Artist Digby Veevers-Carter 

Photo by Alaric Beal

DIGBY VEEVERS-CARTER began his sculpting career carving stone. He transitioned to modeling with wax to create bronze sculptures where he found greater artistic freedom. In 1998, he started Somerset Sculpture and Foundry in West Bath, Maine. By casting and finishing his own work, Veevers-Carter has acquired a deep understanding of the craftsmanship required to invigorate the material, lend depth to the sculpture, and illuminate his artistic expression.

Recently, we visited Veevers-Carter at Somerset Sculpture. Guiding us through the foundry's space, he led us through the twenty-plus step process of bringing one of his bronze sculptures to life, from an initial concept to the final patina. We spoke as well about the role of sculpture in an environment, the personal challenge it was to find a way to sculpt using a pine needle, the longevity of bronze, and the surrender required to use natural materials—like leaves and pine needles—to build the surface of a work of art. 

Read on for that conversation.

BLUE RAVEN GALLERY

As an entry point to our conversation, I would love to hear a little bit about your current studio practice and what feels the most important to you right now in the work. 

DIGBY VEEVERS CARTER

Getting it done. Simplifying. Stylizing and simplifying. When you first begin, you make all this complicated stuff, and you think everybody's going to think you're a freaking genius. It feels like everything's really important. But by the time you get to my age, you just want the sculpture to work. And you know when it works—it's pretty obvious when it works. You try to fudge it sometimes, and you still know it doesn't really work. You can do the same sculpture, same form, a lot of different times. But each time you do it, you catch new nuances. 

Some people have it and some people don't. You can either give something life, or you can’t. Spiritus Anima, that's what they call it. You know, the animal spirit or whatever it is, and that projects my piece. That’s the single most important thing, I think. Does this piece project life? Otherwise, it’s a piece of shit, and you might have to throw it out. But occasionally, you nail it, and that's just what keeps you going. Keeps me going. 

Digby Veevers-Carter

Green Man, Oak (2/10)

Bronze, 43" x 33" x 5"

BRG

That concept of Spiritus Anima, work radiating life, makes me think about how you are sculpting with organic materials. You build your forms using pine needles, for example. I'd love to hear more about that process of creating with objects found in nature.

DVC

Well, it started with trees. If you look at a tree, right, it's just a tree. You've got to think of a tree as an armature for leaves. And a lot of it comes from the idea of sculpting the wind: how things move in the wind just by their own autonomous nature—or in the spring where you see a dust devil of leaves coming out. When you look at a tree and you look at the leaves and the wind hits it, the whole thing comes alive. You get that movement. And I was like, I wonder if that would work for a bird.

And the leaf thing, leaves are funny. I like the shape, so I just cast a bunch for the shape. The first thing I did, I think, was a Green Man. That's obviously a religious transformation from, you know, the pagan things on the side of churches. And so that's how I learned how to do leaves. But the leaf dominates the sculpture. The leaf controls it. You sculpt the face, right? And then whatever leaf you're using dominates the rest of the sculpture, and you've just got to kind of let it go and go with it. And then you just control whether it works or not. 

And then from the Green Man, I think I came back from a show in Europe, in Berlin, and then I was like, I should do a heron. So I did a heron, and I hated it. Eventually it worked. But I thought to myself, I want to do something with a pine needle. Because—what can you do with a pine needle? It's a pain-in-the-ass shape. I mean, look at it. You can't cast that. So I dipped it in wax. I thought, what can happen? The first time I dipped a pine needle in wax, I just dipped it and let it hang so you get that elongated thing, because the wax coagulates and forms almost a peapod. And that’s where that first hunkered heron came from. You can see the form is kind of like, just—boom. I just stuck those on my sculpture and formed the feather look to it, because the hunkered heron is kind of wet, and all hunkered down. As I did that, I was like, I want to do this now. 

The raven came next. And the raven looked stupid with worms all over it, because that’s kind of what it looked like. So I put it down and I—you know, the wax was still hot, a little too hot—but I took my fingers and flattened it out. And I was like, voila, you've got a perfect feather. You couldn't sculpt that bloody thing. So instead of making each feather out of clay, I was like, I'm going to use this over a form. And obviously your form changes as you build it up because you can't really control what the thickness of the thing is. And eventually you end up with something. 

But I've done birds for years. They’re particularly suited to bronze, especially when you've got wings coming out, because you can elongate your form into space, and you can't do that with stone. It has that inherent strength to it. Can you imagine stone wings like this? Just a disaster.

BRG

When you pick something up, whether that's a pine needle or a leaf, what is it that makes you stop? What are you seeing that then becomes the starting point for that piece?

DVC

I think you look at that stuff just naturally, all day long. People can spend their whole lives looking at a leaf and never think about it, but it's a leaf. Some people think it makes great compost. I look at a leaf and I think, well, what would happen if I joined these all together into a form? This all goes back to sculpting the wind. And it's about movement.

Digby Veevers-Carter

Stalking Heron #1 (4/25)

Bronze, 15" x 17" x 2.5"

BRG

Digby, in addition to your work as an artist, you also run and operate a foundry here in Bath—which means that you not only model and sculpt your own forms, but you carry them through the entire bronze process yourself. From what I understand, this is not common for artists who work with bronze. 

DVC

It's very rare. I mean, most artists who do bronze drop it off at a foundry. They drop you off the mold or the piece, and they're like, ‘I want three of them’. And you do it. They—the artists—are not part of the process at all. I mean, in the old days, they've checked the wax, but they don’t know how it works with wax. 

When I started out, I was carving stone. This was back in the 90s. You could do a giraffe farting and you’d sell it. Everything sold. So I was like, I need to make editions. And I like working in wax, directly in wax, because it's got a great elasticity. It’s got a lot of tension in it, wax, which you can't really get in clay. So I just started, and I built a foundry. I invested some money in some bloody fidelity fund, and it doubled. And stupidly, me, I sold it and built a foundry.

BRG

Given that it is so uncommon for an artist to be involved in the technical bronze process, do you find that your work in the foundry influences the pieces you create?

DVC

You just shouldn't call yourself a bronze artist. You should call yourself a clay artist, or just an artist. This appellation of bronze artist doesn't really count unless you can actually work the metal. Say I've got a hand here, right? And say I cut the fingers off. I've got to weld those back. What chances do you think that that's going to be perfectly aligned? Because you weld here and the metal goes, whoop! And it pulls because it's contracting. So then you've got to kind of adjust everything. And then it's different from the original sculpture, so you've got to make it work. And if I didn't like the way I sculpted it, I can change it. In fact, every sculpture I do is actually an artist's proof. There's no repetition except for that it looks the same. I work on every single part of that surface. And if you do a piece and you think, well, that doesn't really reflect the light properly, or, you know, the beak’s wrong or such, you change it. And you get it right. 

I think people, if they buy one of my sculptures, they should know that I've worked on it from every angle. The only thing I don't do is make the mold. And that's kind of a technical thing that Pete does. But I sculpted it, I make the wax, I chase the wax, I gate it. I probably don't have to do the metal part of it. But the metal finishing, it changes the sculpture. It's not the same piece that you sculpted in pine needles. It's now in bronze, and it has a different aura. And it's going to have a different impact. 

But really, working like this, you can change the sculpture. It’s not even that you change the sculpture, you change how it how it fits into wherever it's going. It’s sort of a nuanced thing. I’m on my fifth one of these herons or something, and each one is different. I mean—it’s the same sculpture, but sometimes I add bits in the wax because I’m not very happy how it came out, and you can't do that unless you do it yourself. 

Digby Veevers-Carter outside of his foundry in West Bath, Maine

Photo by Alaric Beal

BRG

It sounds like working this intimately allows you to be, in a way, more spontaneous. Reactive, even.

DVC

Spontaneous and sort of course correcting. Continuously correcting. Because you don't think you’ve ever got it quite right. And those little herons—they're all different. Sometimes I forget which base goes on which heron. So, de facto, in a technical way, they're all unique. But I just put an edition number on because, you know, people want an edition number. It doesn't mean anything, except that I'll only make a certain number. 

BRG

There is an elegance and grace to the lines of your work. I’m thinking of the bent necks of the herons, and their long legs. There’s a real sense of drawing to your sculpture that’s incredibly beautiful.

DVC

That’s the simplifying. But don’t worry, the first heron I did, I got the neck backwards. I was like, what’s wrong with this thing?

BRG

I’m sure that was unsettling!

But the simplifying—yes. It creates a beautiful tension along with the more rough and complex texture of the pine needles. Could you speak more on how you translate the natural world into form, and make those decisions about what to simplify, or even exaggerate? 

DVC

It's kind of instinctive. You really don't think about it; you're trying to make something work. There's no grand philosophical statement behind it. You're taking something that doesn't belong, like a leaf. A leaf is so transitory—I mean, it's beautiful, it's so functional and transitory—and you're really immortalizing it. You're fixing it in one place. And you're either lucky or not. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. 

But lines, sculpture is lines. It's form and lines. Everything else is bullshit. It really is. And that's one of the things you can really do when you're finishing yourself. I put in a lot of lines. It gives it a fluidity. 

What you don't want to do is stop the eye. You've got to start seeing the whole sculpture. Step back, have a cigarette, whatever you need to do. You've got to see the whole thing, because that's what people see. Dan West taught me that, especially when you're doing silhouette pieces like these herons. You've got to catch that fleeting moment when you look at a marsh and you don't really recognize it, but you saw a heron. And your mind forms this image, and you've got to sculpt that image. You've got to let go of what you think a heron looks like.

BRG

When you have your work in someone's home or in their garden, what do you hope that the work adds to the space?

DVC

David Shaw taught me this. Basically, the function of sculpture is to change the space. It's to give it a point of focus. And it does: if the sculpture is good and it belongs in that space, it adds this point of focus that doesn't interfere with the environment. It's there, and you know it's there, and it accentuates where it is at. An abstract square piece can do the same thing as, you know, a figurative piece. When the sculpture is hokey and bad, it screws everything up. It dominates the environment, and it should not do that. 

You can put a massive, great sculpture in a small garden, and it will still look great if it works—if there's symmetry and all that sort of stuff. Sculpture placement is hugely important. But if the sculpture's good, it adds to the space. It just defines it. It’s kind of subtle. It humanizes it, I guess, is the right phrase. You think about Henry Moore's The King and Queen, way up on that mountain, in Wales, or wherever it was. I mean, a big piece, but simple. And it just—it didn't take away from where it was. It added to it. It just gave you a point of focus. 

BRG

I keep returning to the idea that you're taking this thing that's so fleeting, like a pine needle or leaf, and giving it this weight and permanence. Immortalizing it, as you say.

DVC

That’s bronze for you. Unless you're going to melt it down and make cannons again, it's pretty much eternal. A lot of sculptures are. Sculpture is about freezing something in a moment of time. For a figurative sculpture, you're either good and it's still moving—or the human mind allows it to move—or you've frozen it in totality. A single leaf is interesting. People can pick it up. It's got a tactile quality to it. 

BRG

This is a technical question about longevity. What happens to the surface of bronze over time?

GM

Bugger all. It's copper. It's copper, it's bronze, you can pull it out the Etruscan Sea and it's still bronze.

What happens is, especially in this environment with the salt water, you're gonna get green. It starts out as these little pinpricks of green, and it's natural. Copper goes green, and bronze is 94% copper. Once it starts, it's what they call the Noble Rust. That's why I always put a little bit of green into any black sculpture I do. It's called the Education Patina, and you start it the way it’s gonna be. 

And patinas mature. The colors of fall are the first to go in bronze. Reds, golds, they fade. You can do a silver nitrate patina. In two years, it looks like pewter. Browns darken. It all darkens. It doesn't destroy the metal; it doesn't impact the metal at all. But a brown sculpture gets darker. Nicely so.

The transition period is so slow, people never notice. They really don't notice. They'll notice if you do a green patina and it turns red, because that's just a chemical screw-up, and you have to redo it. Indoor sculptures, they pretty much never change. People can wax them occasionally if they want to bring the bling back to them. I say, let the sculpture do what it's going to do, and you're going to like it, because it's an organic process.

Digby Veevers-Carter

Great Horned Owl (3/16)

Bronze, 58" x 12" x 10"

BRG

The process of the patina developing feels aligned with the work you’re making: how you use all these ephemeral pieces of nature and let them inform the overall sculpture. There is a surrender to it. 

DVC

You can't control it. All sculptures eventually in one-hundred years will turn green. You've seen all the monuments—you know, all black with pollution. Ammonium chloride, which turns something green, is basically liquid air pollution. It’s a metal, it's organic, and it slowly changes. So don't get too fancy on your patinas is how I feel about it. Unless you go inside, and then you do whatever you want.

BRG

Digby, thank you for your time today. I have a final question for you: if you were to find yourself at a dinner party full of artists, both living and dead, who would you like to have seated beside you? And is there anything you'd like to say or ask? 

DVC

Besides most beautiful woman in the room. God, that sounds like a nightmare. You know, when I was in my twenties, I would have given you a pretentious answer. I hate to say, I don't really like artists that much. I've worked with them for years, and as they say, bankers talk about art and artists talk about money. It's pretty true. There's a couple of characters I've known, friends of mine that are dead. That'd be fun.

Digby Veevers-Carter

Large Blue Heron (8/16)

Bronze, 53" x 44"

DIGBY VEEVERS-CARTER is a bronze artist based in Midcoast Maine where he owns and operates a foundry, Somerset Sculpture.  

MORGANNE ELKINS is a painter and writer from Midcoast Maine. She serves as Blue Raven Gallery's editor and artist liaison.