At the end of the great war, my father, (an RAF pilot and there being no work opportunities in England), embarked on a journey across Africa, an epic 3 month drive in a convoy of trucks across deserts and roadless savannahs – his real destination! – to re-unite with my mother, a nurse he had met in Cape town years earlier during pilot training. As it turned out they married and settled in Kitwe – Zambia (still Northern Rhodesia then), where I was born, the youngest of 4 children.
Political instability caused us to uproot and move to a small farm, high in misty forested mountains in the North East of South Africa. All my earliest and happiest memories are from those forested, enchanted lands. It became obvious to my parents that I had the makings of an artist in me – I drew in the sand, I drew on the walls, even in my food. Both of them encouraged me – but on the clear understanding that art was something you could do in your spare time or one day when you retired, but in the REAL world you had to have a REAL job.
I guess they were right – I married young, we had 2 children, and I worked as an electronics technician, and did my art and music when time allowed as a hobby. After 26 years of marriage my wife died from cancer and for a while I was directionless – till I met Annie – we married and after a few years we decided to sell everything and move to Ireland – why Ireland?, who really knows, some factors and a lot of happenstance. However we certainly never regretted it – falling in love with both the people and the countryside if not the weather.
And then, at the tender young age of 60 – on a day my wife, while watching a YouTube video of someone chainsaw carving said to me: You could probably do this! For some reason the idea of carving or sculpture had never occurred to me – I’d always painted or worked in pastels’ – but I seemed to take to wood carving like a duck to water and once the bug had bitten me, I couldn’t stop. And so, here I am, still holding down a day job, but living in a sawdust covered world every evening and weekend.
In hind sight its hard to see how I even got started – I didn’t own a single tool, had no wood and, living in a small estate home, had no workshop or even space in our tiny back yard. A lot of credit goes to my wife who put up with sawdust all over the house, random logs of wood stored in the most inappropriate places – eventually we had to move to a house in the country side with some workshop and storage space
As to my work – I like to express the world the way I see it – we both love animals and wildlife – but I don’t want to just depict them with accuracy, I try to capture the quirks and nuances of their characters, their peculiar mannerisms, the speech in their eyes, the language of their movements. The advantage of working in wood (which I collect from fallen trees) is that wood has a life and beauty of its own – wood continues to breath and injects its own life and character into a carving. In many ways the wood itself determines what the carving becomes, and I, merely facilitate. Also I like to experiment by compressing the third of the three dimensions’ creating the illusion of full 3D in 1/3 of the space, which has its practical advantages. Finally the hope is that my carvings will be relatable and in some way create a connection.
Works by Alan Kenny
