Christopher Alles, aged 33, is the father of five kids under the age of five, including triplet girls aged 2. So you might think he was describing his home life when he said it’s “everything everywhere all at once.”
But he was actually speaking about art and how to understand it.
“You have multiple things going on at the same time, and it takes a while to get comfortable managing them: Composition, representation, abstract form, the expressiveness of the character. You have to be juggling everything at the same time,” he said.
The New York-based sculptor sometimes feels the magnitude of that “everything everywhere all at once” task on a cosmic scale, especially when he’s carving; and it’s an experience he finds immensely satisfying.
“You’re taking something that’s meaningless and incoherent, and bringing order, separating things,” he said.
He describes forming a sculpted foot, first separating it from the base of the statue, then forming the front and sides of the foot like simple walls that gradually take on definition and meaning.
“It’s like God separating the land and the water. You’re making distinctions. Gradually things come together,” he said.
But if Alles shares in God’s creative process, he’s definitely not omniscient like God, or totally in control of what he’s making.
“As you go along, things change and emerge. You feel like you’re not in charge,” he said.
There is a mysterious element to making art, and even as he proceeds along the thoughtful and laborious process from making sketches, to miniature clay figures, to full-size armatured clay sculptures, to mold, to final cast poured in resin and marble, he’s sometimes surprised at how various elements work themselves out.
He points to a recent secular commission, “Apollo and Daphne,” a startlingly explosive figurative piece that seems to fly out from a central point suspended in the air, rather than from the ground.
“The composition was just playing around. The sort of geometric form of angles and lines just sort of emerged; it was spontaneous,” he said.
It invites the viewer to feel, rather than just see, the tension between the energies of the covetous god and the hapless nymph, who becomes rooted in the earth as a tree to escape his assault.
But Alles focuses mainly on sacred art, and he recognizes that another thing that’s out of his control is what the viewer actually sees.
“It’s hard, as an artist, to see your own work in the way other people see it,” said Alles. “Other people read things into my work that I didn’t see.”
Alles recalls a statue of St. Joseph with the young Jesus…Read the rest of my latest artist profile for Our Sunday Visitor.
Image: Photo courtesy of Chris Alles
I love these stories of artists that you do! And I had never really thought of sculpture as a circuit that must include the viewer – that’s a new concept to me, and it sounds right.