BERNARD ARTHUR MANSAVAGE: Barney is a self-taught sculptural artist and craftsman residing in Indiana. His artistic medium is primarily wood, with an affinity for using live-edge, found, salvaged, aged and distressed material - which he reprocesses to a various levels of “fineness” or “roughness” - and sometimes both. Processed wood pieces are recombined into abstract formulations, assemblages and sculptures. (With a little furniture and object making here and there too.) Typically there is not paint or stains used. Colors and tone variations are usually inherent to the raw materials and are generally brought out by neutral oil finishes. His art pieces are often accented by pieces of chiseled stone and/or small bits of more rare or exotic cuts of intensely colored or patterned woods.

BACKGROUND & INFLUENCES: Mansavage identifies as a “Midwest boy,” born in Chicago and raised in the northern suburbs of Illinois. He spent undergraduate college years at Harvard with graduate studies in architecture at the University of Maryland. Mansavage is a licensed architect. He managed varied-scale design projects for the creation of public buildings and public places across the Seattle area professionally for nearly 20 years before arriving back in the Midwest in late 2018. That year he left architecture temporarily and moved to Indiana while his wife began a new professional position. He then began his studio-art practice in 2019. He takes artistic inspiration from a variety of sources, many that he encountered initially in the architectural education of his past. Alvar Aalto is one of his favorite architects, and in 1967 Aalto wrote:

“Paintings and sculpture were like branches of one and the same tree, the trunk of which is architecture.” - Alvar Aalto

Mansavage thinks his ideas for making wood art and sculpture have laid dormant since his architecture school days. The artistic and architectural forms of Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier can perhaps be seen in his work, as well as a general influence from the design of the Bauhaus era. He also appreciates the paper “cut-outs” of the older Henri Matisse - especially those created at a room-size mural scale. Contemporary influences include sculptor Mel Kendrick. 

A major influence are the sculptural “assemblages” of the DaDa movement - particularly the wood sculptures of Hans (Jean) Arp.  It was a confluence of events and exposures to the work of Arp in 2019 that lead Mansavage to take up making his own wood artworks.

Hans (Jean) Arp is considered a founding member of DaDa, and his work overlapped and contributed to the Bauhaus art and architecture period, which is how Mansavage initially came to know of Arp’s work.  During his undergraduate years, Mansavage was exposed to a major installation of Arp’s artwork while enrolled in his very first architecture studio experience.  The piece by Arp was a large-scale wood wall-relief entitled “Constellations II” - which was commissioned in 1950 to be located in a student center for the Harvard Law School, and part of a group of buildings designed by Walter Gropius, founder in 1919 of the Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany.  At the time in the 1940’s, Gropius was teaching at Harvard and these 1950’s era buildings were considered the first modern architecture on the Harvard campus. The group of Gropius buildings also contained several large-scale art pieces and murals by artist like Joan Miro, Joseph Albers, Herbert Bayer, and Arp.

Mansavage toured these buildings and their art in an undergraduate architecture studio in the summer of 1993, but the art within these modern buildings was to become only a vague memory as he went on to become an architect over the next 25+ years.  However, in the spring of 2019, while at Harvard for his 25th college reunion, Mansavage visited the Harvard Art Museums.  2019 would have been the 100-year anniversary of the Bauhaus, and the Harvard Art Museums launched a major exhibit about the Bauhaus in newly renovated art galleries with a new building addition designed by contemporary architect Renzo Piano (another of Mansavage’s favorites). Mansavage visited to see the Renzo Piano architectural additions as much as the Bauhaus gallery exhibition, but it was there that he saw the Arp piece “Constellations II” again, this time fully restored and now hanging in the museum galleries. (“Constellations II” had been removed in 2004 from its original law school location during a building remodeling.) Then later in the summer of 2019, Mansavage traveled with his wife to Venice so she could attend a science conference. There they visited the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, which also had a major collection of Arp’s work, including many of Arp’s smaller wood wall reliefs and other sculptures. It seemed that he could not escape the artwork of Jean Arp, appearing serendipitously everywhere he traveled in the summer of 2019. Mansavage truly loved the wood art pieces made by Arp, and seeing these various Arp sculptures in person convinced him to learn more about the artist. Upon returning to Indiana after that summer, he decided to take advantage of his time not working as an architect and to begin making his own wood assemblages.

“YES & YES” - A PHILOSOPHY ON MAKING: Arp and the DaDa artists rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality, and intuition. DaDa is said to get its name when founding artists of the movement came upon the word in a French-German dictionary and it was thought to fit. “DaDa” translates as ‘yes, yes’ in Romanian, and ‘rocking horse’ or ‘hobby horse’ in French. Suggestions of both a toy and the babble of a child, “DaDa” as a word evoked a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group.

“A child's discarded doll or a brightly colored rag are more necessary expressions than those of some ass who seeks to immortalize himself in oils in finite parlors.” - Raoul Hausmann

“In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being.” - Hans Arp

“Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.” - Hans Arp

DaDa art may have been more antagonistic to the established art norms of the day as compared to how Mansavage personally views the world, but he does wholeheartedly embrace an attitude of “Why not?” He likes very much that the name “DaDa” perhaps is just the simple lovely babble of words from a child at play - and thinks of it as a reminder of being around his own father (DaDa), who he remembers as the least serious person around and a man that could make anyone smile.

The additional translation of “DaDa” as “yes, yes” also is quite meaningful to Mansavage, because he often answers either/or questions with the response: “Yes and Yes” or “Both.” This is something of a personal philosophical manifesto: that humans can and should be many things at the same time. He often cites F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mansavage agrees that the most successful and intelligent people in the world can indeed simultaneously hold two seemingly opposing views in their brain at the same time; and can manifest two contradictory traits within their personality. He believes such ability is not just the mark of “first-rate intelligence”, but of empathetic hearts and minds. The ability to see (and even feel) something from multiple and diverse viewpoints is a skill he celebrates and encourages. For example, one can be both visionary and practical, kind and tough, hardworking and fun. One can be both a career driven adult and a caring attentive parent. One can cry over strong feelings and have an incredible tolerance for handling pain. Etc., etc...

Mansavage is therefore uncomfortable and skeptical when presented with either/or scenarios. As an architect he was often asked some form of the question “Are you a design-thinker type of architect or a project manager type?” To Mansavage, the “dreamer” versus the “realist” is a false dichotomy. One can and should be BOTH (or many) things. Life is not a series of either/or scenarios, but consists of Yes and Yes (and yes and yes...) scenarios. So, an aspect of “yes and yes” - and “why not both” can perhaps be found in his artwork too.

Mansavage’s works are tactile collage-making in three-dimensional space; mainly celebrating the composition and texture of expressive woodcut forms as they are, without layers of implied meaning or an underlying painterly narrative. However, there can be a backdrop of critical thinking and emotional reflection here and there. While the work is unsentimentally non-intellectual, it is rigorously hand-crafted. There is generally not computer-controlled drawing or cutting employed, and the imperfect work of human hands using tools definitely shows. The compositions are intuitive: coming from a place of unconscious cognition and inner sensibility, rather than cerebrally derived form-making. Like child’s babble, he hopes his work is interpreted as “lovely and not too serious, with a story or two sometimes recognized within.”

ON HIS ARCHITECTURAL PAST AND HIS FUTURE ART: Generally speaking, the clients for most architectural projects in the world - especially those in the public-building realm where he worked most often - are not really what one would call “patrons of the arts,” but they are good and real people with tangible problems to be met with comfortable, useful and beautiful spaces. The creative work of professional architecture involves thoughtful stewardship of the resources of other people in meeting their needs with innovative and beautiful solutions that are well-designed and reasonably achievable. It is a series of challenges and compromises in group give-and-take in arriving at beauty and usefulness. Mansavage sees architecture as a more “serious” creative process that is rewarding in a related (but different) way to his studio art. Perhaps ironically, the great architects and artists cited as his influences are far more influential in his current sculpture than in any of his past architecture projects. Looking back on his personal career trajectory, Mansavage sees this as very appropriate. His architecture work served the public realm - primarily in the making of schools and civic buildings. Working with a client and a full design team in a realm of tangible constraints, public-realm architecture as a professional activity was a service to others. Conversely, the making of his art compositions comes from him alone. Serving mainly his needs and his constraints, he describes the art he creates as “my own time at play.” Mansavage has not ruled out the professional practice of architecture again but says that role in his life is just “on pause” for now. Having achieved some success and personal accomplishment in his architecture career thus far, he sees artmaking as a new open-ended, productive and valuable use of his time. The Rubber Spatula Studio website and social media feeds were launched in August 2022, when Barney celebrated his 50 year birthday. Sharing his work this way was at the urging of his family (multiple times - especially his children), and to some extent to show that he has not just become a couch potato since 2019. He offers many thanks to his wife and kids and thinks this new creative endeavor added to this mid-point of his life “is like a second mountain to climb throughout my old age.”