Interview

David: Do you generally sculpt in the quiet of nature or do you ever work to music?

Edmund: I prefer the quiet, although I have tried working with music. There are some things that I love so much, and sometimes I like to put a variation into the silence by bringing in some music. I mean, I hear voices when I’m working. I hear the wind. I hear birds chirping. I hear the sounds of my tools.

David: What kind of voices do you hear?

Edmund: Well, people that are entering my brain; reflections and conversations.

David: What other kind of conditions do you work under?

Edmund: I like everything around me in perfect order, and then I can work, just as long as I don’t have any kind of disturbances. I can’t have a dish in the sink or anything that’s out of order. Everything has to look great. I like visual beauty. And then I can go to work.

David: Have you ever had experiences here in Big Sur where you felt like there were nature spirits around you?

Edmund: Yes, I have.

David: Has any of that you’ve felt gotten into your work?

Edmund: On such subtle levels that they’re beyond identity, but yes, I do believe that exists.

David: Have you ever felt like there’s a spirit in the piece of wood that you’re working with?

Edmund: Oh yes, definitely. But there’s a very prevailing misconception that I don’t want that to be confused with, like when people start thinking that “David” was in the marble, or that there is an image in the wood. You’re imposing an image. There is nothing there. It just stands there. You create that spirit. It’s a transmutation of your spirit infused.

I had a piece of wood once, it used to be outside my front door. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was a very strange piece of wood somebody had given to me. Most of my wood comes to me. I seldom go to find it. It just appears. I’m a very passive person. I don’t make a lot of effort about anything if I can help it.

Part of why I particularly love sculpting in wood is because you don’t have to have conversations with people about material. You don’t have to have invoices. You don’t have to buy anything. All you need are your tools, which you do buy, and then you get lost in your studio. And the wood is laying there, waiting for you in the forest somewhere, or some neighbor tells you about a tree trunk they just got rid of, or there’s a piece of wood that you find while you’re walking into somebody’s building site, or somebody gives you a bridge timber.

So I kept looking at this wood in my yard, and I kept seeing a Madonna and child, and I said, “No way, Kara. There’s no way that you’re going to make a Madonna and child. There’s no way you are going to do a nude torso of a female.” I never wanted to make anything that I’ve seen before, or that’s been made before, or that’s become so hackneyed or cliché. If anything enters my mind that even smells of that, I don’t want it, because there’s no adventure there.

I brought the wood in one day, laid it up on my table, and I said, “I’m just going to make an abstract thing out of this.” It was a really huge lump of Douglas Fir, which is a very hard brittle wood. What I ended up making is called “Family Group”. It’s abstract, but it is a mother and child. So there was something about that wood that insisted on being that subject.

David: Have you had that happen with any other pieces?

Edmund: No, it’s just that’s the way that one worked. I had a piece of wood that I used to look at, and I’d think it could be a seal balancing a ball on its’ nose. For some reason, every time I looked at it I could see the possibility of making that.

But I made Moses out of it. (Laughter) And the minute I thought of making Moses out of it, I thought well yeah, I’ve thought about Moses a lot. I’m a Jewish boy. I’ve been told about the Ten Commandments, I like that idea. I’d like to make my version of Moses, that’s all.

Then I went into it, and that’s one of the ways that it can happen. I thought, who needs another Moses? People have chosen him as a subject for so many paintings. I’ve never liked Michelangelo’s Moses. It’s a very powerful, super beautiful piece of sculpture, but it was unsatisfactory in terms of me. It’s another classical Bellod or Roman God, a Zeus with horns!

David: What was your religious upbringing like?

Edmund: My family were the kind of Jews that went to shul on high holidays. They merely had a very routine kind of connection with the synagogue. I resisted being bar mitzvah’d. I went to Hebrew school, and loathed it, so I quit. I was very stubborn, and once I had my mind made up, that was it. I’m sure I was a disappointment for my mother, but I wouldn’t do it.

I didn’t want to be Jewish in my earlier life. I took a lot of abuse from kids at school, and I felt a lot of prejudice. I got beaten up, and I was pushed in a river once for being a “kike”. So I didn’t want to be anything that people didn’t love, or I didn’t want to have some identity that kept me from relating to people and to life. I suppose I negated being attached to anything religious. I don’t like ceremony. I don’t join groups or clubs. I never was good at being on a team. I did not like sports. I don’t like competitive athletics. I liked anything you could do by yourself. I like to swim, hike, high jump, and work on the parallel bar, but I don’t want to play on a team.

So you know, being a religious Jew is being on a team, and I don’t want to be on that team. I won’t play ball, and so I never did it. But, I feel I’m a spiritual person. The religious instinct is alive in my system because I can relate to cosmic forces, life, and the powers of nature. I’ve read and studied other religions, and I can’t join any of them. I can know about them. I can take fragments of them and their philosophies to help me live my life, but I can’t join up.