Art: Driftwood by Design

The sculpture of William Muir looks something like polished driftwood; but nature, with all her wisdom, cannot seem to match by accident what Muir shapes by design. With rasps, rifflers and chisels, he has liberated a splendiferous Eden filled with elegant new phyla of plant life. Now on view at Manhattan's Sculpture Center, Muir's subtly swiveling works exchange contours with the space that surrounds them, earning comparisons with the smooth biomorphic bulges that mark the sculpture of Arp, Moore and Brancusi.

Muir, 61, is a carver who penetrates a forest of woods: hard black walnut, violet kingwood, satiny lignum vitae, reddish cocobolo, Pernambuco wood, mahogany, apple, redwood and familiar trees. Occasionally he also works with granite. Yet it is dried seed pods, withered blossoms, moss and lichens that give Muir his forms. "I am a scavenger and gatherer of all sorts of flora not thought much of by most people," he says.

He takes his specimens home, adds models from his own garden, examines them with a magnifying glass to capture their curvy novelty. He roughs out his ideas in scale drawings in pastel and charcoal before taking up his chisel and hammer. Yet his instinct with natural material rules his work. His guide is "marrying the inner intention to the wood"; like the action painter who follows the nature of his paint, Muir runs with the grain.

Muir's windows overlook the sea. He was born near the soil in Hunter, N.D. (pop. 417), and studied in New York at the Art Students League in 1923-24, but now he is enthralled by the littoral life that he has led on the Maine sea-coast since 1939. For his art derives from the botany of the place—the abstract fluidity with which nature cloaks its creatures. In carving through the gnarls and knots of wood, Muir tempts nature to remake itself in another natural image born of a natural art.