Bart Trickel

Art is a passion, a search, a combination of discoveries merging at a focal point which is the sculpture.
The passion is building, creating, the combining of parts. When I was growing up, my father worked on antique clocks and my grandfather owned a gas station. I played with the junk left over from their work, assembling disfunctional clocks, lawn mowers, and bicycles. The passion to build was born but the end products, though complete, never satisfied me. They were just toys. Then I started to draw and discovered some of the modern atists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Alyce Aycock, Mark diSuvero, and Anthony Caro. I saw a way to build things that were not just toys, but expressions of what I saw and felt in the materials, which were often unrelated to their original functions.
I sketch shapes, unconscious doodles, meanderings with no direction, allowing my body to put forth ideas without my mind's control. These accumulate, and days later I return to look at them, many times surprised to see emotions, thoughts, and ideas that I had not associated with the sketches. I then start building parts of the sculpture, taking polaroids, redrawing, just watching to see what is happening. Though I have an idea of what the final sculpture will look like, the initial sketch is two-dimensional and doesn't always translate to three. Just as the sculpture may not match the sketch, the content may not match the initial thoughts, and the combination of parts starts to tell its own story. When it works best for me it is a discovery. I work with a wide variety of materials, not limited to any certain ones. This allows greater freedom for the piece to take shape and for the discovery process to unfold without restriction. I have used fire in all of these sculptures --welding, forging, cutting, brazing and in the kiln. Fire is an element of creation, fascination and fear.