The art of Woodrow Nash

I don’t remember the first time I saw the human-size busts that are the signature artwork of sculptor Woodrow Nash. From a distance they resembled stylish wood carvings – men and women with scarifications of African tribes on their bodies and facial features mimicking those of us admiring them.

Then I started to see his stoneware people often at shows and art festivals with their heavy beads, nude chests and expressive faces with no eyes. Although I loved his images, the prices were way out of my range. I was hoping that maybe someday a piece would turn up at auction and I could snare it at a price I could afford.

That day came recently when two vases appeared at a Modern Design and Decorative Arts sale at an auction house that I frequent. These sales, though, are the types where the prices can get pretty high, so I figured that I wouldn’t be able to dip my toe in the bidding. Anyway, these were pottery vases, not the realistic figures I was hankering for.

One was white ceramic with gold accents and very little color. It was sculpted with elephant heads and the faces of tribal elders, according to the bid sheet. It was said to be part of Nash’s African Nouveau series, in very good condition with minor dings.

The other was also ceramic with wood-tone faces and an iridescent glaze background, according to the bid sheet. It was described as a large unity vase, and was also part of the African Nouveau series. It, too, was in very good condition with some minor dings.

African Nouveau is what Nash calls his style of sculpture, a concept he described on his website as “15th century Benin with the graceful, slender proportions and long, undulating lines of 18th century (French) Nouveau.” His images represent African queens, kings, warriors and regular people.

“My style is my own,” he said in one article. “It comes from my passion to create realism in sculpting the human form.”

Born in Akron, OH, Nash has been a freelance mural artist, and an illustrator of fashions, record albums and greeting cards. As a sculptor, he works in stoneware, earthenware, terracotta and porcelain. Here’s a video of Nash in his studio in Akron showing off some works in progress and his kiln.

He also does commissions, having completed last year a permanent installation on the Middle Passage – that long torturous journey that Africans endured across the Atlantic to slavery in the Americas – at an arts complex in Columbus, OH. He is also creating life-size figures of slave men, women and children for a museum at the Whitney Plantation in New Orleans, according to his website.

I found other Nash Unity and elephant vases on the web, including one on his website. He said the images showed the unity of man and woman. A pair sold at Christie’s in February for $250. Two vases described as storage vessels sold at the same auction for $125. A sculpture of a female figure was selling for $15,500 at Thomas R. Riley Galleries in Cleveland, OH.

I wasn’t around when the two vases sold at the auction house, but an auctioneer told me that the elephant vase went for $325 and the Unity vase for $900.