Word: woode
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...nothing affected about him; he was not playing a role. He was laconically and sometimes pugnaciously American. And he believed in the redeeming powers of craft: how making things well--no concessions, no shortcuts, with complete faith in the beauty and integrity of material (in his case, mostly wood)--gave a certain urgency and moral power to the object. He never seems to have had a slipshod moment. If you can imagine Jack Kerouac without the stupid sentimentality but with the assets of a truly fine craftsman, you might have had something like Westermann. But there was no other such...
...that pressure. But lots of bad art has been made about intense, violently authentic experience. What made Westermann such a good artist was the combination of discipline and intense feeling. An image he returned to, often and each time differently, was the Death Ship, a simple block of carved wood, sometimes afloat on a green sea of dollar bills, with the tiny dorsal fins of sharks implacably circling it. Death Ship Runover by a '66 Lincoln Continental, 1966, refers not to World War II but to Vietnam, a war Westermann hated and opposed. The auto that has just run over...
...This fascinating stockroom of imports from The Motherland is a browser?s joy. Baskets and bins filled with delightfully rustic wood and metal sculpture; jewelry; and cloth book jackets and bags are less than $30. Other ?art? is priced in hundreds of dollars...
...Across the street from the village chief's wood-frame house, however, in a little bar where two Vietnamese men sit drinking bottled Bia Lao beer, smoking A-daeng cigarettes and spitting onto the concrete floor, there is plenty of opium. Several foreigners are already in the back-room den, crashed out on dank mattresses having puffed their way through half a dozen pipes each. Sophie, a blond English girl in her 20s, insists the black-trousered O-man, as she calls the Vietnamese boy loading pipes, give her and her friends the best possible dope. "Make sure...
...fourth generation on this island. She's a Confucianist, she says, and counts among her friends numerous Bugis and Buton people originally from Sulawesi. She lives now in the house she shared with her husband until he died a decade ago. It's big and sturdy, all faded wood except for the stone porch. She still grows pineapples and cassavas out back; she may be old but she has to work or she feels weak. Her husband, Ji Chiu, was first generation. He came to work the tin mines, a "sold piglet," as they were called, since they were sold...