Gordon Becker
Mediums Used
The calligraphy of longing…
In the north, most easily found in Algonquin Park, there are beech trees heavily marked by the claws of bears that have been climbing them to reach one of their favorite foods, the beech nut. The trees carry the marks of many climbings of full-grown bears as well as cubs. The beech is a shapely, sinuous-limbed tree with smooth, gray bark, sensuous and tactile. The scars are permanent and black, four-claw patterns of striving to fill a hunger. I feel, when seeing these trees, the same sense of delight and awe as when looking at great art. An object has been marked by longing.
In the caves of southern France and Spain, on the overhung escarpments in Australia, southern Africa and the Canadian Shield are the earliest known calligraphies of human longing. Great art was made as a reaching out in desire and hunger. The exquisitely realized depictions of the great beasts are joined to the little stick-figure portraits of the hunters by arcs of little dots. These dots represent the spears and arrows that, in flight, carried the dreams and aspirations of our distant ancestors. Through flight, man and beast were joined in body and spirit and, briefly, we could become one with what we so ardently desired.
Art, throughout human history, has reached for the dream of its time; sated hunger, power over enemies, transcendence of the ordinary and the oppressive, connection to the gods and the longing for subtlety, purity and simplicity.
I began carving dancers in 1984. I see in the effort, brevity, pain and exhilaration that is the spirit of dance the most poignant expression of the dream of flying; of becoming the arrow of our longing. The arrow on the rock wall is in eternal flight. My dancers reach with their bodies and hands into a moment of transformation.
I endeavor to invest my work with the same directness, honesty and simplicity as the scribble of bear claws on a gorgeous tree and as the images left for us in the ancient places.
The shaping of wood into objects of longing and projection is one of the oldest of human activities. The fire hardened stick took flight many thousands of years ago and I strive to continue that flight with my work today.
Sculptures by Gordon Becker
My life in art began in earnest at the age of eleven in Wellesley, Ontario. Being utterly captivated by a film of an Inuit carver creating an image full of magic and power from a raw lump of stone, I determined then and there to become a carver. A Christmas gift of a small set of high quality carving tools began a passion that has never abated. After leaving O.C.A. in 1969 I travelled and worked around the world for nearly a decade; building houses and fighting forest fires in the Yukon, picking potatoes in England, washing pots in Paris, doing hotel laundry in Switzerland, (where I learned to speak French), building more houses in New Zealand and managing exploration work in northern Australia. My travels included several months in Central America and visits to many Pacific and Indonesian Islands as well as New Guinea.
I had the first exhibition of my sculpture at The National Art Gallery of New Zealand in Wellington.
Upon my return to Canada in 1977 I undertook to complete an apprenticeship with a master woodcarver, which I accomplished in 1981. I began, at that point, to seriously apply my knowledge of the world and my skills to the production of sculptural works. Film set construction and sculpture commissions have provided a sound financial foundation from which to work on the development of my artistic passions.
Invitations to exhibit in Commercial and public galleries began to rapidly increase in the late nineties and two thousands.
In 2003 I was invited to exhibit my work at the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea in Florence Italy where I was awarded a Gold Medallion in the Sculpture Category.
In 2004 I was invited to exhibit my work at Galerie Wild in Frankfurt, Germany.
I continue to show my work here in Canada and in Europe.