Abstraction #2

A self-taught artist, Warren Wheelock embraced a broad sculptural vocabulary, creating traditional portraits of historical figures, as well as more abstracted shapes with angular lines and curved recesses such as the one seen here. Wheelock’s sculptural practice emerged partly out of an interest in whittling, or the carving of a handheld piece of wood with precise, measured cuts of a knife. Abstraction #2 achieves on a larger scale the delicate lines and incisions central to the craft of whittling.