Field Recordings

Sculpture’s wonderful appeal is play. You can touch it, feel the cold material, rub your fingers over the bumps, generate friction against the surface, and rap your knuckles against the surface. And good sculpture is geography; your skin reacting to the relief of the material, while eyes drink in the details, you are transported to another landscape. Great painting, for me anyway, is like good sculpture, you want to reach out and touch the canvas, which of course is a no-no, which is why I like Van Gogh, among others, because I want to press my skin against the brush strokes and feel the shape and pattern of the artist’s movements. On the Eastern Shore of Virginia metal sculptor Albert “Buck” Kellam Doughty shapes slices of the Delmarva Peninsula out of steel, iron and scrap metal. And his work makes you want to reach out and touch it. For an area that’s textually rich with marsh grass, swamps, dense forests, black top soil, not to ...