0.13 Roy fridge, 1927-2007  (Page 2/2)

I did a lot of set design while I was in Dallas…the first version of Waiting for Godot in 1956 with the Dallas Little Theater, it was called then. As part of the lobby exhibit, I put in some of my little set design models…and this man who had a gallery up in Dallas came to me and said, “You know, your sets look very structural and very sculpture-like. Would you be interested in making some more sculpture-like things…and I’ll show them.”

I did not intend that these sets necessarily be sculpture, but from then on the things I made I started calling “little theater” and they were very structural…they looked like there was a little play going on. If they were willing to call it sculpture, I was willing to call it sculpture. I always designated myself a whittler.

Thoreau-inspired at port aransas

After we started the Rice film project, the head of the University of Oklahoma art department heard about it and invited me to come to the University of Oklahoma and start a BFA/MFA program in film. So I went up there for four years and did that. I worked on sculpture during that time, but I did more film than sculpture (and of course teaching). Then I came back to the beach at Port Aransas. I have a studio there, and I kept a studio [in Houston] through the 1970s, once again with Jim Love in the front part of that same building. Later he moved to Blossom Street and for a while I rented some space about a block down the street. I had a studio there from 1980 to about 1983, but I also had [my place at]Port Aransas, too, so I could run back and forth between the two.

I ran away to the beach, as I like to phrase it, not so much to make art as to contemplate. Henry David Thoreau only did it for a couple of years, but I wanted to try it out as a living experience. I felt like whatever I made during those years was a reflection of the life I was living. It was not like I was doing this as a career or avocation or occupation—just as a description and reflection of the life I was living

Looking back

Most everything I’ve done are things I wanted to do when I was nine years old as a kid, but couldn’t do because I didn’t know how to do the carpentry, and I didn’t have the money or the materials. So I built treehouses, all of those kinds of things…boats that used to stir my imagination as a child. When I was nine years old out on the old hill where my parents lived, there was no water within 50 miles in any direction, but I wanted to build a boat. I always wanted to build a boat so finally when I did move to Port Aransas, I built about 20 real sailing boats, rowing boats or fishing boats, and about 20 art boats. The excitement of the thought of it all is still there. I also got interested in Jungian psychology and had been keeping track of some dreams. In some of the dreams I began to see images that reminded me of the shamanic or sorcerer images in cave paintings in France, so I began doing some research and then began doing more shaman-related things. I built this tree house out in the woods—what I called the shrine grove—and so built several pieces that stayed in the woods until a big flood came along and washed them away. So my various steps were first I did heroes, then I did hermits, then I did shaman, and then boats. Of course the boats were actually before the shaman, but it sounds better to put it the other way.

I consider myself a very lucky person—some people might call it fate. Okay, maybe they handed me the ball but I didn’t drop it, I had to run with it. The main thing I would say is that the art has been a great excitement to me, but art was never the thing in itself. It was just sort of one more wondrous thing in the life I’ve been so lucky to have lived.

Roy Fridge was interviewed on June 5, 2006. You can listen to the interview here .