My Father

by Michael Carrico

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I do not seek, I find   picasso

When we were young, my dad would take us kids to the state park, going on great walks down by the river; that is where we would go “junkin’”, as my father would put it. We would scavenge through the piles of drift wood washed up on the river bank, trying to find one that would appeal to our father. Sometimes he would stumble upon an old burnt rotten tree stump, and he would say to us, “It’s not the skin that makes the sculpture, it’s the form.” And so we would toss it in the back of his truck, and take it home.

Over the years my father has developed a mixture of cement, to where the consistency is much like clay. Using the driftwood as a sort of skeletal structure where one can simply attach the cement and then let it dry. The amazing thing about cement, is it’s ability to take on any kind of texture. Using plastic containers, one can pour in the cement, and when its dry, simply take off the container, and you have a nice, almost glasslike base for a new sculpture. It’s as if you are taking the negative space, and making a new kind of positive space out of it.

Lately, I have been going with him to the wrecking yard, a new place that he has found. There is a place where they take all the unused cuts of metal and pile them before they ship them out by train to be melted down. In this pile one can find some of the most extraordinary pieces of metal, ready to be used and integrated into a piece of sculpture.

I saw a david hockney interview on the TV, “The Southbank Show”, on the bravo channel. David hockney said that for the last century artists have been trying to go around picasso. He said that picasso was like this huge mountain that you couldn’t go around, and the only thing one could do, was to go through him. The problem with david hockney, is that he does not understand what picasso was doing, so his attempts at this become nothing more than weak imitations of picasso. A sort of trying to conceptualize what picasso was doing. And it is not that david hockney is a bad painter, on the contrary, but it is because he doesn’t know how to find. I think my father has “gone through” picasso. And I hope to show, in time, and on the internet, that this is true, by trying to present the large quantity and the quality of my fathers artwork.       Back