurail pass. He pursues his work with minimal overhead and the fewest tools imaginable, and survives something like a Gypsy. "Sculptor" reflects not only Tomashek's activity as a carver but his extensive research into the long, worldwide tradition of miniature animal sculpture and art, an interest that extends from primitive, ancient, and modern shamanistic fetishes to Beanie Babies, TeleTubbies, and all the other tripe of popular culture today. Having gone to college, Tomashek is too highly educated to be able to pass himself off as a naive "folk carver," but "the folk" are nonetheless drawn to hiswork like bees to flowers. You have only to watch children cluster around his table at an art fair, their sticky little gummy-bear fingers picking through Tomashek's trays of tiny carved pigs, chickens, gorillas, half-inch high Nixons and Reagans,lizards, elephants, monkeys, ducks,dinosaurs, and all manner of other microbeings to see how fascinated children are by his work; they can't tear themselves away from the little world he has created for them. Tomashek's tiny, antic, brightly painted creatures trip and tumble out of the cornucopia, or the clown car, of an apparently inexhaustible imagination. The container of this imagination --SteveTomashek's own head--features a long, narrow face with eyes set close together above a sharp and prominent nose. Watching him work, it's tempting to offer the crackpot theory that eyes set close together make it easier to triangulate objects in the near field of the miniaturist's vision, and that a sharp nose makes it easier to part the veils of everyday scale and get through to the world of the small. The kit of tools used by Tomashek to create this teeming, bug-sized little world consists of a grand total of two knives--and a small stone to keep them sharp. Along with a few of those thimble-like rubber fingergrips used in offices for flipping through papers, which he uses to protect his thumb from cuts, this is the whole extent of his tools. It would be hard to work wood with any greater economy of means. As a strategy for artistic and biological survival, it's brilliant: a bag of basswood carving blanks,his tools, a few fine brushes, some tubes of acrylics, and two or three cigar boxes full of finished carvings all fit inside his rucksack, and there's still room left in there to pack a lunch. After the carving of a creature is done,Tomashek sands it through two or three grits, then proceeds to paint it as meticulously as if it were a Persian miniature. He uses artists' acrylics, squeezed from their tubes onto little pallets of masonite. Working with ultra fine (18/0) brushes on details that are almost microscopic, he sometimes has to wear a 2X magnifier mounted on his forehead to see what he's doing. Just handling the work presents problems of its own. To paint works this small, Tomashek usually drills a shallow sixteenth-inch hole in an inconspicuous place on the underside of the carving, then mounts the work on a toothpick. Loosely socketing the other end of the toothpick in a block of wood on his bench like a flag in a hole on a golf course, he can then twirl the carving and work on it from all sides without having to handle it. When the painting is complete, the works are signed and dated (with Lilliputian handwriting) and their miniscule and intricate detail protected (people love to handle them) with a final matte clear varnish top coat. Tomashek puts everything he's got into every single piece he makes, but some of those pieces take as little as 45 minutes to carve, perhaps another 30 minutes to sand, and maybe three or four hours to paint, at most. It's nothing like toiling for decades with jackhammers and dynamite on the colossal faces of Mount Rushmore, where years are invested in the creation of a single work of art. If the piece he's carving accidentally snaps in his hands, or the painting isn't working out, Tomashek just sets the piece aside and goes off in another direction, maybe to return to the idea another time, and maybe not. No setback is ever so crushing that creation grinds to a halt. Tomashek's approach is fecund, and generates a plenitude that it is easily replenished. He goes forth and multiplies. Every carving, in a sense, is a quick sketch. Since none of them take hundreds of hours to make, there is less at stake on the outcome of any single piece, and this keeps his work economically accessible, which is part of its appeal--in this sense, Tomashek's are true works of folk-art, priced within most people's reach, from about $25 (for a small tiger the size of an eraser) to about $500 (for a Noah's Ark the size of a sub sandwich,with two of everything aboard). There is a secret to making a figure carved out of a lump of wood seem alive, but no one knows what it is. It is a talent, a gift that some people have. It might have something to do with being able to feel, inside your body, what it's like to be that animal, and then transmitting this feeling into the wood with the tip of your knife. The vivacity of Tomashek's carvings comes from his gift for sensing an animal's structure, for feeling the action of its bones and muscles, from the inside out, so to speak, even while he carves the animal from the outside in. He studies the animal's characteristic postures, the way it moves and carries itself, then distills his observations into a gesture two inches high. The work seems alive, though not in the way that a decoy carver's full-scale 3-D rendering of a duck is lifelike, with every trompe l'oeil feather in place. It's the captured gesture, not a literal-minded replication, that gives Tomashek's animals their life. They look like they have just been caught red-handed in the act of being who they are. Astonished, they fix you with stares of such animal intensity that your own gaze locks on them, and can't turn away.
Tomashek has idled away many an evening playing chess at a coffeehouse in Minneapolis called Muddy Waters. He once carved a chess set in walnut and butternut, with the white pawns depicted as squat little businessmen in suits and ties and bowl-haircuts. The black king is seated on the suffering head of one of them in the manner of a potentate seated on the kind of African throne that has carved human figures for support. Tomashek's wit sneaks up on you. One of his pieces is a dog whose coat is covered with dots. Look at this dog for a while and you see that some of these dots form the outline of a dog bone (dotted to indicate invisibility, the bone having been eaten by the dog and now inside of him). Looking closer, you see a layer of smaller bones lower down on the dog's belly: the dog is like an x-rayed, archaeological site of all the bones it's ever gnawed. Then there is Tomashek's assortment of tigers, some of them painted with ordinary off-the-shelf tiger stripes, but others with stripes that have subtly morphed into stylized bolts of lightning and crackling nets of electricity. And this gets us to his electric eel, its sides painted with patterns of frequency waves like those that run across the screen of an oscilloscope. If you look carefully at the eel's eyes (the outlines of which are taken from the shape of a particular kind of small electrical connector) you can see that the tiny highlight painted on one pupil is a "+" sign and on the other, a "- " sign. The pallet for the eel's paint-job is derived from the multicolored transistors, diodes, capacitors, and resistors found in the bins at places like Radio Shack--the sort of electronic small parts that were also to be found down in the basement labs of the department of experimental psychology at the University of Indiana, where, as a student, Tomashek once had ajob wiring rat cages. The job involved soldering bits and pieces of this electronic confetti into various contraptions for harassing rats (...rat presses lever A and gets a treat...presses lever B and gets a shock). Tomashek stared so long at the things that their colors got imprinted in his brain. In terms of subjects, Tomashek is all over the map, carving and painting menageries stocked with everything from realistic animals to the fast-multiplying lunatic and zany creatures of his own invention. Open his sketchbooks and you pull back the flaps on the circus of an imagination that seems to run non-stop 24 hours-a-day, with page upon page of animal studies and caricatures in pen-and-ink, and collages of exotic animals and people clipped from National Geographic and other magazines. From his travels in Europe are sketches of Paris, scenes of his ancestral village in Switzerland, and thumbnail sketches of the astonishments he saw during his visit to the artist Jean Dubuffet's famous museum of the art of the insane, in Lausanne. Pages are devoted to a collection of beautiful postage stamps of animal life--exquisite works of miniature art in their own right...a portrait gallery of birds, frogs, monkeys, armadillos and gazelles from countries all around the world. Other pages contain handwritten epigrams, quotations, and journal entries, and poetry that Tomashek pastes together with words cut out of magazines and newspapers. The poems look like ransom or hold-up notes, and read like Beat poetry from the Fifties. Tomashek's small library of art books, another reservoir of imagery, further illustrates his openness to a wide range of influences--from the brightly painted work of the folk carvers of Oaxaca to pictures from the Mayan Codex and the art of ancient Egypt, to the work of Picasso, the gorgeously colored horses of the Fauve painter Franz Marc, and the surreal and enigmatic boxes or dioramas of the artist loseph Cornell. Also in his collection are books of wildlife photography, an assortment of children's books (Curiotls George, Babar, The Pokey Little Puppy) and--a work of central importance to him--the Museum Of American Folk Art Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Folk Art and Artists, one ofthe definitive books in the field.
The work
of Thomas Little has been exhibited at crafts fairs and galleries
in the Twin Cities, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and has
a growing following of patrons and collectors, including some
abroad. Tomashek is now moving more into the creation of whole
dioramas--tableaux of dozens of creatures at a time, entire menageries
and bestiaries, circuses and Noah's Arks, reenactments of myths
and folktales--though not to the exclusion of the individual
carvings that have been his bread and butter. A two-inch tiger, tensed to pounce, all but devours its prey with its stare. A lemur, the nervous wreck of the jungle, seems ready to jump out of its skin. Spilling forth from a couple of tools almost too simple to be believed, a whole zoo springs to life from scraps of basswood no bigger than a cookie or a lump of coal. Stuffed inside one of Tomashek's cigar boxes, his animals vibrate with so much suppressed vitality and fun that it's a wonder the box doesn't burst apart. When Tomashek sets up at the fair and lets these creatures out, it's like a neighborhood release of laughing gas. Nearing his display, people break into smiles. Moving closer, they cross into a zone of enchantment, and become enthralled. Tomashek's creatures wake people to their own forgotten affinity with nature. Tiny and intense, his richly painted sculptures trace back to the earliest art of man. Concentrated packages of energyheld in the palm of your hand--little fetishes that can be felt and fondled and communicated with--they have the charm and the power of talismans. Even the most comically exaggerated of these figures derives its power fromTomashek's quietly impassioned study of the unfolding actualities of nature. The knife of this artist moves in response to the impulses that stir the animal itself. The miniatures of Thomas Little are charged with the spirit, the slapstick and the pathos that animate everything alive. |