Gar Waterman

10" from horntip to horntip, I had this loghorn steer sculpture cast in stainless steel for a client's roof deck  in NYC. A little drama underlighting at night and the surrounding buildings will have a lil' piece of Texas in their view. 

Through July 24 the Hui Visual Art Center on Maui is hosting a terrific show of marine inspired art from island artists, including my carved wood nudibranch sculpture from my residency there this past winter. It is dispalyed with all the sea slug inspired artwork from my Maui elementary school sessions - the kids did some really great colored drawings, so great to see them displayed in such an elegant space. 

My 7 weeks as artist-in-residence at the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center on Maui were wonderful. I worked with local elementary school kids doing nudibranch inspired art workshops and carved an aeolid nudibranch sculpture out of five different woods from the island, which will appear in a marine inspired exhibit at the Hui in May along with the kid's artwork. I had a great time with the kids which further reenforced my commitment to use my artwork to help educate and raise awareness of the biodiversity we are losing from our world at such an alarming rate.

Pest Control

William Kent: Prints       Gar Waterman: Sculpture

KLG Gallery, February 10 – March 13      2022

William Kent was a Connecticut artist I got to know several years before he died in 2012 - quite an irascible character, very political work, remarkable sculptor and printmaker with a style that was anything but subtle - heavy irony delivered with stark humor, societal idiocies reduced with relish to graphic conundrums.  Nabakov believed Kafka’s Metamorphosis to be about the artist's struggle for existence in a society full of philistines intent on destroying him step by step, a point of view that echoed Bill Kent’s own relationship with the art world and may have had something to do with the frequent appearance of insects in his work. Pest Control features a selection of Bill’s insect inspired carved slate prints along with my sculpture, including the new Coleottolo series featuring beetles on flame cut steel plate drops in a juxtaposition of organic and architectural that reflects my belief that nature will endure past our own brief tenure here on Earth.

There are a number of species of wood boring beetles killing millions of trees in several regions of the country right now. Here in the East, we have Emerald ash boring beetles – out west you will find, among others, the Western pine beetle and the Deathwatch beetle, all leaving massive swathes of dead timber in their wake. Milder winters limit insect populations less effectively, so the infestations are getting worse. We regard these creatures as pests when their numbers and dietary habits don’t coincide with our own interests, but there is a clear environmental irony present here: the beetles wreaking havoc on our forests are simply doing what they do – like us, they are opportunists. However, the human race is the unequivocal master of destruction on this planet, with a 7 billion plus population devouring finite resources in a fossil fueled rush towards a catastrophically warmed world. We have only to look in the mirror to glimpse Gregor Samsa and identify the real pest on the planet.

Max Coleman's fabulous 15'x 26' slug mural, now featured on the loading door of the aquarium in conjunction with the nudibranch exhibit inside.