Amy Arnold & Kelsey Sauber Olds

from Madison Essentials March/April 2022

Anxiety—Sometimes Helpful, Sometimes Not

In 1888, the Swedish artist Carl Larsson and his artist/designer wife Karin Bergöö established their home and studio in Sundborn, Sweden. In the 100 years that have passed since his death, his life; his work; and, more importantly, the lifestyle he and Karin established at Sundborn has become an avatar for the aspirations and hopes of many artists: the merging of artistic pursuit and family idyll. Larsson’s most famous work celebrated his joy in family life and served as inspiration for his creative output.

Amy Arnold and Kelsey Sauber Olds followed a similar path to their artistic and domestic circumstance. While their artwork doesn’t stem directly from their family narrative, their initial and early intention was to find a location to establish an almost magical marriage of familial strength and shared creative endeavor and imagination.

They met in Madison but quickly realized that in order to craft the life they wished of independence, self-reliance, immersion in natural beauty, and inspiring community, they would have to find a different locale to pursue their dreams. They now occupy a small farm on a windswept ridge with sweeping views in every direction a handful of miles outside the town

of Viroqua—a community well known for its welcoming embrace of creative citizens and those seeking to explore less-conventional lives. Amy and Kelsey have slowly, patiently, and with great imagination discovered a way to practice their art as a team while ensuring their family of three boys would be brought up with all of the strength and potential they could provide. They made a conscious decision to trade surety of income for togetherness and fulfillment in the work they do together.

After working separately on their individual artistic pursuits, they began working together making wood sculpture approximately eight years ago. Their roles are defined by their individual strengths and passions. Kelsey, a graduate and former soccer athlete at Kenyon College in Ohio who still moves with the lithe grace of that discipline, continues to work as a furniture designer and crafter. His role in Amy’s sculptural enterprise is to build the basic structural forms for her work and rough out the threedimensional blanks. As Amy described the relationship, Kelsey is grounded; she’s the risk-taker.

Every piece begins with a conceptual drawing done by Amy and enlarged to the actual dimensions of the final sculpture from which Kelsey makes a template that can be traced onto the appropriate block of wood. These blocks can be individual or glued up in composite for some of the larger pieces. After roughing out the basic form, Kelsey turns the process over to Amy who then carves the final form to her satisfaction and applies a polychromed finish of milk paint protected with a finishing sealer.

Milk paint is made from casein (a protein found in mammalian milk), lime or borax, and a pigment agent. It has the property of being opaque, quick drying, and nontoxic once dried. The ensuing forms have a richly textured surface—a forest of chisel marks—not unlike alla prima brushstrokes on a PostImpressionist painting, which sometimes follow and enhance the contours of the sculpture and may appear independent of the contours’ natural direction. Many of the sculpted pieces appear to then be surface sanded to visually emphasize the tactile and topographic nature of the manufacture. The color lies in the depressions made by the carved marks, and the subsequent ridges left between the depressions emerge as a network or map of surface form.

When making her work, Amy often works in multiples, repeating a character faithfully but uniquely in each iteration. Amy and Kelsey are sales driven by necessity, searching for the figures that will resonate with the collectors and casual buyers they meet on the art fair circuits, craft shows, and online markets. They also take on specific commissions and are grateful for the work they’re getting right now.

Two significantly larger commissioned sculptures lie on her workbench, awaiting shipping. Both appear to be in her Bloom category: standing figures with one arm extended at the elbow, palm turned up, each holding a single flower. The female figure is dressed in a timeless frock capped with a Peter Pan collar and shod in bright red Mary Jane shoes. The male figure sports a yellow ribbed shirt with accompanying

green shorts. Both figures are rigidly formal and upright in posture, staring gravely forward, making direct eye contact with their wide-spaced, almondshaped eyes set off with an almost sternly set and expressionless mouth, giving the figures an enigmatic quality that suggests emotional distance.

The gestures of the figures, so intentionally formal in pose; the directness of gaze; the gravity of expression, all achieved with the relentless rhythm of the carved mark,

seem to locate these pieces in what might be thought of as a folk-art idiom. Indeed, one of their larger works, a mermaid clutching a conch-like shell and balanced on a plinth of repeating scroll-shaped waves would be perfectly at home in the Nantucket Whaling Museum alongside the carved figureheads of long-deceased whaling ships.

Amy and Kelsey’s work has an almost timeless quality. The sincerity of intention, the advertisement of craft, the sobriety of color and expression all combine to serve as a touchstone to popular arts of the past and a wry, almost ironic and deadpan comment on the present. Whether human in iconography or animal in inspiration, from the large format works to the diminutive minis, these dramatis personae of Amy and Kelsey’s imaginative world face the viewer with self-confidence and stoicism. They are the product of a deliberate choice of lifestyle and independence, an expression of an authentic and wellcrafted partnership.

Tadsen Photography

Drone/Aerial Imagery

Chris Gargan is a landscape artist and freelance writer working from his farm southwest of Verona. You can find his work at Abel Contemporary Gallery in Stoughton. He is seen here with his dog Tycho Brahe.