La Crescenta artist sculpts his way back to the Stone Age
Artist Devin Thor worked often with a paintbrush in the past, but it’s the stone sculptures carved with a diamond-blade, powered cutting saw that’s been garnering him attention lately.
In his La Crescenta backyard, he takes the power tool to a huge slab of flagstone and grinds out figures of animals such as bison, fawn and antelope, species which date back to the Paleolithic era, which ended around 10,000 B.C.
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Thor said he’s trying to create abstract representations of cave art he saw in Europe that some say could be as old as 30,000 years.
“In essence, [people back then] were big-game hunters,” he said. “What they hunted and what they ate were those animals they painted on their caves.”
Ten pieces from his collection will be part of an exhibit called “Paleolithic Creatures” from April 9 through May 6 at Gallery 825, 825 N. La Cienega Blvd., West Hollywood.
Thor’s been into art his whole life, and it’s something that ran in his family. His father was a Disney animator in the 1940s and worked on shorts including “Casey at the Bat.”
But for most of his adult life, Thor was a geologist before changing gears and becoming an artist full time.
Aside from being inspired by ancient artworks, his sculptures capture the animals’ relationships with modern-day man and man’s stewardship of the Earth, Thor said.
“It touched my environmental geologist part of me that my art can speak to those emotions, to how much I care about the planet and the life that’s on this planet,” he said.
His animal sculptures started off small with maquettes or miniature-scale works, but that didn’t last long.
“I realized that for them to have impact, I’m going to have to scale up. The larger it is, the bolder the impact,” Thor said.
His works got much bigger. Some of his sculptures weigh as much as 350 pounds.
It all starts off with buying flagstone imported from Arizona at local landscaping businesses.
Then, with some clever engineering, Thor is able to suspend the stone so he can use the power saw and diamond blade.
Fortunately, his home is situated on a plot of land that lets his backyard double as his studio.
“I’m lucky to have a home that abuts against a national forest property,” he said. “I can take a stone back there and cut without causing much noise.”
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Arin Mikailian, arin.mikailian@latimes.com
Twitter: @ArinMikailian
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