Читать книгу Woodcarving Illustrated Issue 72 Fall 2015 - Группа авторов - Страница 22

Woodcarving Illustrated

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SUMMER 2013

20

Fred

Cogelow

Self-taught artist combines

relief techniques with realism

to create fine-art carvings

By Bob Duncan

F

red Cogelow was seemingly

destined to be a woodcarver.

“Everything kept leading to it,” he

said. His father was a woodworker

who died when Fred was six, leaving behind

a set of tools that Fred used to make his

first carving: a face crudely gouged into his

mother’s breadboard. He later received a set

of cheap carving tools as a prize at his job

as a newspaper delivery boy, prompting his

manager to say with a guffaw, “Hey, maybe

you’ll be a famous woodcarver someday!”

After graduating from high school, Fred

attempted to carve a piece of an old fir

moving beam. “I started carving with a

dull carpenter’s chisel,” he said. “It was a

miserable piece of wood. After working on

it for six hours with the chisel and a blow

torch, I gave up for another six years.”

In high school, Fred was steered away

from art and woodworking electives. At

the University of Chicago, he found greater

inspiration in the stone and wood carvings

that adorn the neo-Gothic architecture

than he did in his political-science classes.

That enchantment, combined with the

acquisition of a fellow student’s abandoned

woodcarving, led Fred to carve a number

of gargoyles. “I quickly burned out in the

few jobs my degree qualified me for. I tried

making furniture and soon realized I was

better at carving accents than at making

the furniture itself. Had I realized I was

so pathetic at the start I would have quit

out of pride, but fortunately I encountered

Fred Cogelow works on a

mezzo-relief carving

in

his winter studio. Photo

by Susan Mattson.