Nick Lenz RIP

[Kid]

A warnig for all those who think a "Nick Lenz Style" can be copied like that. As a "student oversea", I had the pleasure to focus on the intellectal and theoretical aspects of his works when communating, I was not the workshop kid.

Over the years we ever and ever came back to this crucial point: It is about combining things in a way that makes the result so easy, so evident and convincing you cannot even see the work behind it anymore. It is not enough to take some doll parts, a clay gargoyle or a concrete garden decoration and put some tree onto or beside it. There must be either an overall "story", maybe a riddle or at least a pun.

I suggest to look at many different pictures of his work and examine them under this perspective. Then you will see a tree "root over gargoyle" tells about a creature being overwhelmed by a tree, a Penelope examined, maybe seduced by another tree and a little clay head a funny joke adding a simple flower. It is about telling stories not making sculptures. Don't look at the "big works" only and don't think what Nick has made was always supposed to be mad, different, strange or odd. Look at his craftmanship, see the patience and don't forget about the tiny, small ephemera he also made.

 

[Kid]

And above all this: Nick ever agreed that one of the basic abilities of a creative is in fact rather a disability, a lack or even a disorder. We are simply unruly boys and girls. We do ot accept orders and the consequent "order" others hardly ever think about. Creativity basically means, anything goes. Anything can be combine d with anything else – if it helps to tell the story. So please stay away from "creativity courses" and any rules trying to bring order into creativity. Ask instead: - What else could it be? What if? Nick was extremely interested in any kind of art. When I visited him once, he took me along to the MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. I remember him saying wiring and that branch stuff I could easily do myself. Having read this, look at that Lenz idea again:

 

[ShadyStump]

@Kid I think that's the point of the exercise. Think of elementary school art class. Much of it is about encouraging students to see possibilities in the mundane, to find in ourselves that unruly school child. Some of us learned this lesson quite well, others only learned that it was possible.

The purpose here is to honor a great, if slightly eccentric, artist by dabbling in the methods he wholeheartedly lived by. No one is expecting to make something as great as Nick Lenz created. If the pieces thrown together for this one experimental meeting are kept, they will serve only as a reminder to the individual that there are possibilities they might not be exploring thoroughly.

 

[Michael P]

Nick was a great teacher. Interestingly, in my experience he never explicitly encouraged his students to do anything "Lenzian". What I do remember is his great respect for what each individual tree offered. He could see unconventional opportunities in "difficult" material, and was very sensitive to the aesthetic preferences of each student.

I have no idea how you could replicate this in a workshop without him. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

 

[August44]

And I got very lucky and bought the second edition of "BONSAI FROM THE WILD" in like new condition several weeks ago for a pretty low price. Few and far between are people with his gifts and imagination.