Rock Solid Commitment -- Tony Angell's Art Is Sculpture And A Way Of Seeing The World

The 2-FOOT-HIGH block of pale Indiana limestone posed between muscle and grace: thick at the bottom, leaning like a rumble of smoke, and topped by the carved face of an alert owl.

Tony Angell pounded hammer to chisel, knocking away the straight-line flanks with a rhythmic chank, chank, chank. Each blow sent fragments ricocheting off the walls of his Lake Forest Park studio and stirred rock dust carrying the sweet, pungent odor of an oily beach.

He had sculpted the owl's face first to give his work bearing and the stone life. Still buried somewhere deep inside the block were a barrel chest, broad shoulders, gripping claws, tightening muscles, shifting weight and a wariness.

Angell would find them as he worked because after three decades of sculpting and even more as a naturalist and wildlife illustrator, he can see creatures within stone. Though his works have a stylized realism that leaves no doubt what the subject is, they are really about essence. His sculptures have a lean of body or turn of head that evokes a sense of motion and place.

The owl would eventually move from studio to his latest show at the Foster/White Gallery in Pioneer Square (which ended last week). His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums and found permanent homes in libraries, city halls, corporate buildings and private collections around the Northwest and across the nation.

Angell's work is known for how it combines elegance and strength, but it is most remarkable in how it represents the convergence of his personality, passion and life.

A former University of Washington shot-putter, discuss-thrower and arm-wrestling champ, Angell is 6-foot-2, 225 pounds, thick and still muscled at age 59. He has a broadcaster's voice, a thunderous laugh and a younger man's energy. A friend, Seattle novelist Ivan Doig, describes him as a rushing river threatening to break its banks.

Angell revels in the girth and weight of boulders, which he tips, turns and pushes. When deep in thought, he will use the palm of his right hand to caress the cold round head of a stone bird like a shot-putter searching for a grip.

He has trained hawks and falcons and nursed perhaps 100 injured birds at his home. He is a writer and illustrator of several books and, since 1971, has worked as state director of environmental education, coordinating efforts to teach Washington schoolchildren about the natural world. He preaches about re-connecting with nature and needing to recapture our senses to do it.

Those senses drive his art. The ideas come from trained eyes and the images he has banked through thousands of hours at estuaries, beaches and in forests and wildlife reserves. In his studio, he pushes against a boulder to sample its strength, gauges its composition by how hard it resists his chisel and what scent it releases. He taps it with a hammer or file to hear which direction it wants to go. He starts by banging away and finishes with hours of gentle sanding.

As he worked on the owl and the straight edges gave way to rounded forms, Angell was surrounded by the muscle and the grace of his art: blocks of granite, onyx and black marble next to polished sculptures of ravens, eagles, plovers. The most thrilling part of the journey for him is in between the two, when the stone commands commitment and promises to make an ephemeral idea permanent.

EARLY ONE FALL morning, Angell sat on a rocky bluff above a bay along southern Lopez Island. The sky was clear and windless. There was not a single boat on the dead-calm water. Looking out, you would be impressed by the nothingness.

Angell saw an amphitheater.

Gulls glided back and forth. A loon bobbed a few feet off shore. An otter broke the surface, snorting spray and diving again. A heron stood erect. A flock of mergansers flew in, spied fish, and suddenly formed a squawking, thrashing frenzy, thick as an islet a few hundred yards out.

He took it all in, pencil wedged between the fingers of his right hand, powerful Zeiss binoculars in the left, sketch notebook splayed open in his lap, a green Nature Conservancy cap perched on his head. He sketched the basic forms and postures. He would fill in the detail later. The essence and the action were what mattered.

As he got up to move on, he saw two ravens soaring high above the tree line. He let out a "kraak, kraak." One of the birds made a slight deviation from course, returned a half-hearted kraak and disappeared.

Doig, who has spent considerable time with him, said that Angell's field work is not observation so much as participation.

"We'll go to places like Indian Slough and watch the dunlins all turn at once in a solid flash of white," Doig said. "To watch Tony watch a sight like that intensifies the experience. It's like he is discovering a miracle. It definitely rubs off on you."

Angell said it is a matter of paying attention, which, in a prepackaged, broad-bandwidth world, is harder to do all the time.

"If you're not patient and you don't wait it out, you won't see it," Angell said. "Part of the process is knowing that understanding is not a 30-minute experience with a beginning, middle and end. Do this long enough and you begin to think like your subject. That's how you end up in the right place."

The right place, initially, was Southern California's San Fernando Valley, of all places. He grew up there, learning about art from his mother, who painted and taught school. He learned observation from his father, a private eye who could pick out a single conversation in a crowded restaurant, tailed celebrities such as Tyrone Power and Walter Winchell, and was successful enough to count Howard Hughes as a client and be consulted for Ellery Queen mysteries.

Though postwar subdivisions were invading the valley's walnut groves and truck farms, Angell spent much of his youth wandering the foothills, climbing toward raptor nests, and combing the Los Angeles River. He spent summers in the Michigan woods with his uncle, a rural mailman and nature-lover.

His parents indulged him, letting him keep snakes, birds and other critters in his room. At 11, he took a correspondence course in taxidermy and skinned and stuffed dead animals so he could study their structure.

He was a boulder of a teenager, becoming the all-city shot-put champ before accepting a track scholarship in 1958 to the University of Washington. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, but Angell got his undergraduate and graduate degrees in speech communications and decided to be a teacher. He never took an art class, but painted as his mother did, and sketched.

He trained falcons and hawks while in graduate school, talking his landlord into letting him remodel his Edmonds rental to allow the birds their own space.

He married, took a teaching job with the Shoreline School District, and bought his Lopez Island property while land prices were still within reason. He eventually built a spartan cabin high on a bluff and deep amid madrona trees. It still has no running water or electricity, but serves as a part-time studio and family getaway where his two young daughters, Larka and Gavia, can see what he does.

FOUR DAYS after Angell first took hammer and chisel to the limestone, the right angles had been shorn away and there stood a sturdy owl. He held both ends of a metal rasp and scraped back and forth, back and forth, over the bird's barrel chest and broad shoulders. The work covered his hands like gloves with the powder of ground stone.

"This came out of a wild owl that was put into the zoo," he said, brushing off shavings with his palm. "Owls tend to stand still, posturing, but this one was constantly repositioning, as active as a parakeet on a hot plate. He's startled, just beginning to turn, preparing to push off. But this comes from a collection of moments, too, a visual soup."

The owl was getting close to the point of fine-tuning and polishing, the parts that least interest Angell. He likes beginnings and refers to the raw blocks as lit fuses. That's why there are usually many stones in various stages of metamorphosis around his studio.

"The rock itself is the challenge," he said. "The stone continues to push back at you and you're pushing against it to see where it will go. That's emotionally pleasant but physically rewarding, too, like lifting a load."

Angell was a painter, illustrator and schoolteacher in the late '60s when Frank Richardson, a neighbor and curator of birds at the Burke Museum, gave him a slab of soft soapstone. Within a day, Angell had carved a crude bear. Soon, the two were making trips to the riverbeds near Marblemount and hauling back truckloads of boulders.

By 1970, friends and art patrons told Angell his work was good enough for a show and suggested he try Dick White, who ran a top gallery in Pioneer Square.

"I walked in and there was Dick White sitting at the far end of the one-room gallery at a desk. He looked up and said, `What do you want?' I said, `I want a show!' He said, `Who are you?' I said, `I'm Tony Angell!' As it turns out, he had seen my sketches in Pacific Search (a magazine). I guess I got him off balance with my direct approach. I thought that was the way you did it. I didn't know any better."

Within months, White held a show for Angell, complete with catering, live music, patrons and buyers. Angell looked around and thought, the only thing out of place is me.

The show sold out.

Wildlife art is sneered at by some critics, but Angell's work, which also includes bronze sculptures, has always sold well and been shown regularly at the gallery, now known as Foster/White. He has shown his art in Santa Fe, New York and elsewhere, is regularly awarded public-art commissions, and was one of only two sculptors among 25 international artists invited a few years ago to chronicle Alaska's Copper River Delta.

He was a technically competent sculptor almost immediately, but his fundamental style and approach changed in about 1975 when he was commissioned by U.S. West to create a sculpture of two ravens. He had found the perfect base, a big block of chlorite, but he was stumped on how to shape it. So it sat in his yard as he stewed.

He was writing and illustrating a book on ravens, for which he holds a special awe, and decided to drive to British Columbia to examine native carvings for inspiration.

Driving home, his mind was consumed with the power of the forms he saw and the vague ideas that teased him. As he pulled into his driveway, the headlights cut through the dark and onto chlorite stone standing in the mud.

"Right there in the headlights I saw the form within the rock," he said. "I think I must have worked 24 hours a day and finished it in something like three days. That marked my transformation from replication to expression and I haven't looked back."

The piece, titled, "Courting Ravens," rests in the Northwest Collections of U.S. West Communications.

One of the pieces Angell has kept is a puffin that reminds him of a mentor, the renowned illustrator Francis Lee Jaques, who encouraged Angell's drawings early on.

Jaques' wife, Florence, was an author of several nature books and penned a popular nursery rhyme that included the verse: "But this poor little puffin, he couldn't play nothing/For he hadn't anybody, to play with at all/ So he sat on his island, and he cried for awhile and/he felt very lonely, and he felt very small."

Angell put the poem to music, strummed his guitar and performed it for the couple. He was working on the puffin sculpture when he learned his mentor had died. The men were about 50 years apart in age, but the death hit Angell hard.

As he polished the finished bird some months later he noticed an imperfection in the green stone, a single gold streak descending from the right eye and down the cheek, as if the puffin were crying.

ANGELL HAS a small, cluttered office in the corner of a mothballed Lake Forest Park elementary school. With its dusty-book smell it seems as far away from art and wildlife as you could get. But it is part of the same whole.

In 1971, he became the director of environmental education for the state superintendent for public instruction. He was on the ground floor of a state program to develop curriculum on everything from watersheds to energy consumption to population growth.

Environmental education is not a course in itself; its lessons are woven into subjects from social science to English to biology. It has also gone through several evolutions and Angell now operates with a half-time aide and the occasional help he can hire through grants.

He evaluates and coordinates what's available from public agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources and companies such as Weyerhaeuser. He helps teachers plan, get material and engage students.

Recently, an out-of-state conservative group produced a preliminary "report card" that claimed some environmental education in Washington isn't based on sound science and is biasing children against business interests. Angell went on the radio to debate the author and roared, "Show me examples!" The author replied that the findings were preliminary.

Angell is also not shy about arguing his points as a board member of the state chapter of the Nature Conservancy, whose membership has broadened since its inception in the '70s to include voices of business and political interests. He has served more terms than anyone else on the organization's regional board and is considered its institutional memory.

"Tony walks the talk," said Elliot Marks, the state conservancy director. "He represents the passion of the mission. He talks about the education the kids need and he has the knowledge of the natural history."

In both classroom and boardroom, Angell's status as an educator is heightened by his art. When he speaks to kids, teachers or policy-makers, he uses the sculptures or his detailed sketches to grab their attention. While other educators push for more technology and more computers, he pushes for outdoor classrooms. It's a stance that has caused some to consider him a Luddite.

Over-reliance on technology comes with a price, he says.

When he first began showing children his sculpture years ago, they asked how they could do it. Now they ask how much it costs.

"We're closing doors and stages of development for youngsters when we don't cultivate patience and their senses before turning them over to the TV where, snap, snap, snap, everything is settled in 30 minutes and they don't have to think whatsoever. So when they are 12 and 14, no wonder they climb the walls."

ON THE FIRST Thursday in November, the owl posed beneath soft lighting inside the Foster/White Gallery and in front of an understated sign showing the asking price: $9,000.

Darkened by hours of polishing and sanding, the sculpture stood at the head of a display room lined with Angell's ravens, plovers, a loon and other creatures created from bronze, limestone, marble. Four of the dozen or so sculptures had already sold.

Other works were detailed and elegant; the owl was essence - muscle and grace. Other than the etched face, claws and select feathers, it was minimal in detail but powerful in form. Its wings were tucked back, its shoulders broad, its chest puffed and leaning forward, its head turned to the left as if trying to track a noise. It was titled, "Listening to the Woodland."

Three feet away, Angell greeted friends and patrons and told stories loud enough to carry above the murmurs of gallery walkers streaming in and out. His hands were jammed halfway into the pockets of his jeans, accentuating his broad shoulders and size. His eyes were alert and each time he heard a familiar voice or saw someone he recognized, his head would swivel, as if tracking.

Richard Seven is a Pacific Northwest staff reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a staff photographer for the magazine.