Fred Rose

Fred Rose grew up along the river in Carmel Valley, CA.

He received his BFA in ceram­ics from Cali­for­nia State Univer­sity, Long Beach- 1992 and his MFA in sculp­ture from Cali­for­nia State Univer­sity, Fuller­ton- 2001. He taught Wood­work­ing at Cali­for­nia State Univer­sity, Long Beach for 7 years. He is currently a self-employed artist living in Costa Mesa.

He has been making wood sculp­ture for the last 25 years. He is influ­enced by the writ­ings of Eric Sloan and John Seymour, the works of such artists as Noguchi, David Nash, Martin Puryear, Guiseppe Penone and his own child­hood along the river and in the forest.

Fred Rose is inter­ested in how the spec­trum of tradi­tions in wood from util­i­tar­ian wood­work­ing, wood sculp­ture, and folk art can act as a visual poetry about the nature of the phys­i­cal world or the quirks of being human.

Most of his wood is collected from locally found logs from the urban forests of Long Beach and Costa Mesa. He mills logs into a combi­na­tion of lumber, carving and turning blanks, or spec­i­mens of wood oddities.

He often combines found natural organic forms with his own man-made objects. He collects evidence of how we deal with living trees by pruning them or how trees as living things respond to adver­sity as a source of poetic and conceptual inquiry.

He has a growing fond­ness for things he calls wood anomalies.