About the artist

The work I do is a culmination of three life long fascinations. Three distinctly different obsessions which have haunted me in life. In order to tell that story let me begin with this story.

Being a child of the desert, trees were rare, beautiful, and almost sacred. Trees are the constant in my life that give meaning to belief. A seed, dirt, water, sunshine, and time create individual miracles that come in every imaginable form. Each miracle is a story written on a time scale beyond our understanding. The wood that is the tree records every moment in time. Years of drought and plenty, a tree divides between the root and the trunk, the trunk and a branch, the branch to limb. Each bifurcation remembered in the wood, the turmoil of change, the flow of life around life, create beautiful patterns. Each miracle a story incapable of lying, incapable of being anything other than a pure telling of every moment in time recorded by a life we fail to fathom the complexity of.

America. For all its warts and blemishes, all its shortfalls and breakdowns, all the ugly and brutal and savage, America is the culmination of greater things. Born in rebellion and nourished on hope, it is the greatest country the world has ever known. A nation founded on ideals of individual liberty and freedom for every man woman and child and a country founded on the belief that God bestowed upon each of us certain inalienable rights that cannot be taken by man or government; I am eternally grateful to be here, now, doing this.

Story Telling is the greatest of all arts. The telling of stories has been with us and shaped us since the beginning of time. The stories we formed, formed us. The story of mankind, the story of civilizations great and small, the story of your family, the story of you, all stories are part of the same story, and no story ever really ends. No story should ever imply completeness. No story should ever be entirely true. Any story once told is no longer yours.

I appreciate the opportunity to work on telling the stories of a life I cannot comprehend through these pieces. None are complete, none are true, none are as beautiful as the lives they were made from. I try to tell the story the wood has inside of it as truthfully as I can and still create usable pieces.  Each is the best that I could do, as close as I could come to the proper story of each. In every piece, I find the wood telling fables of every life: chaos, convergence, struggle, order, and ultimately the story of growth. It’s the story of your first love. It is the story of a man on his deathbed recalling his life.  It’s the story of the decisions that shaped you. It’s the story of my journey to find peace. 

I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Doug McCombs