Thou Shalt Go With The Flow

Artist Bruce Oren renders the face of Moses in fine detail in marble, from the wrinkles worn into his face to the weight of his eyelids. He conveys the heaviness of the tablets on his shoulders by the angle of his elbow, the definition of the muscles. But as we move away from Moses’s face, the details begin to grow coarser, until we see the edge of the block that Moses came from.

The figure emerges from the marble, but Oren leaves room for the stone to have its say, too. We get to see not just the finished figure, but the path Oren took to get there.

The keen sense of an artist working with the materials he chooses, in a kind of collaboration, pervades ​“Entropy Warriors,” a retrospective of 50 years of Oren’s art across a variety of media, from drawing and painting to sculpture. The work is on display in the two-floor gallery in Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel in Westville through Feb. 26, 2022, with a conversation with the artist scheduled for Feb. 5. 

“I’m compelled to create,” Oren writes in an accompanying statement. ​“I try to create beauty and bring order to the chaos of the universe.” But the order Oren has in mind isn’t an imposition, but a sense of balance, accomplished through observation, intuition, memory, and sometimes, a sly sense of humor.

“I don’t really plan my sculpture. I’m a direct carver. I just start beating on the marble and see what happens,” Oren said. ​“There’s nothing magical or cosmic about it. At some point, roughing it out and making the stone move in dynamic ways, things start to appear in it, just like anyone looking at clouds. Once I see something that’s interesting to me, I drill down and take it out.” He gets his blocks rough-cut, ​“straight out of the quarry, so they already have some movement to it.” As the shapes emerge, he moves from a hammer and chisel to finer tools, ending with sandpaper. ​“It’s a fun process and it’s not nearly as hard as people think. Marble is very plastic and forgiving. I’ve knocked noses off of faces, and you just take the face two inches deeper and it works out fine.”

Early in his sculpting career — he has been practicing it since the 1970s — ​“I became convinced that it’s important to have some of the original rough stone” still visible in the piece. ​“I think showing people the process brings them into it more.”

How, then, does he know when a piece is done? ​“It’s purely intuitive. You just decide.”

He retains that openness even if a general idea comes to him first. For a series of limestone sculptures, he said, the original concept was ​“semi-autobiographical. It started with the womb, and then birth, and this” — the topmost piece — ​“was going to be a crib. But I’d gone to the Egyptian exhibit at the Met, and I was heavily influenced by the paintings the Egyptians did on limestone… So this became more of an Egyptian piece than autobiographical.” 

But a vestige of the first impulse remained, in the form of the sliding boxes that frame the figures. Those boxes take Oren back to when he was three years old, when his father taught him to play chess. ​“The chess pieces were in a sliding box — the black pieces on one side, the white pieces on the other. So I became very attached to that box. It has a visceral meaning to me. I find if you do art that satisfies a personal need, there’s usually a universality to it.”

Oren trained as a sculptor in college, though it wasn’t his initial plan. He thought he would be a veterinarian because ​“I like dogs and cats,” he said. But in the early 1970s, ​“they needed large animal vets. So they put me in a barn with cows and chickens and horses. I really didn’t like it. I stopped going to classes and ended up failing my first semester. My student advisor called me and said ​‘what are you doing with yourself? Why’d you fail?’ I said, ​‘I’m sitting in the student union drawing everyone that passes by.’ ​‘You’re an art major!’ he said. And it stuck.” 

Oren was drawn to abstract and surreal work. ​“I like to play,” he said, and appreciated art that ​“doesn’t spell things out. People see different things in it.” The pieces are also ​“in some ways easier to live with. Some pieces I’ve gotten from other artists, I can look at for years and see different things. That’s exciting.”

He noticed, however, that critics and galleries preferred artists who stayed in a particular medium, honing a particular viewpoint. He didn’t want to do that. ​“I just like working with different stuff and doing different things,” he said.

He also ​“didn’t like my first taste of starving as an artist” when he graduated. ​“I knew I needed a day job.” He did restoration work on historic buildings around the country, putting his sculptural skills to use. ​“It was interesting work and I enjoyed it,” he said. But in the mid-1970s, as recession hit, that work dried up. Responding to a classified ad, he ended up working at the Houston Chronicle for 27 years, doing infographics and op-ed illustrations, and got pieces picked up by other papers as well. (Some of those pieces appear in the BEKI show.)

But he continued to produce sculptures as well. One of them was a piece he called Ritual, which he created out of marble years ago and finished only recently. ​“I was pouring everything into work, but I got a few pieces done at the time” he was working for the Chronicle, he said. The marble sculpture stayed with him for decades. Then, just this year, ​“I scored large rolls of leather strap, and I realized I wanted to at least see what it looked like, and I was really pleased with how it looked when I strapped him up. Then I slapped a yarmulke on him, and it became a statement. I have very mixed feelings about ritual in Judaism, and the meaning of it, and how much it constrains people and how much it frees them. I wanted to address that.” 

But he doesn’t have an answer. ​“I think it can go a lot of ways, and I have internal conflicts that go a lot of ways, too.” That said, he has found himself drawn to religious and mythological figures for his entire career, whether it’s figures from Torah or from Greek stories.

“They’re rich veins,” he said.

He came to New Haven with his wife, Angela, when she got a job at Yale. He worked at the New Haven Advocate until he had a heart attack, then returned to art.

“The whole time I was working at papers, I knew I’d be going back to this,” he said. ​“And when I came back to it, not only did I not have the commercial problems I had before, but my whole conceptualization had changed and matured. It’s a very different feeling creating now.” 

One of the painting was created during an Everyone Orchestra show at Toad’s Place; before the gig, the band advertised on Craig’s List, asking if artists would be interested in coming to the club to make paintings while the band played. Oren answered the call. ​“I stretched this canvas and set it up,” he said, and started painting. ​“It was a lot of fun. There were huge, wonderful dynamics and the audience really got into it. I was pleased with how it turned out.” Another set of paintings came about after Oren painted a wooden lattice against a piece of paper and noticed afterward accidental faces and figures, which he then fleshed out later just enough to push them into sketchy representation — enough to draw the eye, not so much as to pin down exactly what the shapes should be.

Oren still works on long time frames, still collaborating with his materials. Among the paintings and sculptures are photographs of a teahouse that he built in his backyard. ​“It’s actually still a work in progress,” he said with a laugh. He started building it five years ago from recycled materials; the slate roof is from a church in New London. ​“It was a lot like sculpture. It evolved. When I first laid the foundation I thought it was going to be a lean-to structure that I’d finish in a couple of weeks. But the materials that I gathered — the slate, the columns, the windows — each one has a story, so it evolved into a much more elaborate structure. At some point I realized it was a teahouse.”

Was there a point midway through construction that, if someone asked him what he was building, he would have said he didn’t know?

“Oh, yeah,” Oren said. He knew it would find its way in time.