Carl Dahl
As an artist my goals are to achieve excellence in my art and kindness in my dealings with others. As for the art ... this work is an outgrowth of many life experiences and reflections ... growing up in the southwest, finding a broken reproduction of a Greek Sculpture, being around horses and working with a German sculptor at a concrete fabrication plant. These experiences all remain an integral part of my work.
In sculpture, I prefer to work on an intimate scale. This immediacy lets me work fast and with simple tools. My materials are moist clay, steel wire, time and heat. The emerging clay figures bleached, bone-like and suffused with rusting iron capture elemental parts of my desert experience. The wood bases reflect an instance of life grounding this entropy. On paper my drawings are gestural and simple and owe a great debt to Sumi-e and Expressionism.
In horses, I find beauty, power and freedom; their legs, that seemed overly long to me as a child, rise to complete the perfect form. They remain one of life's great joys. There is nothing I would rather smell than a horse's neck - no greater feeling than sitting a horse. They recall the boy in me and have made me a better man.
In the human figure I find fragments of perfection ... part Angel, part Beast. This paradox is a metaphor for the struggle to find meaning in the face of a world that, like the desert, is often unforgiving. By studying human and animal forms; their movements, their parallels and contrasts I strive to create objects that reflect the essence of the gestures, woes and joys that are the narrative of existence.
Making art gives me joy and helps me make sense of the world. The resulting artifacts are a distillate of my imagination given form by my hands, trying and mostly failing, to capture what i see ... and what i feel - the later with some success.