I began carving wood and immersing myself in nature as a child. I’ve been faithful to both loves for more than 60 years. The challenge for me as an artist is to bring alive in my work my perception of nature and enhance the beauty already inherent in the wood and stone.

I’ve also expressed my vision through painting, drawing, stained glass, beading and other mediums.

beaded bag, glass beads, soapstone, abalone on suede

Guardian of the East

mahogany and abalone

Kwan Yin

cypress

Flicker feathers and micro seed beads

Moon Mother

white pine

Mushroom Priestesses

cypress

Puma and Cub

big leaf maple

Forgiving Humans

pine

Bobcat Walking Between the Worlds

walnut oil paint

Puma Meets the Ravens

black soapstone

Guardians of the Sacred

black walnut

Guardian of the Sacred by Karen Vogel
This essay originally appeared 1993 in Uncoiling the Snake edited by Vicki Noble

I carve wood because I have to. I feel like something is leaning on me to do a particular piece. I want to bring into form a feeling or energy. This energy is embodied in the image. Often the first response when someone sees my work is to say, “Did you find it that way?” Sometimes I have an ego twinge and think, “Do you have any idea how many hours and thirty years of woodworking go into creating something that looks like it grew that way?”

In some sense all I did was find the form within the wood. I will be drawn to carve a piece of wood to see what is inside. Sometimes I begin to carving without any forethought as to what I’m going to carve; I’ll just start carving and look for what it might be. I work for a while. Then I take a walk and think about the wood. Or I will sit with a piece until I get an image. As an African carver says, “They show up in my head like something coming to the surface of the water.” (Anderson, 1979).

Some of my carvings begin with pictures. When I found a postcard of “Rattlesnakes in a Dance,” I wanted to carve those snakes. I assumed it was a mating dance of a female and male, and I carved the piece with this mistaken assumption. After I completed the snakes, I found out that the picture is of two males dancing. There seems to be no obvious explanation as to what precipitates this dance. The most likely explanation is that the stimulus is sexual.

Since I am a lesbian, did I unconsciously pick a perfect symbol for myself? Certainly my conscious self quite freely switches cultures, species and gender in the images I carve. I don’t know what part my unconscious played in choosing an image of what could be called “Rattlesnakes in a Homosexual Dance.” I do know that I’m continually delighted by what feels like trickster energy surprising me with information about nature that is infinitely more complex and delightful than Walt Disney or biology class ever led me to believe.

Before I could begin to carve the snakes I had to study the picture for a number of months. I absorbed the form into my body and remembered times I’ve seen rattlesnakes. I began to search for the piece of wood that could express the image. It meant I had to find just the right piece. It had to have a pattern and color that would look like rattlesnakes. The wood also had to be a size and shape that could contain the image.

For the past thirteen years I’ve carved and collected many different types of wood. So I match up images I’m carrying around in my psyche with feelings in my body and the wood in my shop. There is a final moment when those factors coalesce.

The initial focus must be quite sustained and strong, in order to overcome the density inherent in the material. The woods I often use, such as ebony, snakewood, or ironwood, are extremely hard. But the resistance is more than just a physical quality. There is inertia in the beginning that seems to come as a challenge to me to find a way into the pattern and current running through a particular piece like water flowing down a river. The pattern turns this way and that as the tree grew, twisting, turning, and branching in response to the seasonal changes and yearly differences. Each piece of wood is unique, with a distinct temperament depending on its particular growth condition. My task is to recognize what the wood is expressing in its characteristics. The characteristics are hardness and color and how it grew which is expressed in the pattern of the rings of growth and branching.

My first task is to prepare the wood for carving. I cut blocks of wood off the original chunk of black walnut before I rough out the basic form. This is the stage where I experience difficulty in working more than an hour a day on a particular piece. The work looks clunky and I have to exercise a certain amount of discipline just to do a little bit every day. I have to trust that I’ll be able to transform the raw block of wood into the image that I desire.

That’s why I say the push to do a piece has to be sufficiently strong to get me through the first stage. The other ingredient that gives me focus is the challenge to see if I can do it. The last and perhaps strongest ingredient is love. I love wood. I feel that wood is my friend, and my work comes out of my relationship with wood. Each piece is a dialogue we’ve had together. We listen and speak to each other and touch each other to the core. Both of us are transformed by the relationship.

During the process of roughing out a piece, I’m making essential choices in the form. I’m deciding where the snakes bodies intersect and where their heads meet. I make these decisions based on subtle changes I see as I uncover the pattern in the wood. As I chisel deeper into the wood I make minor adjustments in the form to reflect certain peculiarities I find.

As the work continues my excitement in the emerging form increases. So do the hours I work. The snakes begin to come alive. Now I enter the stage of final refinement. I’ll smooth the form with tiny, inch-long violin planes. I put in the details such as the eyes and tail rattles with my pocketknife. I’ll also take out the tension I see in places in the snakes bodies. The place of tension in the piece will sometimes correspond to something blocked in my body or psyche. Then I have to do work on myself or wait for a dream to release the energy that enables me to work again.

Sometimes I let a piece sit for days or weeks at a time. Wood never stops growing even after the tree is cut down. It continues to absorb and discharge moisture. The colors change too. I have also noticed how the form settles and grows into a piece over time. So when I let a piece sit and grow into itself I can then isolate the parts that are still awkward and need further refinement. Then one day the snakes are done. I’ve removed everything that was in the way of their coming together in their sacred dance. One of my final acts was to whittle through the last strands of wood that connected the snakes and the head and neck. The cutting through came as an audible snap and movement that left the snakes touching but not attached. When I read the description of the dance I remembered that snap and movement. I realized that the head and neck form a critical point of contact. The snakes push their heads together and use the resistance created by pushing to raise their bodies straight up. With this energy force they go as high as they can until they fall to the ground. The movement is repeated for half an hour or more. Through my experience of carving the form, I can clearly imagine that the dance must feel like a dynamic ecstatic union. That is certainly the feeling I wanted to bring into form.