The Creation of Woodies

   I apply the finish and match colors on custom architectural mill work for rich clients and corporations as a day job. In the course of that work I am exposed to some of the most beautiful wood that exists. Many years ago I began seeing faces in the figure of the wood on custom conference tables we were building and decided to "enhance" the faces so others could see them as well. Most of these faces would occur on veneer panels with the symmetry of the mirror image resulting from the book matching of the leaves of veneer. I discovered I could also make my own book matched wood by re-sawing solid wood in thin sections and gluing them up like they do when making sound boards on acoustic guitars. I made over 100 of these solid "woodies" painting eyes and other things to enhance what I was seeing in the figure of the wood. I sold almost all of these originals in a gallery in Reno, NV. To my surprise and delight everyone saw faces in the wood as well but no two people seemed to see the same things. The most fascinating thing about woodies to me was all the different interpretations everyone came up with and were even willing to argue about what each one actually was to them. That encouraged me to make them more open to interpretation when I created them. Recently I have been creating my woodies digitally. I still have access to amazing wood species and find that photographing the wood grain and book matching the veneer digitally in Photoshop is much easier, allows me to create multiple creations with the same piece of wood and allows more options.

 I have several versions of these new digital woodies available online as prints on my website: http://rick-mosher.artistwebsites.com/