For nearly four decades, David Crawford has been giving his view on reality physical form. Starting in jewelry and wooden furniture, David experimented with many different mediums and styles before finding bronze sculpture as a preferred creative outlet. Living in the tiny community of Halfway in the backwaters of a backwater corner of Oregon, using a foundry designed and built buy himself, he continues to forge his unique view of the world into a very real and permanent form.
If you aren't born wealthy there are only two ways to make a living in this world. One, is to get up in the morning (or evening) and go out and provide goods or services for the pleasures or needs of others, and the other is to steal stuff. Since I don't understand Wall Street, or house flipping, and since everyone recognizes you in a small town whether or not you're wearing a ski mask, I provide goods or services. Are my goods any good? I don't really know, but as long as people keep preferring them over my "services", I'll keep making them. Any job can be difficult at times, but I believe my job is pretty well suited to my personality and abilities.
I never know quite what it is I'm doing, and I never know who is going to support my doing it, but it does take real work, and I don't get much of it done. Over the years I've tried to answer people's questions about my process, or my work schedule, where my ideas come from, why does anyone pay me to do this, and I always feel like I let them down with my answers. I let myself down with my answers. The truth is that I don't know where the bulk of my ideas come from, my process is best described as a loosely organized sequence of narrow escapes, my work schedule is from when I was twelve until now, except when I'm not working, and I don't have any idea whatsoever why anyone buys my things.
Be that as it may, my work is rewarding, frustrating, exhilarating, and at times just plain tedious. I grind quite a bit, and would rather not. I stew a fair amount over details that nobody seems to notice or care about, and at times I wonder if it should be chicken or feathers for dinner. But all in all, for me there is no feeling quite like making something of nearly nothing, and having someone enjoy that something enough to support me to go and do it again. I am an artist who does work for the people. I satisfy my own visions of what to make, and how to make them, but I also want people to find the work interesting and engaging. I am not particularly interested in trying to educate or inform my audience. I believe them to be educated and informed independent of my influence, but I do hope they find something unexpected or new in my work. I don't generally think of various occupations to be superior or inferior to another, nor do I think of the well-to-do class as being more informed or enlightened than the less well off among us. I learned early and often that it is a tall order to find anyone that can't teach me a thing or two. We are, each and every one of us, masters of something that the person beside us in any crowd is not, and I sort of like it that way.
I make these points to put my efforts in perspective. Is what I do important? Only if art of others is important. We each get to decide what is important to us when it comes to art, and we risk missing some pieces of life by narrowly defining which art is and is not worth our attention. So I am grateful that I live in a time when one might live most anywhere and yet find a way to pursue his or her visions toward making a living and a life of that pursuit. These are the best of times, and since they are my only times, I intend to enjoy doing what I do, and eating some chickens now and then, along with the feathers.
I was born to make things, and I have no memory of a time that I did not. My earliest creations were born of desire for things that others had that I would like to also have. Be it a boat, or a bow and arrow, a sled, or trap, I spent a good deal of my energy making objects of desire. When objects of desire shifted from tools of exploration or destruction, to creatures who often wore skirts, my creations began to focus on things I believed these creatures might find beautiful. Instead of the rough utility of a crude plywood creek-plying vessel, what my product looked like became very important to me. Girls looked good, and seemed to make every effort to do so, and so my creations should look good if they were to attract any attention.
I began my career in art as a tool of courtship. I made jewelry and jewelry boxes, miniature furniture, larger furniture, and eventually a few guitars. I made these things mostly of wood, and often of walnut scraps or limbs I'd sawn into small boards. Every courtship I engaged in was marked by the presence of my creative endeavors. For money, from grade school on, until I was out of high school, I worked in the hay fields of the MC Ranch, one of Oregon's largest cattle operations based in the community of Adel, in the southeast quarter of the state. I like beef, and appreciate the effort that goes into making grass into a hamburger, but I didn't see any future for me in the cattle industry. I was not born to land, and had insufficient tutelage in animal husbandry, so from a very early age I knew I would not be making a living the way many of my classmates would likely do. I would more likely need to find my own way.
After a hapless and somewhat wayward two terms in college I ran out of the money I'd saved, and had to find work. My most obvious paycheck was going to be of the agricultural labor variety, and so I went home to work for my old boss, operating a D-6 caterpillar, plowing open a previously un-farmed piece of land on the ZX Ranch based in Paisley, Oregon. The ground was sage covered, and had been burned in preparation for tillage. Neither the ZX nor the MC did anything small in those days, and this field was no exception. There were four of us working this ground, three crawler tractors pulling 4 bottom plows, and one large wheel tractor pulling a 5 bottom plow. When we started, we had completed a stripe of 17 furrows, halfway around the field by noon. We began before daylight, and quit at about 6PM. On day one we were done with one lap of the field. While away at college in a moister climate, I had become unaccustomed to the dry air of Oregon's high desert, and by the fourth for fifth day my lips were bleeding from the dust and diesel exhaust, and I had begun to wear a vaseline soaked rag in my mouth to try and heal up my college-boy soft skin. After eight or ten days of crawling our way around this field, I had a revelation!
It occurred to me that I was not straight-jacketed into this way of making a living, and I didn't really like it. I could likely get a job as a carpenter. On the following day I informed my boss of many years that I was going to look for work in the building trade. I feared he would fire me on the spot and chastise my pathetic work ethic, but instead he said, "Good for you! While you are looking for the job you want, I have a whole lot of parts bins I'd like you to build. When you find a full time job, finish up the project you are on that day, and go do what you like."
Not only was it the right move for me at the time, it proved to be a very good way to make ends meet as I worked my way through the rest of my college education. I enjoyed the work and I excelled at it. I understood what was important to learn and unlike "managerial business 302", I held on to what I learned. In my carpentry debut I had a great boss who took the time to make sure I knew what I was doing, and who wasn't afraid to throw some challenges my way.
One day while sawing a piece of finish grade T-1-11, plywood siding on a diagonal for a gable end of the house we were building, Casey, my boss, watched patiently as I drew and cut the panel to shape, to the specifications that he had read to me from the scaffolding. As I was preparing to carry the piece up to him he calmly said, "I think that one will be good for the other end."
I had cut the panel such that it fit with the textured finish-grade side facing into the attic space, as opposed to the weather side. Casey let me make mistakes and let me learn from them, and I thought I would never want to leave this job.
But as things happened, winter came, and the days turned gray. The thermometer looked like it must be upside down, and importantly my bank account looked right-side up. The blush on the rose of carpentry was for me apparently only for fair weather carpentry. In mid December I busted my nearly frozen thumb open when a roofing nail tipped over as I hit it, and as it was healing, my thoughts began to shift away from the project at hand, toward the warm, sometimes hot sculpture lab at college. A friend with whom I've remained close to this day was having the same sorts of thoughts from his night job sweeping planer shavings at the local lumber mill.
With all haste, we began plotting our return to school. I worked the following summer for another building contractor, and save a very few temporary odd jobs, I've been self-employed ever since. I would assume that at this point I am not employable in any capacity, as I have done things my own way for a very long time now. Should I have the good fortune to keep this up until I wake up dead, I will have pulled off what I consider to be a marvelous feat of self-determination.
No way of getting on in this world has ever seemed so compelling as the freedom to wake up to a challenge of my own making every day, and the option to redefine my challenges as my interests have wandered. I have been lucky, and in some ways I have been disciplined, but the ball has always been in my court, and whether I hit or miss as I dribble or drool my way to the basket of self-fulfillment, I will never regret the blisters, scrapes, and pulled hamstrings of this never ending analogy. I may never quite dunk the ball, but I've hit the backboard so often that it is time for a good scrubbing.
Put simply, I'm doing what I want to do, and it has been interesting.
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