“I began making wood sculpture in 1962.
I knew how to use a chainsaw and it was one of those things – one day you just start.“
JB (James Blain) Blunk was born in Ottawa, Kansas. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied physics, later changing his major and studying under noted ceramist Laura Andreson. After serving in the United States Army in Korea, he met sculptor Isamu Noguchi in Japan and served apprenticeships with Japanese potter Kitaoji Rosanjin (1883–1959) and Bizen potter and Living National Treasure Kaneshige Toyo (1896–1967). Blunk was the first American to apprentice into the line of descent of that country’s great unglazed stoneware ceramic tradition.
After returning to the U.S., Blunk was eventually able to build his own home and studio near the Marin County town of Inverness, California, where he had a lifelong friendship and association with painter Gordon Onslow Ford.
Work
Among Blunk’s best-known and highly regarded public works is “The Planet” (1969), located in the lobby of the Oakland Museum of California. Writer Monica Quock Chan, in an article on the Oakland Museum, described “Planet” as follows: “In the entrance lobby sits a circular, benchlike sculpture 13 feet in diameter. Back in 1969, woodworker J.B. Blunk carved “The Planet” out of a single redwood burl, and it has been an icon of the museum for years.” Blunk created the sculpture from a two-ton piece of redwood with the help of then-apprentice Bruce Mitchell.
Glenn Adamson, writing in Woodwork magazine (October 1999), described “The Planet” as “an irregular, wildly textured circle, riddled with textural incident. The piece is unified by a rhythm of alternating jagged forms and restful, smooth shapes. The work has been called ‘one of the most touched pieces of sculpture you could find,’ and indeed it still serves as a play space, bench and oversized toy for visitors to the museum.” Artist Garry Knox Bennett has said, “It’s a masterpiece. It’s an absolute masterpiece. Not only does it look good, when you see kids climbing on that and under it, you know it’s eminently successful.”
Two other monumental works are “Magic Boat,” at the California Orientation Center for the Blind, and “Greens,” at Greens, the restaurant operated by the San Francisco Zen Center at the Fort Mason Center in the Marina District of the city. In his Woodwork article, Glenn Adamson described “Magic Boat” as a “cradle-like nine-foot square sitting area with a rhythmic series of round projections that beckon to the hand.” Adamson characterized “Greens” as “a feat of engineering as well as a tour de force of woodcarving,” a complex installation consisting in part of a “vertical redwood monolith” and “an assortment of small, rounded tables and stools.” The entire work was cut “from a single 22-foot diameter stump of redwood.” Like Blunk’s “other major installations,” Adamson said, “’Magic Boat’ and ‘Greens’ encourage a feeling of community through their circular compositions and inviting shapes.”
In 1988, Blunk collaborated with landscape architects Ron Wigginton and Rachada Chantaviriyavit on “Wheat Walk,” a project for the University of California, Davis, Arboretum. “Wheat Walk” was awarded first prize in an International Design Arts Competition. “Wheat Walk” has yet to be constructed.
Blunk’s work continues to be exhibited in galleries such as the Landing Gallery of Los Angeles, Kate MacGarry of London, and Blum & Poe galleries around the world. His work is also offered at auction by firms such as Sotheby’s.
Sculptor Isamu Noguchi characterized the contributions of JB Blunk as follows:
“I like to think that the courage and independence J.B. has shown is typically California, or at least Western, with a continent between to be free from categories that are called art. Here the links seem to me more to the open sky and spaces, and the far reaches of time from where come the burled stumps of those great trees.”
“J.B. does them honor in carving them as he does, finding true art in the working, allowing their ponderous bulk, waking them from their long sleep to become part of our own life and times, sharing with us the afterglow of a land that was once here.”
Earth, Wind & Fire: Rediscovering the Elemental Art of J.B. Blunk
By GLENN ADAMSON for Frieze. 03 SEP 2018
Ahead of his first solo in the UK, why the late California-based sculptor’s material sensibility and countercultural ideals deserve reappraisal
Wood. Clay. Stone. Spirit. These are the elements from which J.B. Blunk created his work – and a more elemental artist of the postwar era would be hard to find. Frank Stella famously said, in 1964, that he wanted to ‘keep the paint as good as it was in the can’. Blunk had more or less the same attitude to trees. Likewise the other materials he harvested from the land around him. But unlike the minimalists, whose works were theory-led, he proceeded through sheer instinct and in deep conversation with nature. His art was the ultimate expression of life lived off the grid.
James Blain Blunk was born in Kansas in 1926, and in some respects he remained a quintessential Midwesterner, plainspoken and hard-working. When I met him in 1998, though, it was like visiting a Jedi Master assigned vigil over the state of California. I’d discovered his work in the catalogue for the 1969 touring exhibition ‘Objects: USA’, organized by New York dealer Lee Nordness and curator Paul Smith for the Johnson Company: an essential document of the postwar craft movement. Blunk was represented in the show by an abstract seating sculpture, The Ark (1969), carved from a single enormous timber. I wondered who could have created this astounding work, and why I had never heard of him before. After a bit of research I realized he was still a name to conjure with in the Bay Area; his masterpiece, The Planet (1969), was on permanent view at the Oakland Museum of California. A feat of environmental reclamation, it’s carved from a single redwood root structure, all that was left of a majestic tree felled long ago. I went to see it and was amazed anew. And then came another surprise: Blunk was in the White Pages.
When I reached Blunk by phone, he expressed some astonishment. He was not used to receiving calls about his work (certainly not from graduate students like me), though he had continued to produce work unabated, often incorporating carved monolithic stone. He warmly invited me to come and visit him: ‘I’m not hiding under a bushel basket.’ And so I made my pilgrimage, driving from San Francisco, to the small town of Inverness, up a rough road and, at last, to the top of a ridge, with breathtaking views of the woodland beyond. And there he was: over 70 years old but still built like a sapling, delighted to tell his story. Blunk had settled on this land following his tour of duty in the Korean War and an ensuing period living in Japan. He’d struck up a friendship with Isamu Noguchi following a chance encounter in a craft shop and then gone on to study with the great mingei potter Kitaōji Rosanjin and the more traditionally-inclined master Kaneshige Toyo. The influence of Japan pervades the house he built between 1957 and 1962; it feels like an ancient temple as much as a mountaintop cabin. He became a dropout here, before it was fashionable: growing his own food, making most of his own tools, even delivering his own daughter without medical assistance (that child, Mariah Nielson, is now the steward of her father’s estate, and is writing a book about his life and work).
I was lucky to encounter Blunk when I did. Shortly after, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. By the time I interviewed him for the Smithsonian in 2002, his recall was much diminished. He died later that year. But then a remarkable thing happened. For many years his work – for all its massiveness – had been hard to see clearly, because of its proximity to cliché. Little known outside the Bay Area, even there he was often seen as a throwback.
After his death, however, a process of reappraisal began, helped along considerably by two LA galleries, Reform and Blum & Poe. This year the Oakland Museum has staged a full retrospective (which runs until 9 September), while recently the Palm Springs Art Museum made an inspired pairing between Blunk and the sculptor Alma Allen. In London, Kate MacGarry is opening its autumn programme with a show focusing on his ceramics.
It’s easy to see why Blunk’s star is rising. Authenticity is in short supply these days and he was always the most genuine of artists, grounded in place and in himself. Then too, there has been a general reappraisal of the counterculture which he both anticipated and exemplified. Fifty years on from 1968 – Peak Hippie – that moment’s idealism and political commitment seem like something to live up to, not laugh at.
In any case, Blunk’s work is so damn impressive that it was only a matter of time before it would find a new generation of admirers. The Planet and the other large-scale seating forms he made are endlessly inviting, each one a vast compendium of textured marks and sculpted incident. In these and his later totemic works, like Flying Stone (1980) and Mage (1983), it can be difficult to tell where Blunk’s interventions into the raw material begin and end.
In this respect he was very like Noguchi; both sought ‘not what can be imposed but something closer to its being. Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter’.
Even Blunk’s ceramics, which may initially seem slight and offhand, are marvels of invention. One small plate in the MacGarry exhibition is made from five lumps of clay, just squashed together. Shiny glaze brings out the redness of the clay, with the exception of a rectangle askew in the centre. Within is a further hand-trailed curl of glaze, just the beginnings of a spiral. Two stone inclusions burst through the surface. The plate has all the essential characteristics of the Japanese bizen tradition in which Blunk was trained so many years before: flavourful clay, given life by the fire. It has an unpretentious curiosity about it, a love of craft and material. And it has something else, too, something all his work shares. Cliché be damned, I’ll just say it: a touch of magic.
Glenn Adamson is Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA, and the author of books including The Invention of Craft (2013).
Inside the Sublime World of Late Sculptor J. B. Blunk
A stunning, handmade idyll where redwood, river stones, ceramic, and creativity reign.
By Kathryn Romeyn for Architectural Digest.
Photography by Yoshihiro Makino July 30, 2018
Imagine living not only in the midst of pristine natural surroundings but actually feeling truly embraced by them, breathing in warm woody aromas as an abundance of curvaceous redwood forms hug you inward. Such is the state of being inside the intimate, hand-built abode of the late prolific American sculptor J. B. Blunk, who began creating it in the late ‘50s in Inverness, California, after his friend and patron, the surrealist painter Gordon Onslow-Ford, offered him an acre of land.
Though he was Kansas-born and UCLA-educated in ceramics, Blunk’s earthbound life traces to Japan, where he spent four years living in the early ‘50s and where he met renowned artist Isamu Noguchi by chance. Noguchi was responsible for the introduction to Onslow-Ford, who allowed Blunk to climb trees on his land in search of the perfect plot for his future home, which became the pure expression of his artistic being.
“Once he chose that spot he became that place,” says Christine Nielson, his wife until he passed away in 2002. “It wasn’t nature so much as it was just the world that his material existed in,” she says, adding she would not call him a naturalist. Blunk felt a relationship with the wood that grew around this place, on the Northern California coast, and had an undeniable connection with the redwood burls washing up on its beaches that he salvaged. His art curator daughter, Mariah Nielson, sees a certain reverence for organic material in his abstract yet evocative style, which left much of the natural form intact in wood and, in his slightly rugged clay work, purposely left rocks jutting through the fired surface. He strove “to find the shape or the spirit that was in the piece of wood, and bring it to life or reveal it,” says his daughter, adding that the material guided him, not outward influences, though some might find subtle parallels to Brancusi and Noguchi.
While it’s hard to imagine anyone not walking through the graceful towering entry arch and feeling their heartbeat quicken at the beauty and balance of textures surrounding and inside the compact home, Mariah, who was born there, admits she took the house for granted. As a teenager she wished to be “quote-unquote normal and have a father that wasn’t an artist. I really pushed up against the house and I rejected the lifestyle my parents had brought me up in.” Not until her early 20s, when she was studying architecture, did Mariah appreciate what they’d created “and the fact that it was a work of art.”
In fact, at 16 she left for Tokyo, following in the footsteps of her father, who was influenced heavily by his time apprenticing for two Japanese national treasures, potters Kitaoji Rosanjin and Toyo Kaneshige, and learning about Shinto (the ancient Japanese religion that worships nature). “That friendship really changed his life,” says Mariah of Noguchi.
Another life-changing relationship was with Christine, his second wife, whom he met in 1968, when she was a school teacher and his son Bruno (one of two sons he had with his first wife, Nancy Waite Harlow; Bruno is an artist in Inverness, too), was in her math class. Unlike their daughter, Christine felt immediate awe in the house. She was invited for tea with another teacher to borrow Navajo artifacts for a social studies unit on the Native American tribe. “I walked in and I was absolutely charmed,” she recalls. “I had such a feeling of being comfortable. I found it so appealing and thought, I want to be in this place. It really was almost as though I fell in love with the house at the same time as I fell in love with the man.” Her response was visceral. “There was a fire going in the Franklin stove, and it just felt small and intimate and welcoming, and beautiful.” She moved in during the summer of ’69 and way later came an appreciation for the artistic qualities of the home.
“We were total hippies for a while there—I’m horrified when I look at old photos now,” laughs Christine, who now oversees financial management of the J. B. Blunk Estate and sits on the board of a few green companies. “Everything we bought on every trip to every place was hanging on the walls or pinned somewhere. It was like a junk shop.” Christine added her mark by tacking things to the walls and beams of the 600-square-foot original tiny house, hanging as a room divider Peruvian belts and textiles they bought during a Machu Picchu adventure in the winter of 1969. (That trip was Christine’s first education in textiles, which later, along with ceramic jewelry, taught by her patient husband, became her own form of artistic expression, appropriating the geodesic dome to house her loom.) Now, she halfway laments, “it’s totally spiffed.” Mariah, who works with the estate and permanent collection, keeps it like a museum, says her mom, who relents that while living so tidily is a tad more difficult, it’s far easier to appreciate the architecture.
In more than half a century it’s more than doubled in size to its current 1,400 square feet. Even at its tiniest, Christine says, “I never felt constrained. I was happy with him and I was happy there, and space didn’t feel like an issue, but it was certainly great when we added on the bathroom [with a composting toilet in the mid-’70s], and terrific when we added the bedroom upstairs.”
The layout was, and still is, simple. The main rosy redwood-clad space comprised the kitchen, living and dining rooms, and also Mariah’s parents’ bedroom until 1985 when they added a master upstairs. There was a tiny little loft, which was her older brother’s room, and later they added her room, connected by a ladder. The bathroom is off the back of the house, with an outdoor shower, a composting privy, and a beautiful sink Blunk carved out of one piece of cypress.
Truly every piece has a provenance story behind it—it’s incredibly personal.
It’s easier to talk about the items Blunk didn’t make than the ones he did. A few chairs came from the Stanford library, one of which he turned into a rocking chair for his wife to use after Mariah was born. Cookware was commercial, and a collection of wooden plates was sourced on their many Central American travels. “Truly every piece has a provenance story behind it—it’s incredibly personal,” says Christine. Other non-Blunk-made items include several hand-carved wooden masks gifted from a friend, an Indonesian stool he bought there in the ‘80s, ceramics by his lifelong assistant Rick Yoshimoto (who continued making in the workshop after his death, followed by his son Ido, Mariah’s contemporary), and paintings he traded his artist friends for his work.
The house didn’t evolve according to any planning, but instead spurts of work or sales gave it a pulse. Blunk was the opposite of fussy. “He took the house for granted and I cannot remember a single time when he said, ‘And here’s the house I built,’” says Christine of the ultimate work he didn’t consider part of his oeuvre. Really, life was breathed into the compound by his creative impulse, which was, as she describes, “pretty much nonstop and omnipresent.” Adds Mariah, “he was constantly creating. There was very little separation between art and life. He started early and ended late, and he always took a tea break, which I loved.”
Blunk might start the day making a wood sculpture with a chainsaw, but “he appreciated that it was a really aggressive tool and hard on the body, so he would only work with it for 20 minutes at a time, take a break and either stretch or work on a painting or on a ceramic series or make a piece of jewelry, then go back to the chainsaw. In one day he might work across three or four different mediums.” Because of this approach, there’s a clear through line in his artwork, a sense of continuous motif and theme regardless of the technique or material. “He had supreme confidence in what he was making,” says Christine, who credits her husband with teaching, encouraging, and helping her to make ceramic jewelry. “He was extremely patient and a phenomenally good teacher.”
Practicality and function came into play, especially when it came to his seating, but selling pieces wasn’t what motivated Blunk. Sometimes there would be a studio full of pieces and no immediate customers, but, says Christine, “he just kept going and never, never was discouraged. We lived simply and very happily, and he just kept working.” The legacy of Blunk’s work ethic would appreciate the fact artists have continued to create in his spaces, which Mariah and Christine, along with their husbands, now share custody of and each spend a season living in.
“What he asked me to do was to keep the house full of life and creativity,” says Mariah of her dad’s wish before he passed. “That was really important. I appreciate that request because it actually has allowed me to be quite open and generous with the place in terms of how we share it.” Since her father died when she was just 21, managing his estate and, in a way, studying everything he’d written and made, allowed Mariah to feel closer to him in the last decade. She just finished digitizing his entire archive, and is helping work on a book and organize exhibitions. The Oakland Museum has one on currently, through early September, and London’s Kate MacGarry Gallery opens a show in September.
But she has rich firsthand memories, too. On road trips up north to the mills where Blunk sourced his wood, “we’d hang out with these really rough characters that were actually so gentle and really liked my father. We’d stop to buy crystals, eat at diners, stay at these classic motels on the side of the road, and look for river rocks—that was one of his passions, collecting rocks.” As for Christine, she cherishes scents that remind her of an Indian summer morning early in their romance, “waking up, the sun having just come up, and a sense of warmth pervading the house and the smell of Meyer lemons and the taste of the millet cakes he would make me for breakfast.”
The home was never static when its creator was alive, and since his death the women in his life have ensured it stays dynamic. Mariah was director of the J. B. Blunk Residency from 2007 to 2011, during which time artists who they felt Blunk would have resonated with or felt a synergy with—chosen by a selection committee—lived in the space and created for two months at a time. “As a family we’ve never been interested in turning [the house] into a living museum where it feels like an interior frozen in time. That’s not what my father wanted,” says Mariah. “Especially in the woods of Inverness up on the ridge, it’s really important to live in a home, to keep it standing and structurally sound.” To Christine there’s no doubt they’re making him proud by sharing its magic with likeminded souls. “I think he would be thrilled if he could look down from heaven,” she says. “I can’t imagine anything would make him happier.”
Another Visit To Blunk’s House
A Little House in the Big Woods
The late craftsman J.B. Blunk built his Marin County cabin by hand: a holistic expression of an artistic life.
By Amanda Fortini for The New York Times. November 17, 2016.
IN THE SLEEPY Marin County town of Inverness, on a remote wooded ridge that overlooks the wide blue sweep of the Tomales Bay, sits a modest, low-slung redwood cabin that the late multidisciplinary artist-craftsman J.B. Blunk built entirely by hand.
The Blunk House, which resembles a cottage from a midcentury-modern fairy tale, is no less than one artist’s architectural treatise on how to live. The integrity of his vision — a total embrace of the handmade — is evident upon first entering the yard. There’s a rock collection, its contents gathered by Blunk; a ceramic studio (with three kilns) where Blunk once worked; and a woodcutting studio that still contains pieces of redwood he gathered. Two towering arches loom over it all. The first was carved by Blunk from a single piece of redwood circa 1974. The second was cast in bronze and installed by Blunk’s son, Bruno, in 2002, the year Blunk passed away, as a tribute to his father.
For Blunk, art and life seamlessly coexisted. Beyond the heavy, ponderous redwood door, the sort one might find in a medieval castle, is a simple open-plan home with a sleeping loft, all of it illuminated by sunlight pouring through picture-frame windows. “My father built everything in here,” Mariah Nielson, Blunk’s 37-year-old daughter, says. We sit at the kitchen table Blunk carved from a massive slab of redwood and drink tea out of ceramic cups that Blunk fired in his kiln. His pedestals, columns, stools, chairs and sculptures, with their clean lines, allusions to the human body and affinity for hollow spaces, are all around us, the California cousins of Brancusi and Henry Moore.
ALTHOUGH J.B. (“JAMES BLAIN”) BLUNK moved fluidly among mediums — making ceramics and jewelry, painting and, late in his career, working with stone and cast bronze — he is known, primarily in the West Coast art world (and increasingly beyond it), for his chainsaw-carved wood furniture and abstract sculptures. He sometimes used cypress, but his preferred material was redwood, the soft, claret-colored wood of those majestic sentries indigenous to the area. He salvaged huge chunks of it that washed up on beaches or remained from building and clearing projects, often using massive burls that loggers left behind.
Blunk was born in 1926 in Ottawa, Kan., but he is a California artist in the truest sense of the term, his craft bound up not only with that state’s landscape, but also with its characteristic ideologies. His enterprising, self-reliant, independent spirit ties him to the settlers Joan Didion has called “the adventurous, the restless and the daring,” as well as to California’s counterculture and back-to-the-land movements. It takes a certain audacity to move to rural-nowhere and erect a house from found materials, to grow your own food and carve, kiln or create whatever else you need. And the house itself, in its porous approach to its natural surroundings, exhibits a typically Californian philosophy of design.
Blunk’s trademark large-scale “seating sculptures,” which blur the line between functional and sculptural and were created for various local institutions (UC Santa Cruz and the Oakland Museum of California among them), are, for the many Bay Area residents who grew up lounging on them, practically part of the landscape themselves. The pieces, culled from gargantuan pieces of redwood, look like magnificent oversized ashtrays you can sit in. Their power derives partly from their innate tension; these are works of artistry and precision carved with a swift, violent instrument.
But anyone familiar with Blunk’s oeuvre will tell you that the house is his masterwork. In 2006, Nielson — who designs a line of luxury basics called Permanent Collection and works as a freelance curator, in addition to managing her father’s estate — moved back to Inverness part-time and has since been refurbishing both the house and her father’s legacy. A show of his ceramics at Blum & Poe in Tokyo opened this month, and plans are currently underway for an exhibition at the Oakland Museum in 2018. “This show is going to look at Blunk holistically,” says OMCA senior curator, René de Guzman, “not just as an artist but as someone who was building a lifestyle.” It is this lifestyle, its ethos and aesthetic — seclusion and simplicity, a reverence for the landscape and an uncompromising fealty to the handmade — that feels so relevant now. But the real pleasure of Blunk’s house is that everywhere, from the chisel grooves on the hand-carved bathroom sink to the chainsaw marks on the oak-wood floors, there is evidence of that element too often missing from our modern, mass-produced lives: the human touch.
BLUNK DESIGNED AND constructed the house with his first wife, Nancy Waite, from 1958 to 1962. He had no formal training in architecture or furniture making or joinery; he’d studied ceramics at UCLA. In 1951, while in the army during the Korean War, he took a trip to Tokyo, where he met Isamu Noguchi in a mingei (folk art) store. This was to be the most fateful encounter of Blunk’s professional life, and not just because Noguchi’s work, with its abstract, organic shapes and use of negative space, is an obvious influence on his own. Noguchi set him up as an apprentice to the acclaimed ceramic artist Kitaoji Rosanjin; later, he worked with the potter Kaneshige Toyo, who was a national treasure in his lifetime. The two years Blunk spent steeped in the Japanese stoneware tradition would teach him to welcome cracks and imperfections and color variations in a piece, an approach he’d eventually bring to wood.
Noguchi was also responsible, however indirectly, for Blunk’s turn to woodworking. In 1954, when Blunk returned to California, he floated among a series of odd jobs for two years before Noguchi introduced him to the Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who would become his friend and patron. Ford was about to build a house in Inverness; he hired Blunk to construct the roof. This was the first time the young artist had worked in wood, and it’s surely not a coincidence that in 1958 he began constructing his own house on an acre of land that Ford had given him to live on. His first wood sculpture, a loglike throne carved from a hunk of cypress he found roadside near Petaluma, was created as a gift for Onslow Ford in 1962, and is now in the permanent collection at SFMOMA.
Blunk viewed his house as an ongoing creative project rather than a finished work of art. “J.B. never wanted it to become a precious place,” says Nielson, who has continued to renovate, replacing the carpet in the master bedroom with walnut floors, and adding sliding redwood panels to the kitchen cabinets. “It was really important to him that there was ongoing activity and creative production here,” Nielson tells me. Ido Yoshimoto, the son of Blunk’s longtime assistant, Rick, recently moved into the property’s ceramic studio, where he sculpts wood objects and dyes indigo silk-screen prints. And from 2007 to 2011, Nielson ran a residency for artists in collaboration with the nearby Lucid Art Foundation. Max Lamb, Gemma Holt, Jacob Tillman, Jay Nelson, Rachel Kaye, Rainer Spehl and Harry Thaler have all stayed at the house.
In the 1970 short television documentary, “With These Hands,” which profiled eight different craftspeople, Blunk — coiled like a spring, with dark, brooding eyes — is seen pacing panther-like around a giant redwood burl. He’s tuning into the essence of the wood much the way Michelangelo did with stone. “When working with a large natural form like this, the primary thing I think you have to accept from the beginning is that you’re going to make something from what is there,” he says, referring to his method of direct carving. He might have been talking about every aspect of his life.
And Another.
https://www.manoftheworld.com/blog/2019/4/3/jb-blunk-house