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p 45FALL/WINTER 2011 Harbinger, Bruce Beasley


matters in a very precise way - and it matters in a critical way. So you have to pay attention. But there’s something about paying attention in that way which frees my mind to just drift. Then ideas come while I’m working and sometimes I just can’t stand it, so I put my tools away and write them down.


JH: Lee, what kind of scale do you like to work on and what kind of materials do you mostly work with? LG: Well, I work in stone. All my bronzes so far have been cast from stone originals. So I say I’m a stone carver. I work in hard stones that don’t scratch, starting with marble. I did a jade piece this year, and some in granite. Most of the things I’ve done I can lift, so let’s say less than 200 lbs. The largest thing I’ve done so far is the basalt piece on the UBC campus. That was a commissioned piece and weighs about a ton. A woman who I knew before had lost her son in a skiing accident and she wanted something to help her remember her son, and her children in general, so she asked me to make something for her and we decided that the material would be the basalt. So we drove down to the stone yard near Seattle – she drove and I listened – she talked the whole way. I had a lump of plasticine clay and I played with it while listening to her. By the time we got to the stone yard I had an idea. I showed it to her in clay and she thought it was


good, so we picked out the stone. It had to be cut and delivered, but I took measurements of it – a hexagonal column of basalt. I made a 3-D computer model of it and a model of my clay sculpture and then I started playing with these two models, finding ways to increase the visual size of the sculpture while minimizing the amount of carving I needed to do. That was pretty exciting and it was the first time I’d used 3-D modelling to help me design. The piece is called ‘girl child reflected in her mother’s eye’. It’s all basalt except for one highly polished bronze insert that reflects against a highly polished basalt sphere.


JH: I see – so that was your largest piece and the others are under 200 lbs. Lee, do you still have a gallery in Vancouver? LG: Not our own gallery. We had that for about a year and used it mainly as a base for making contacts in the art world. But once I got in with the Petley Jones Gallery we realized we didn’t need our own gallery anymore.


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Night bird


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