Future Outlook 2025 is the title of my latest commissioned wooden sculpture. It is based on an earlier relief of a hand pushing aside a theater curtain: ‘Stage Fright’. The beautifully grained elm wood provides the basis for the folds of the curtain.
Future Outlook 2025. Elm wood with a hand pushing aside a curtain.
The client Hetty de Snoo saw something completely different in it. Emotional: “My husband just passed away. I’m going to sell our house and look for something smaller for myself alone. When I saw this sculpture hanging, tears came to my eyes. What will the future bring me?”
Future Outlook 2025 is based on an earlier relief: Stage Fright.
Hetty saw ‘Stage Fright’ hanging in my daughter’s house, where she regularly babysits my grandsons. They are both very fond of their former neighbor from the urban farming district Oosterwold in Almere.
Beautifully grained elm wood
I accepted the challenge, knowing it might be very difficult to match the original version. I carved this in beautifully grained elm wood, the basis for the movement in the ‘curtain’. Try to find such a thick plank of wood, which provides its own passe-partout. The sides of the wood are just as beautiful as the ‘top’.
But also: a good excuse to travel to Tafelboom in Utrecht again. It seems to get busier every Friday, when Egbert opens his workshop to the public. His wide planks, harvested from trees that had to be felled in the city of Utrecht, are popular as ‘natural’ tabletops. But Egbert also makes benches and other heavy furniture from them.
This time I had to search a bit longer than the previous times I was there. With Egbert’s help, I found another plank of elm wood with yet another pattern of beautifully rolling folded curtain design. Different in shape though – much longer and narrower than the original.
That’s why I carved the hand (and the cuff with 24 karat gold leaf) somewhat larger. I didn’t need to adjust the shape of the curtain, in terms of depth. The pattern in the wood was already perfect. Nothing more to do.
Version two was about domestication
The hand had to be a right hand again, just like the second version I made of this idea. There, a little head even emerged from the elm wood through some knots. On Facebook I asked friends which animal they saw in it. In all the responses, there were some who came to the same conclusion as I did: a sheep or goat.
I thought of the transitional period of humanity from hunter-gatherer to farmer, with a permanent place of residence. It is now approximately four thousand years ago that people began to domesticate wild animals. I love interrupting all those hours of carving to read about such far-reaching transitions. And then thinking about them during ‘carving’. Wood carving can be just as calming as wandering around with a flock of sheep. The wood sets the pace for you. Especially the somewhat tough elm wood.
The plank for client Hetty had no knots and was much less whimsical in pattern than ‘Domestication’. The work was finished in seven days, including one full day of sanding with increasingly finer sandpaper.
Finished in one week
The reward for the wood – and for me – rubbing in a thick layer of French patinating wax from Les Anciens Ébénistes. Colorless, but certainly not odorless. How I love that old-fashioned smell of beeswax, those flat tins from my childhood, with which my mother rubbed the dresser.
Handover of ‘Future Outlook’ at the villa of estate Oud-Zandbergen in Huis ter Heide.
Hetty really wanted to see the studio, where I work on Fridays with my regular buddy Tom Ligthart. The association Guts en Klopper warmly welcomed Hetty in Huis ter Heide, on the beautiful estate Oud-Zandbergen of the Seventh-day Adventists, a park with trees more than a century old.
Jan Bom
June 21, 2025
