Sculptors, by their nature, are usually craftsmen or, if you prefer the term, craftspeople. Technically theirs is probably the most demanding of all the arts, the most physical, and the most demanding in terms of sheer bodily energy. So many sculptors, even allowing for the big advances made by modern technology, lead lives not unlike the old-style village blacksmith and some may even look like them. The forge, the foundry, the workshop dominate their lives in a kind of voluntary, all-consuming, yet good-humoured slavery.
Bill Freeland, the American sculptor exhibiting at the Ashford Gallery, which is a kind of ancillary to the RHA Gallagher Gallery, is an artist in love with the manual traditions not only of his own art but of all skilled handcrafts and professions. He spent his youth in a rural America which has largely vanished, and in an epoch where the man with an exact skill - whatever it happened to be - always carried respect locally. Old-style farm machinery - ploughs, harrows, rakes - and traditional farming tools were an everyday feature of life, and they have affected his imagination deeply.
He was born in 1929 in Pittsburgh, and was trained initially in the local Museum College of Art. Previously he had served four years in the US Army, an experience about which he says little but which is believed to have left a deep mark on him psychologically. At that time his ambition was to be a painter, and he studied under Franz Kline, one of the top Abstract Expressionists and a fellow-Pennsylvanian. One day Kline said to him: "If you are really interested in painting, why don't you go to Hans Hoffmann?"
Freeland at that time had no idea who and what Hans Hoffman or his school were, but he joined it anyway and found it a shaping influence. Hoffmann, a respected painter in his own right, ran his famous classes in Provincetown, Massachusetts. "At that time, lots of people were studying under him. He was a fantastic teacher! The greatest thing about him was that you could be completely abstract or entirely figurative, but somehow he always left you a back door. We worked every day from the model, but it was mostly about the picture as a flat surface.
"He was about 80 at the time I studied with him, but he was very vital - the energy of a 20-year-old. There were maybe 50 to 60 students in the class, and he worked on everybody's charcoal drawing, every day. Hoffmann was a character - a really interesting man."
About 1972 Freeland began taking trips to Holland, still preoccupied with pursuing his career as a painter. However, these visits also whetted his interest in a range of crafts such as woodwork, shipbuilding, and other areas which involved skilled manual work and a range of materials. When he came back, he found he was heading more towards sculpture, or at least working in an area which combined elements from both painting and sculpture. "I was working on shaped canvases at the time. And I was very interested in the beauty of materials - wood, bronze, but lots of other things too. As I painted, the things became more and more three-dimensional, more and more like sculpture."
He has never broken entirely with painting, however, and feels that what he does today is still close to it, "or maybe close to drawing". Many of his recent works resemble reliefs, or even collage, and he openly admits the influence of Cubist innovations in this area. "I went through a whole period of dealing with collage. I did them on paper. That quality is still in my work - I was living in New York at the time, and I became interested in collage there." His present exhibition, in fact, includes graphic works as well as sculpture.
Living in a particularly lively area of Manhattan, he also found a visual stimulus from the many shops or businesses in the neighbourhood which specialised in window dressing. "They did it for display in the windows - for events like Christmas or St Patrick's Day. It was mostly green and red for Christmas, green and gold for St Patrick's Day, but black usually seemed to come into it as well."
Though he found the immediate milieu vital and stimulating, he soon realised that "while I was living in New York, my work was not about New York. It was not about leading an urban life. I realised, too, that most of the artists were there because there was a market - or else they were caught up in art theory. I was closely related to the earth, as a kind of discovery. "I was there about two-and-a-half years, in a neighbourhood where a lot of interesting people were living, and I met and knew some marvellous artists. But as for finding myself, I was getting nowhere. So I went back to Pennsylvania and continued working there. I lived close to Amish country, and the farm machinery interested me - especially in the way it combined beauty with function."
He came to Ireland first in 1980, then returned in 1992 on a Ballinglen Foundation Arts Fellowship, and has been "concentrating on Ireland" ever since. The idea of Ireland first excited him when he read Synge's Riders to the Sea, so it is almost inevitable that his base should be in the west, in Co Mayo. Divorced and with one son, he lives with the painter Magda Vitale, and they share a cottage and studio - "a house which we turned into a space for working".
Both of them love Ireland and, rather surprisingly, feel that the Irish State treats its artists much better than America does. Freeland has an impressive list of exhibitions and awards in America behind him, but this is his first Dublin exhibition, and he had taken an active and decisive part in mounting it.
In terms of contemporary sculpture, for Ireland it is a major event in spite of its relatively small scale. He has, however, taken part in group exhibitions in this country, including Iontas, and he was represented in The Ballinglen Experience, mounted at the RHA Gallery two years ago. This time, however, he can be seen at something like full strength.
After a diet of New York-educated whizz-kids, he represents an America which has always existed - and strongly too - but which current conventions and curatorial censorship have rather tried to play down. It might even, in several senses, be called the Real America. It is not provincial, in the usual term, since it is intellectually self-aware and internationally conscious, but it is fresh, frank, indigenous and with an in-built native vitality (Calder would be the outstanding example if he were still alive). It also has a strongly functioning intelligence and knows its own mind.
Freeland was brought up in the 1930s, by his grandparents, in West Virginia, "along the Ohio River" in a country of "farms and coal-mining". Growing up in that milieu, he says, "has a major context in my work. The Roosevelt years, the work ethic, were so important for me. It was a man's world, and you were expected to work. `So-and-So does this and is the best around', regardless of what he did - that was the tone, the ethic.'
West Virginia was very much Civil War country. Virginia was ravaged in that conflict - which it entered reluctantly - and Freeland's family were mainly Confederate. His great-grandfather was a colonel in the Southern infantry ("21st Virginia" he says rather wryly) and when Pickett made his famous and ill-fated charge at Gettysburg, "my ancestors were on the other (i.e. Southern) side. My grandmother - well, you couldn't mention the Civil War to her. It was always `the War of Southern Independence'."
Memories of the four-year tragedy live on in the defeated Southern states, just as Ireland for generations remembered the Famine. He admits that he was at one time "a real Civil War Buff. When I moved to Penn, I was about 45 minutes' ride from Gettysburg. I went there with an artist friend and we spent a whole day there - even slept on the battlefield. We painted all day. It was 100 years to the day after the battle was fought - July 2nd 1963. They still pick the Minie balls out of the ground there."
Freeland is reticent in commenting on contemporaries, as artists so often are: "I almost feel like saying `I don't know what other people are doing.' It is hard to say what is going on, hard to read the pattern. The most recent movement which interested me was Arte Povera in Italy - but maybe more because of how they did it than what they did. The idea that almost any material is valid, that you use what is at hand - that attracted me more than the artists involved. And Joseph Beuys - I like the way he used art as a biographical thing."
He likes his sculptures to have a look of function or simple necessity, "like something a farmer might make, or a sailor mending a boat." He also aims at "an implied sense of movement in my work. It doesn't move, but you feel that at some time in the past or in the future it might just function."