Pieter VanZanden loves garbage.
The 51-year-old artist came to his art relatively late in life, around 2013, but when he did he was influenced to use garbage and recycled materials because of all the ways he had made a living in the past — extracting natural resources. VanZanden worked for a snowboard manufacturer, as a fisherman in Alaska, as a mechanic for the local refinery, and as a carpenter building houses. He feels he’s done enough extraction in those lines of work that when it comes to art, he would rather take existing materials that might get thrown away and turn them into something else.
Works by Pieter VanZanden
Photo by Nancy K. Crowell/La Conner Community News
That’s how the giant Pacific octopus he’s just finished came into being. VanZanden worked on a house his brother was building for a couple who had to remove a madrone tree from the yard for construction. The couple wanted every tree they took down to return to the house and they commissioned VanZanden to create an art piece out of the madrone.
“I don’t do commissions, by the way,” VanZanden notes, “but this fell into place because it was part of the house we were building.”
The octopus is impressive and fills a large space in The Chop Shop, VanZanden’s shared studio space in Edison. He explains that he has already built the infrastructure to mount the piece on two walls in the house. In an imaginative feat of reverse engineering, the carpenter/artist took the dimensions from that infrastructure and applied them to what he could create in three dimensions, built a frame for the sculpture then fit the wood around the frame.
Although he works in just about any medium, it’s the work that comes from spare parts and tossaway objects that are the most intriguing and probably hold the most satisfaction for him personally.
Early in his exploration of art he took toy soldiers he had collected from friends who moved away when he grew up in Oak Harbor and constructed a life-size soldier. Hanging from the ceiling of his shop is a fish made from nails a hardware store was going to throw away. There’s also a bird that folds up into an egg, made from the satellite dish that once topped the Rhododendron Cafe. He and wife Lucy Mae, owner of Todd’s Monuments, saved their own garbage for seven years and together built a giant metal crab filled with that garbage that now lurks atop an outbuilding behind Terramar brewstillery.
VanZanden thinks about the big picture of modern life a lot and often infuses his sculptures with irony, although lately he says he’s stopped trying to send messages with his work and just recreates animals he has known and seen. He says that, yet he’s currently working on a piece combining a cat skeleton with a pigeon skeleton — a striking commentary on genetic modification and the future it suggests.VanZanden pays close attention to what is happening with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what genetic scientists are doing. Some of the creatures he creates may seem wildly improbable, he says they are all based on what is currently happening. VanZanden thinks a lot about our impact, as humans, on the environment and is almost apologetic about building the octopus out of wood, noting, “I normally don’t use wood, I would rather see the trees growing.”
He cites the death of two good friends in Chuckanut Bay as the trigger that prompted him to think about what he wanted to do with his life and his choice to move toward art. That was a good move for the kid who started with LEGOs. He’s now transferring his accumulated skills to art that is provocative, entertaining, and amusing. And he’s getting recognition for it. VanZanden has been an invitational artist in La Conner’s “ArtsAlive!” several times and has shown at Smith and Vallee Gallery. And while his art may use recycled materials, it is decidedly original.
Nancy K. Crowell is a photographer, photo editor, and a general assignment reporter.
