Wood sculptor Ray Book is fairly new to Florida. The Baltimore native’s work, however, was made for life on a tropical peninsula. His ongoing “Rib Series” features graceful bent wood forms that, depending on your frame of mind when you view them, mimic the ribs of a boat, or the thoracic structures of fish. Some might even say the sculptures resemble abstracted palm fronds.
Other sculptures incorporate the elegant form of a miniature ship’s hull suspended within a delicate wood framework. One of these, “Wintertide II,” won a $3,000 cash award for Best in Show at the Space Coast Art Festival in Port Canaveral over Thanksgiving weekend.
If you can’t wait until March to see Book’s solo show at Vero’s Gallery 14, the artist currently is exhibiting five sculptures through January at RosettaStone Fine Art Gallery in Jupiter.
Book’s first visit to Florida was in 2012 when he and his significant other, Pat Katz, sailed down from Baltimore in their 47-foot ketch. They were on a mission not only to check out galleries where Book might place his work, but also to escape another Mid-Atlantic winter.
”I sure would like to get warm,” Book remembers telling Katz.
Before long the couple had sold their house and its furnishings and pointed their sailboat south. The trip to Florida took two and a half months.
“It was cold – we left really late – and the water was rough and ugly,” Book says. Their first stop in Florida was Titusville, and then on to visit friends in Cocoa Beach.
“We decided it was warm enough. We didn’t need to go any farther,” says Book.
That was before they met another boating couple who suggested they sail down to see Vero Beach.
In addition to the trout they caught in Vero’s waters, Book discovered other reasons for an open-ended visit here.
“I found the Vero Beach Art Club, and quickly found that there was a pretty good art community here,” he says.
At first the pair opted for a stay of a few weeks; then they decided to stay the winter, and set a heading back to Baltimore in the spring.
But when spring arrived, they stayed put; Book and Katz are now full-time Florida residents. The couple lives on their boat at the Vero Beach City Marina. Book maintains a working studio on dry land near downtown Vero.
Book’s studio spans two connected bays in an un-airconditioned storage facility; a variety of power tools, a work bench and a wood steamer take up much of the floor around its edges. Wall-mounted shelves that reach to the ceiling hold wood boards, fasteners, glue, a couple of old projects, and other flotsam and jetsam of the artist’s life.
In the middle of the studio stands an 8-foot-high sculpture tilted “The Prow.” Gently curving outward in its ascent, a vertical stem of walnut is supported on both port and starboard sides by short cypress boards, stacked to suggest the planking of a ship’s prow. Each board terminates in a jagged carved edge that suggests the truncated form is the survivor of a mythic storm penned by the likes of Conrad or Melville.
The exterior of the sculpture is in the process of being sanded to a perfectly smooth finish; the rough interior side of the piece is meant to be viewed as well, says Book, and will be left as is.
“I love old wooden boats,” he sighs.
“There’s a place called Curtis Creek in Baltimore. It is a graveyard for old wooden ships.”
And steel ones, as well. Located within the Baltimore city limits, Curtis Creek is a tidal estuary of Curtis Bay, which adjoins the Patapsco River. Over the years a number of historic ships have been towed there to slowly sink into the sandy bottom of the creek. One of these, the fragmentary hulk of a World War I-era wooden freighter, served as the model for Book’s current project.
That one, says Book, “had burn marks on it. The boat was burned. The prow’s sticking up, and what is left of the boat is just the prow.”
And although “The Prow” does not have the airy lightness of Book’s more open sculptural forms, it still relates very much to Book’s Rib Series.
“The structure has always been on my mind,” says Book. “It seems to be the common thread even with this one; there’s the backbone and the ribs.”
It’s a cinch to see that Book’s fondness for boats has influenced his art. In addition to living on a sailboat, he has also built a wooden motor boat and a dinghy for his own use. But there is another source for his art, one that is, in a manner of speaking, even closer to his heart.
Book has been preoccupied off and on since his teens with a degenerative spinal condition; his first back operation occurred over 40 years ago. He concedes that his focus on his own vertebrae has “very much” contributed to the preoccupation with skeletal structures in his art.
The artist was born in Huntington County, Pa., the youngest of eight children and the only artistically inclined member of his family. Early on his father earned a living as a watchmaker, but when Book was 3 the family moved to Baltimore, where the elder Book drove a cab for much of the rest of his life. Book remembers with pleasure the long-ago fishing trips he took with his father; otherwise, home life was not happy for the boy.
At age 16 Book left for Orono, Maine, to attend Skitikuk, a now-defunct alternative school that Book says was modeled after the child-centered boarding school Summerhill, in England.
Book spent his senior year there and then returned to Baltimore, where he got a job as a carpenter’s helper.
“I quickly got into the trim end of things, the finishing – trim carpentry. I ended up being a stair maker, built-in cabinetry, that sort of thing,” he says, adding that he was soon self-employed at his trade.
“All the while I would be doing some sculpture on the side, playing with it, really.”
During the economic recession of the early 1980s, Book went west with his then-wife and their daughter in search of carpentry work. They eventually settled for four years in Colorado Springs, where Book opened a woodworking shop and began to sculpt in bronze on the side.
His sculpture at the time centered on the realistic depiction of the human figure. In Colorado Book began to show at regional art fairs and sell his work, but it wasn’t until he moved back to Baltimore that he began to investigate the style for which he is now known.
“The abstract stuff didn’t really start until the mid-90s,” says Book, who admits to having had distain for abstract expression until he began to work in it himself.
His foray into abstraction began when he had a dream that he was seated in front of a large canvas, painting. He immediately went out and bought the materials he needed to paint and created in a month’s time a dozen semi-abstract canvases on the theme of boats and water, which he later sold in a 1997 solo show at Baltimore’s Dead End Saloon.
A painting career did not develop from that exercise, but a habit of making thumbnail sketches of his spur-of-the-moment ideas did.
He notes that he doesn’t let anyone see his sketches, which help him work out the technical aspects of his creations.
“When I get an image in my head, it’s kind of already finished, and the image dictates the wood or steel or stone I will use. Then I have to backtrack and figure out how I can do it,” he says.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m running out of ideas and I get a little worried about that, but then something pops up and I keep on going. Right now I have two ideas on the back burner, but I have to finish ‘The Prow’ first.”
