Lacquered Bamboo 

I look at the bamboo growing in thick clumps out side my studio door and see a friendly presence. It is tall and graceful and makes wonderful rustling sounds when the wind blows. Bamboo is an integral part of my immediate environment here in Hawaii. My sense of reality is strongly conditioned by the natural world, the mountains, the streams, the tall trees and the bamboo. And I see my role as an artist as being something of a chronicler. I observe and absorb what I see into my art. The bamboo literally falls in to my lap, and practically asks to be made into art.

It is a challenge, to transform the bamboo and respect its basic nature at the same time. So, I cut it, clean it up a bit and color it with various layers of colored lacquers. The bamboo is in a sense naked and raw when I start. I dress it and give it some make up too. It is still bamboo but now it’s a show off.  It can take many hours of laboriously wet sanding and repainting thin veils of cashew lacquer  to achieve the right amount of depth in the colored surfaces. My goal is to sense 50% bamboo presence and 50% George Woollard presence in the finished product.