Daniel Mack (b.1947) has worked with Hudson Valley natural materials for 35 years as an artist, furniture maker and architectural consultant.
His furniture work is in many private and museum collections. He has written seven books. In the 1970s, he worked in radio and television and has taught writing and media at several universities and workshops on rustic work. He now teaches about creativity at craft and art centers. Since 2004, he's been working with bark he gathers on the banks of the Hudson River. This is the Anima series--collections of carved figures, stones and assemblage and His Muse for all this is Hermes, The Trickster, "the One who shakes the Snowglobe"
He writes a column for DIRT, a regional magazine, on Thin Places, the Celtic term to describe actual places or experiences where the veil between this world and The Other is “thin” or liminal.
He’s writing, and making freely available, The Casual Alchemist, an approach to creativity and the creative unconscious, based in archetypal psychology. He has an interest in Surrealism.
He helped build a few Nature Playgrounds based on the old, radical idea of “loose parts”: Just make natural, interesting stuff available and children will do the rest; No Instructions or Directions Needed
Continuing to explore the expressive and palliative capacity of ephemeral materials and simple tools by making carved stones, carved bark, land arrangements, collage and assemblage.
Exploring the techniques of Surrealism
Reconfiguring the Studio from a Woodworking Shop to a Wonder Room
INTERESTS Artist's Statements
- The Appearances of The Trickster: “The Guide of Souls who allows a plot to be deeply rearranged is rarely an obvious actor in the story at hand, for durable stories are self-containing, self-defended against change and fragmentation. The Trickster works in the shadows, like an embarrassing impulse, a cunning pathogen, a love affair, a shameless thief taking a chance.” Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes the World, p. 91
- Role of (art) making in palliative care, hospice, aging, grief, transition.
- The notion of “Customary Beauty” Beauty from use and familiarity Sir Christopher Wren
- Better understanding of the whys and ways people adjust, refine their Stories.
- Changing needs for beauty, the feral and developing new skills and dexterity.
- PINTEREST See Boards
PUBLIC EVENTS/TEACHING
- Guiding Experiences in Casual Alchemy, Creative Aging
- for ALL ages in his Studio
- PECHAKUCHA July 8, 2023 Ways of Encountering Shadow at Amity Gallery, Warwick, NY
- PODCASTS stirringthecauldrn bvent9. youtube.com/watceature=youtu.be Secret Teachings
VIDEOS on Alchemy The Needs Arts
