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
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 mention the bayside and seaside waters, Doughty blends the very earth and fruit of land and sea together in palpable, fun, and striking dimensions that not only make you want to play with his creations, you want to jump into them.
Doughty is the winner of several awards, including Best in Show at the Chesapeake Virginia Beach Fine Arts Festival, and for having only been making art professionally for a few years, he’s off to a quick and hot start. As hot as the metal he shapes. Talk to him about his creations and you’d think he’d been doing it his entire life. “I can make anything; you name it I can make it. Clams, trees, crabs, it doesn’t matter,” Doughty told me at a recent show at the Blarney Stone Pub in Onancock. While some might scoff at such confidence, once you see his grape vine, or his sprawling gothic trees, you can’t really argue with the man.
The fact that he even uses scrap metal, often donated or found, rather than refined metal makes his work even more eco-hip.
Heck, Doughty even uses old farm tools to shape his vision from molten steel.
And he’s just getting started.
What I like best are his natural shapes, the deer in the bog (my four year old couldn’t stop playing with the indestructible key piece), the pointed menace and mystery of the trees, the perfect round grapes of the Best in Show winning grape vine, the Jimmy Blue crab rising out of the murk. If it sounds too provincial for you consider that Doughty makes one of kind creations. If you want something he’s boasted he can make it.
Born out of a Hog Island lineage, Doughty’s family roughed out the early part of the 1900s on a fly and mosquito ridden Hogg Island working oyster beds, fishing and hunting the marshes, ferrying Northerners out on the water on fishing and duck hunting trips, and tending the wild hogs that tore from one side of the island to the next. The island was only accessible by boat, and like the island, Doughty’s creations are tough and beautiful at the same time, like the skin of a shark, or the carapace of a loggerhead turtle.
And if you’ve had the pleasure of touching either of those, you know the thrill in touching something that is once exquisite and tough
You can contact the artist at: http://hogislandcreations.com/
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