Being able to conceptualize an idea and then translate it into a physical reality is the realm of the artist.
Working with wood, metal, stone and clay, three sculptors who make their homes in the southwest suburbs are showcasing the dedication, investigation and experimentation true of all great artists–even if their tools are chain saws, welding torches and jackhammers.
This is art not for the faint of heart or the sensitive of hearing. It is brawny and beautiful and imbued with life. The work transcends the boundaries between folk art and fine art and holds the viewer spellbound with its transformative power.
The three artists–Scott Cochrane, Jack Barker and Viktor Bougaev–are as unique as their sculpture.
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One crisp fall day about 10 years ago, Scott Cochrane, 36, was cutting firewood in his back yard. It is hard work and monotonous–trim the branches, cut the logs, stack the wood. It is also lonely work. The whine of the chain saw discourages company and makes conversation impossible.
So Cochrane was letting his imagination roam when he picked up another piece of wood from the pile and “it just looked like something. I wasn’t sure what, so I started cutting,” he said. “I ended up carving a bear’s head.”
That wood sculpture–like a bear lumbering from his den after a long hibernation–was a harbinger of creations to come. Friends and family clamored for carvings, and Cochrane was happy to oblige them. More bears, along with eagles, raccoons, fish and other woodland animals came to life under the direction of his saw.
“Then I had this bright idea,” Cochrane said.
He had been looking for somewhere to set up a studio–the whine of the chain saw around the house understandably interrupted nap and bedtimes for his three daughters–and Cochrane made a deal with the owner of a vacant tree-lined lot along 159th Street in Lockport.
“I stood there every Saturday for three years in the sun, snow and rain. I’d bring the wood with me and carve the stuff right there,” Cochrane said.
“It turned into a sideshow,” he added. “I think I even caused a couple of accidents.”
Passers-by stopped to watch him work, and many offered to buy his art. He sold a few pieces, pleased to supplement the income from his full-time job as an operating engineer for the state Department of Mental Health.
The orders continued to come in, and Cochrane wrestled with the concept of being creative on demand. “I didn’t know if I could do it, or if people would like what I did.”
Adding to his personal conundrum was Cochrane’s lack of formal training in the arts, “although my mom always said I’d be an artist,” he said, laughing.
His fears were unfounded. Cochrane formed a company, Northern Exposure, to market his art, rented an old schoolhouse in Homer Township and started a second career.
His pieces, which range from wildlife tableaux to whimsical creatures, sell for an average of $250 each. Smaller sculptures such as his seasonal Santas cost $50, and larger, more intricate pieces may go for several thousand dollars. Customers have ordered leprechauns, sailors, totem poles and furniture–an oak table and a headboard of maple.
“I can suggest. You can request. Or we can collaborate,” Cochrane said.
Landscaper Gregory Grimm has bought pieces conceived by Cochrane and had him carve a ferocious eagle with its wings spread and talons pointed. “His work is outstanding and true to life,” said Grimm, who lives in Lockport.
Grimm is an avid collector of sculpture, purchasing pieces from England, Italy and China. Among his collection are marble and stone figures, hammered brass and delicate wood carvings from South America. He called Cochrane’s work unique. “It’s not too refined, not too crude.
“To do what he does with a chain saw is amazing.”
Cochrane recently bought a 5-acre farm in Homer Township surrounded by thick stands of trees that help dampen the sound of the chain saw. Cochrane’s studio is now located next to his home, and both dwellings are dwarfed by a pile of logs.
“The hardest part of this job is getting a log out of the pile,” he said, explaining that a 5-foot-tall tree trunk about 2 feet in diameter weighs several hundred pounds.
Cochrane wears work boots and a hardhat with a face shield, and the creases of his coveralls are weighted with sawdust. The fine particles are sent flying at the touch of the blade, and they gently settle around his feet; Cochrane scuffs through the pile as he moves around the wood.
It takes about an hour to create a typical 3- to 4-foot-tall sculpture. Cochrane uses seven different Stihl chain saws as he sculpts. The largest is used to rough-cut the log into shape, and smaller saws refine the image. Others are equipped with carving tips that he deftly manipulates to add details to the wood.
“All the pieces are different because no wood is the same,” he said.
In addition to working with cut logs, Cochrane creates sculptures from tree stumps. “If there’s at least 3 or 4 feet salvageable from the ground, we can make something out of it,” he said. A recent customer engaged his services to create a 50-foot-tall baseball bat–a replica of Babe Ruth’s–out of a tree in his yard that had been struck by lightning.
“I know I’m not forming clay or taking a chisel to a rock, but this work is never boring,” Cochrane said. “It’s always a challenge.”
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Jack Barker, 63, has lived his entire life in Essex, northwest of Kankakee. He and his wife, Eleanor, have four children and 10 grandchildren, and for a long time Barker ran a gas station and body shop that fronted his property along Illinois Highway 129.
Barker was known as a good man with a welder. And, when he wasn’t repairing cars, he puttered around the garage and sometimes made little doodads out of chrome bumpers or other scrap metal and gave them to the grandkids.
About three years ago, Barker decided to try something a bit more artistically ambitious. The result? A 20-foot-tall green and purple dinosaur made of farm augers, shovels, disc blades, pipes and a beer keg.
“It had no rhyme or reason. It just was,” he said.
The neighbors weren’t sure if Barker had gone crazy. His yard began to fill up with metal sculptures: a giant chrome bumper grasshopper; a turquoise pterodactyl made from the front of an old fan; 55-gallon-drum cows and horses; pigs and cats welded of steel wool; a movable skeleton composed of gears, flywheels, torque converters and bicycle chains; pink flamingos tufted with metal shavings.
“I remember I asked a neighbor to help me move the grasshopper out of the garage. He’d only do it at night so no one would see us,” Barker said, laughing.
But people did see, and they stopped. One evening Barker and his wife came home from a restaurant to find several cars parked in their driveway. “They got out of their cars and asked, `Who’s the artist?’ Heck, I didn’t even know I was an artist until then,” he said.
All of Barker’s creations are sculpted from found objects–what Barker bluntly calls junk. He and his lifelong friend Gene Kilbride scour the local landscape picking up exhaust manifolds, mufflers, rusted wire, air tanks from a semi-tractor trailer.
“We all like to tease him,” said Kilbride, who told a story about a scrap metal dachshund Barker was welding together and which Kilbride insisted resembled a pig. “He wouldn’t believe me, but then his grandson comes in and says, `It looks like a pig.’
“It starts out one way and turns out another,” he added. “The first mistake is the last. You can’t change it.”
Barker calls those sculptures “abstract by accident.”
He has no fixed idea what a pile of parts may become. “It’s when the fancy strikes or when something starts my motor,” Barker said. “I just visualize what’s in the junk.”
And when that happens, the sparks literally fly. Using a welding torch, Barker joins augers and fan housings, tailpipes and clamps together, further shaping the piece with mallets and sanders, sometimes adding a little spray paint, but mostly leaving the metal to oxidize. “Rust gives it character,” he said. “I like to think that they grow with age.”
Barker’s yard is populated by more than 50 sculptures, and his metal art has drawn some unlikely visitors. His guest book is signed by people who live all across the U.S. and he has even had visitors from Italy, France and Ireland.
Elizabeth Delacruz, a professor of art education at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, stops by often.
“He’s the most unassuming, kind and gentle person,” she said.
Delacruz has championed Barker’s art, which, although outside the mainstream, is nonetheless the result of a “highly evolved (and) refined aesthetic sensibility.
“He is a true world-class artist in both dedication and intent,” she added.
Delacruz is hoping to interest galleries and museums in Barker’s metal art. Barker, meanwhile, is still not sure he wants to part with his creations, although he has done a few special orders.
“I could have sold them many times over, but I’m sentimental that way,” he said.
“I remember this 90-year-old lady, spry as a cat, who came out in this big Cadillac and I guess she fell in love with one of the cows I’d made,” Barker said. “She looked at me and said, `If I wasn’t in a nursing home, I’d buy that cow right now, Mister,’ and then she hobbled back into the car and left. I don’t know if I could have sold it to her even if she wasn’t in a nursing home.”
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Viktor Bougaev, 37, was a well-respected sculptor in Russia. He attended fine arts school in his hometown of Odessa and graduated with a degree in architecture. The artist’s medium of choice was clay, and his high-fired ceramics and bronze molds were in great demand. The sculptures attracted attention even outside his country, and Bougaev’s work was featured in two exhibitions at the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Chicago in the late 1980s.
In 1992, Bougaev, his wife, Tamara, and their two children left Russia “because of a disagreement with the current authorities,” which in his heavily accented English is all he will say of the matter. The family was granted political asylum by the U.S. government and settled in southwest suburban Alsip.
Priorities were different in this country, and Bougaev put his art on hold and concentrated on finding a job. He eventually made his way to the Bevel Granite Co. in Merrionette Park.
“Viktor walked in off the street and demonstrated his skill. He needed some training in this type of work, but he had the ability to conceive and execute designs,” said James Rogan, 52, president of Bevel Granite, a company that specializes in cemetery monuments.
Bougaev had never worked with granite, a hard, coarse-grained material, but soon he was creating his own designs. “I looked at this as an opportunity to work in another medium,” he said. “I liked the nature of granite. From the hardest material I make the finest art.”
Although he uses compressed-air power tools, “I am doing what Michelangelo did,” Bougaev said.
He designs and carves lifelike three-dimensional religious icons on his monuments. “I make them look alive,” Bougaev said.
Rogan said customers are impressed with the headstones. “It is a style of carving that reminds you of the Renaissance but with a certain contemporary flavor.”
“I try to create new visions out of old traditions,” Bougaev explained.
The artist is working on developing his own style, and Rogan has allowed Bougaev use of the plant and its equipment on evenings and weekends to explore the process. “I never worked with this material before,” he said. “I had always worked with soft materials, so I am overwhelmed with the power I have over the granite.”
One of the first sculptures Bougaev created–other than the gravestones–was a piece called “Paramount Instinct.”
“There are two directions to my art,” he said. “The monuments and then those that are for my deep soul.”
A snail in its shell on top of a frog, “Paramount Instinct” was included in Pier Walk ’96, an installation of sculpture at Navy Pier.
“I met Viktor about three years ago,” said Terry Karpowicz, a Chicago sculptor and co-director of the exhibit. “I get some of my material from Bevel Granite and had seen some of Viktor’s work. He was on my mind when we began to put together the show. We wanted to draw from established and emerging artists–and Viktor is in the latter category.”
Bougaev describes the work as “the most insignificant creature taken to the top by the most primitive instinct,” and he is working on a project titled “Eagles’ Den” for next spring’s Navy Pier show.
“It will be really big and heavy and colorful,” Bougaev said.
When finished, the sculpture will weight two tons and stand 9 feet tall. It is composed of 17 slabs of granite–all of different colors–glued together, and is influenced by Native American dances.
Leaving behind his homeland and the materials he is most familiar with, Bougaev is still optimistic about his success as a sculptor.
“I have been in this country a little over four years,” he said. “People do not yet know me here.”
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Scott Cochrane’s artwork can be viewed at his Northern Exposure workshop. For an appointment, call 815-838-0632.
Metal Art by Jack Barker is located on East Street in Essex. For directions, call 815-365-4045, or visit Barker at his site on the World Wide Web: http://www.usa.net/jackb/.
Viktor Bougaev’s work is on display at Navy Pier.
