Ivan Denton A pioneering Ozark
woodcarver, his works have often been
Introduction "The storm winds were increasing and the seas were becoming heavier as the eighty-five foot Army Transport vessel "Leapin' Lena plowed west through the Bering Sea just north of the Aleutian Islands. As the ship heeled to starboard a tiny hand-carved wooden horse slid across a desk by the mate's bunk and would have been broken had not one of the deck hands yelled, "Whoa!" and the horse stopped. I was that mate and I had carved the horse. I didn't see the incident because I was sleeping, but I have always chosen to believe the story as it was told. That was the winter of 1946. I started carving some time in the thirties, but I didn't start to consider woodcarving as an art until some time in the late fifties. The first ten years that I carved for a living, I did around ten thousand pieces that I would classify generally as craft items. In the thirties, most of us boys carved or whittled to some extent because those were hard times and we had to make most of our own toys. I carved from wood, pine bark, soap, soft stone, and sometimes bone and ivory. I haven't had any formal training but I have earned my living by the edge of my knife and chisel for around thirty-five years. It dawned on me after a little while that if I were going to be successful I would have to communicate something to the art collector. If I worked too hard to do commission work or slant too much to someone else's feelings, I would slip over into commercial art. What I had to communicate was me. My world is the woods, the fields, the creeks and rivers and deserts. I love horses and wildlife, braided riding gear, saddles and anything that has to do with the cowboy life. These things are deep down, and art must touch someone deep down. When you buy a piece of art you are buying a little bit of the artist. When I'm working hard to create a design for a carving (or to compose a song, which I sometimes do) I feel an intense driving force within me that I can't always identify: all I can say is that I'm trying to arrange lines and curves toward a beauty and a harmony and to share them. I will not say that I have achieved the level of great art, but I work always toward that goal. What I search for is simplicity plus uniqueness. I like to compare sculpture to music and painting to clarify this. A guitar virtuoso, a friend of mine, once said to me, "I have always felt that what you don't play is as important as what you play." The late Andres Segovia, one of the world's greatest guitar artists, said, "If people have even a little understanding, it is better to move them than to amaze them." I would add to this a quotation by Bob Bateman, a master wildlife painter: "A masterpiece should make you feel you are seeing it for the first time and it should look as if it was done without effort." Simplicity and uniqueness. All three of these men could amaze, but that is the craft. A craft is teachable. One can be taught how to use the knife and chisel, how to work the grain and sculpt the detail, but the art must come from within you. To learn to share yourself is to find wings for the spirit." Ivan Denton
Squatting Cowboy
Fly Like an
Eagle
Untitled
Detail from Untitled
Empty Saddle
Fly Like an Eagle
Watched
One Step More
Bronc Peeler
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