Understanding John Grande’s Famous Carving, The Middle Forkis

John Grande’sMiddle Forkis a large-scale sculpture that has been on display at Seattle Art Museum since February 10th, 2017. He created this amazing piece of work using the mediums of cedar and waterproof glue. His process for creating the piece is rather interesting. He used a team of volunteers to take a plaster cast of the living tree. John brought the piece to life at Mad Art studio using actual pieces of old growth cedar. The original piece was 40 feet long but since being placed in the Seattle art museum it has nearly doubled in length to over 105 feet long and 30 feet in diameter (John Grande: Middle Fork).

Middle Fork is iconic for the Seattle Art museum as you see it as soon as you walk into the doors. John’s work is displayed in the museum as well in galleries around the area, and in parks and city spaces. He enjoys working with large groups of people and creating works of art that can be changed over time as the area changes. John is local to the Seattle area. He works out of his own art studio creating and selling prints of his original pieces. Many of them art stylizations of classical pieces such as the Mona Lisa spray painted for example, or pop art styled pieces of pop stars (I See Dots).

Middle Fork is an incredible piece that is constructed to look as close to a real tree as possible without being an actual living tree. It is massive measuring 105 feet long and over 30 feet in diameter. It is constructed of cedar and waterproof glue. John used several volunteers to help him construct and collect the wood for the piece. It follows realism and a natural line structure rather than some of his other works that are more abstract. The sculpture is interesting as is has elements of being both open and closed at the same time (Art forms). If you look at the piece from a distance it looks to be solid however if you get right underneath it and look closely you can see that the wood is almost woven together and mesh like.

This piece was very interesting to observe, and John Grande’s other works were also very interesting to see he seems to have a very wide base of talents. If you have the chance I would definitely advise you to go to Seattle Art Museum or at very least check out his video “John Grande: Middle Fork on YouTube. It shows a time lapsed version of the work that went into bringing this amazing piece of the Cascadian Forest to the big city of Seattle.