Sculptor Tom Czarnopys says some of his earliest memories involve hunting and fishing in a national forest near his boyhood home in Michigan. “I remember when I was perhaps five years old, cutting ferns, helping my dad build deer-hunting blinds with a little red serrated pie knife. I still have memories of the smell of the soil, the sandy soil underneath the roots.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
By second grade, Czarnopys was drawing animals, fish, and birds. He also became interested in taxidermy. “It seemed a shame to me to throw out the beautiful plumage of a pheasant or a grouse,” he says. “I admired these animals, how well adapted they were; the appearance of pheasant and grouse and deer acts as camouflage, integrating them into their environment. I thought they were so beautiful.”
He spent years at the School of the Art Institute trying to find his own voice and “looking at really good art in museums.” It wasn’t until his senior year, in 1982, that he finally came “around full circle to what drove me to make things in the first place.” His teacher, painter Ray Yoshida, encouraged him to speak of his years spent hunting and fishing, and Czarnopys soon “started working with materials I took from up north–ferns, earth.” He began making hunting masks, then arrived at his first mature works after a key moment in Michigan. While bow hunting deer in “the same three square miles” his father had often taken him to as a child, he saw a number of fallen birches whose insides had rotted away, leaving tubes of bark. “I remember actually picking one up and kind of wrapping it around my forearm and taking another piece and wrapping it around a bicep. I felt like I was doing something significant; I didn’t necessarily know why. But I started to feel a relationship between nature and my body and wanted to start bringing things together.” Back in Chicago Czarnopys made the first of his full-size figurative sculptures, Birch Hunting Suit, in which he placed birch bark on a chicken wire armature “so it was like a hunting suit–or a second skin.” Soon he was making sculptures based on casts of his body, which he then covered with bark. He says these works were “about my impulse to locate myself in nature.”
One of Tom Czarnopys’s early figures is included in the MCA’s current exhibit, “Art in Chicago, 1945-1995.” The show at the Illinois Art Gallery, 100 W. Randolph, is up until January 17. Gallery hours are 9 to 5:30 Monday through Friday; call 312-814-5322.
