Excerpts From Heron Dance Interview of Leroy Setziol (2000)

Our relationship with the primitives is direct. The struggle is in the spirit. That’s the genius of native sculpture . . . their ability to approach the myth that lies beyond the bear or fish to say something about existence. As an artist, I don’t recognize any distinction between us. I’m working in the same area as they did. I suppose you could call that inspiration.

I don’t want to encourage or discourage you. You like all of us must face reality – internal and external. In the end you’ll have to take a chance . . . Happily in sculpture the difficult learning process is also exciting, interesting and strengthening.
     - Leroy Setziol, at the age of 76, in a letter to a young art student

Leroy Setziol was an Oregon wood sculptor. He was eighty-four years old when I interviewed him toward the end of a fifty-year career as a woodcarver and artist. In the first year, he told me, he made $15. In the second, $75. For the first several years he and his family rented cheap storefronts in Portland – he worked in the front and his family lived in the back. It was fifteen years before he was able to make a living. He said to me, “In the early years we were very, very poor. I was on the verge of quitting several times. It is very difficult to get started as an artist. The art world is based most of the time on name recognition. If you don’t have a name, you aren’t going to sell very much. . . . My wife was a teacher and for the most part she brought home the bacon. That is a good way to have a wife.”

    When I asked him why he stuck with it, he said,

“Long before I became an artist, I made a small carving. That gave me the belief I could do it. It was a small little carving. Without really having explored my talents, I just had the feeling that I could do it. And the determination. I was just in love with the whole thing. It would be hard for me to conceive of living otherwise. It is a very fine way to live. It is a wonderful way to live. I like wood a great deal. I am in love with wood. Wood looks good, smells good, feels good. The normal words to explain how I live might be self-fulfilling. But I don’t believe in that. On one level I am a worker like everyone else is a worker, only I deal with different things. Ideas. Spirit. Normally, except for my own home use, I deal with non-utility things. The idea of self-fulfilling doesn’t occur to me. I don’t do it for that reason. I don’t know why I do it exactly. I do these things, oh, I guess, for other people.”

When he made the leap, all he had ever carved were two small statues with a razor blade. Years before he became a sculptor, he was an army chaplain in the South Pacific in WWII. After the war, he was a minister in a lower class neighborhood in Baltimore.

“I was not a good minister. For lots of reasons. It was a very painful experience. I was glad to get out of it. I am not very reliable. I do the things the way I feel that particular day. But you can’t do that in society. If you work for someone else, you have to do what they tell you to do. And you have to do it when they say to do it. That is not very good for me. You can’t be erratic in a normal job. You have to be dependable. I am not dependable. The idea of working for someone else doesn’t please me very much.”

His work can be found all over the Northwest: City Halls, hospitals, churches, homes and commercial buildings. At the time of our interview, he was working on a commission to carve images of Gorbachev, Kissinger and the Dalai Llama. Much of his work involves large panels that have been used on doors and walls and building exteriors. Many are abstract; others have religious or spiritual significance. “My prices are lower than most artists” he said to me, “I don’t want to carve just for rich people.”  Ten years ago he held a Free Show at which he gave away thirty-five pieces – several months of work – to two hundred friends and long time customers. A few years earlier, he held an Unemployment Show at which he offered his work to unemployed persons for almost nothing. “I hope to have one more free show before I die.”

Leroy and his wife live in the Oregon mountains in a house and built out of railroad ties. They’ve planted thousands of trees on their twenty-two acres, which they hope someday will provide free wood for young sculptors: black walnut, yellow cedar, chestnut, redwood, Japanese black pine, pin oak, locust, giant sequoia.

Leroy was interviewed by Scott Landis, a frequent writer on wood craftsmanship and sustainable forestry, for the catalog of Leroy’s retrospective exhibition at the University of Oregon Museum of Art in 1991. In that interview, Leroy talked about  wood:

 “You can bow low before some pieces of wood. They’re so important in and of themselves, I hate to do anything with them.”

Other Random Interview Excerpts:

How would you describe your work.

I do various things – freestanding pieces for houses and buildings and gardens. Most of my demand is for wall carvings. Except for commissions, I do what I feel like that particular day. I walk in my studio, look at a piece of wood, and suddenly I know what to o with it even though it may have been around for twenty years.

What is most rewarding about how you lived life?

Finding happiness by pursuing my talents. People neglect their talent in favor of money. Consequently, there is a great deal of unhappiness. They whole thing about life and the life of society is the exercise of your talents. In that way you become who you are. The only thing you have that makes you an individual is your own particular talents, whatever that may be.

But as Christ said, “They also serve who only sit and wait.” That is a talent too. The challenge can be very simple or very complex.

Fewer and fewer people are fulfilling their talents. Archeologists judge the worth of a society by the quality of its artwork. I think that is exactly right. The British call us a hamburger culture. That is our claim to glory. And missiles. The most disturbing thing about our present situation is the emphasis on the military.

Imagination

I know artists who are very good technically but have no imagination. Their products are clunky. Imagination, whatever that is, is fundamental.

I live to a large extent in my imagination. Even when I am in bed or eating. A good deal of the time I am thinking about imaginative things. The ability to visualize things in a non-prosaic way. Something like that.

Beauty

Like the imagination, it is difficult to talk about beauty. People are stuck on the phrase, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I think that it is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in the thing itself. In the form. In the color.

    “There are people who would disagree with you that a particular object is beautiful, but in the long run we do in fact pick out art and music that are extraordinarily beautiful.”

Mystery

  A lot of things are mysterious that we take for granted. We have a peacock on our property here, and he just shed these huge beautiful tail feathers. How those feathers got there, or a tree, or light. These are fundamentally mysterious. How light goes through empty, cold space, and hits the earth and generates heat. There is no way of explaining that.

Humans are the most arrogant of all creatures. We assume that everything belongs to us. We don’t bother to think about the things around us.

Creativity

Creativity is basic to my life. For some people, everything they do is creative. I do a lot of cooking, especially since my wife has been so sick. I handle food the same way I make sculptures. I don’t believe in recipes. I think about it advance. I proceed the way I want to proceed. Sometimes it works out okay, sometimes it doesn’t. The first time I made cookies, they were terrible. It makes life constantly exciting.

 Roy grows the vegetables and Ruth is in charge of flowers and herbs. Her garden plots are organized. His are thinly disguised chaos, choked with weeds and vegetables in mortal combat. “I’m not a gardener,” Roy says, “I’m a grower. My gardens are a mess, but they produce.”   

There are things much more important than pain. I am in pain all the time. There are a lot of things much more important. One is being in a job you love. Being with people like my wife and daughter and son, that are compatible, amenable, helps you transcend pain. I believe in the transcendence of pain. Not only pain, but difficulties.

Everything comes from God. That is the transcendence I feel. Most of the time I am able to do that, but sometimes it is very difficult.  It is not bad being old, except for health problems. When the pain is very intense, I writhe on the floor. But I go to work anyway. The principle of transcendence is basic, along with beauty and the imagination. Transcendence is important not only with pain, but in dealing with difficult people. Leave it all with God and leave them alone. Don’t try to get back at them for whatever they may have done.

Transcendence is one of the miracle things that human beings are capable of.

The chief characteristic of handcrafts is that they maintain by their very nature a direct link with the human heart, so that the work always partakes of a human quality. Machine-made things are children of the brain; they are not very human. 

- Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman