In October, Timothy Meyerring’s Timo Gallery welcomed a new artist. Jeremy Wolf is a Wisconsin native and 1999 graduate of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) with a degree in sculpture. His current body of work is comprised of what he terms “animal portraiture”: woodcarvings of animals featuring anatomically possible expressions that allude to human emotion. Wolf mainly uses found or repurposed wood along with oil paint. Off the Cuff interviewed him to learn more about his technique and philosophy.
What are your artistic influences and philosophy?
When I was learning how to carve, two Italian woodcarvers kept popping up, Bruno Walpoth and Gehard Demetz. While their work is decidedly different from what I’m trying to do—they depict people, not animals—they were a great inspiration as far as how they handle wood as a medium. The way that they treat the wood and the process that they use for painting and mark making has been pretty influential for the stuff that I’m doing right now.
As a whole, I’m drawn to artwork where you can really tell that the artist is having fun. I admire people who are conceptual with their artwork, but I’ve been finding that I just can’t work that way. If I think too much about what something means or how people react to it, it kind of takes the fun out of it for me. I put concept into my work in a general sense through the subject matter, but once I start working, I try to forget about all of that, step away and look at how things are working visually. It’s interesting to see the things other people get out of it, which a lot of times are totally different than what I was thinking about, but I think it’s still valid. The moment when a viewer is looking at a piece—that’s the art right there.
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Tell me about your process.
I usually make models of things before I carve them, and some of the stuff will happen in the model, and some of it will happen in the sculpture. It’s a push-and-pull between the two. I’ll work on them simultaneously and make changes to one and then make changes to the other. The models are usually in oil-based clay, so it stays workable indefinitely.
Keeping things spontaneous working in wood is difficult. You have to have everything planned out because you need to make sure you’re not removing too much. One of the most fun parts about carving wood is you’ll be doing all this math—you have your model, sometimes you take pictures of it, you grid it out, take lots of measurements, figure out the ratio between the sizes and map measurements onto the piece. You have to be so careful when you start carving, and then all of the sudden you get to this point where you start to see what’s happening, and then you can push all of that aside and start being more spontaneous.
How did you come to focus on animal portraiture?
It started in the past when I was doing more papier-mâché stuff. I was doing a lot of masks, and I realized that the part of it that was grabbing me wasn’t exactly that it was a wearable mask, but that it was dealing with the face. Also, the portrait bust is such a traditional, known art object, and it’s fun to put a spin on it just by making it of an animal not a person.
Have animals always been important to you?
Oh yeah. Ever since I was a little kid that’s all I would do—draw animals, draw animals, draw animals. Whatever I could find pictures of I would try to copy. It’s always been what I’ve had the most fun doing. I enjoy figuring out how the animal’s put together and how to recreate the anatomy and then have fun with it. If I analyze it after the fact, I feel like whenever you look at an animal, you can’t help imagining what its consciousness is like or what it’s thinking.
To view Jeremy Wolf’s artwork, visit jeremywolf.com or stop by Timo Gallery (207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 110) Monday-Saturday, 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
