Three-Dimensional art master Ken Lundemo is a simple kind of man. Only two hobbies occupy his free time — creating sculpture and going fishing.
“There’s hardly any time for fishing anymore,” he said. “But I still fit it in.”
The fish have crossed over, into Lundemo’s artwork as well. The first statue that greets gallery-goers at his latest exhibit is a happy-go-lucky-looking bear with salmon all about his belly — “Ted’s Dream.”
Lundemo is a 76year-old local artist, a retired USWest/Qwest technician born in Tacoma raised between there and Kitsap, who has been sculpting, potting, creating and showing his work for almost 50 years.
He’s also one of the founding members of the Bremerton Collective Visions Gallery which will be feting its 13th anniversary this month with an exhibit of Lundemo’s wood-fired stoneware in the main floor gallery and Deanna Pindell’s 3-D abstract exploration of mystery in the newly refurbished basement gallery.
Lundemo said, of the hundreds of exhibits he’s arranged in his career dating back to his first show at the Johnson in Port Townsend in 1962, this is one of the most contiguous in subject. It’s an ode to nature and it feels organic as soon as you walk in the door.
“Very Northwest,” a fellow CVG artist told Lundemo.
It’s a collection of art spanning the past 30 years — some pieces date back to the ‘70s while others of his newest work will be on display.
“This piece here, I just took out of the kiln on Sunday,” Lundemo said at CVG last week.
He was pointing to one of the most beautifully colored pieces in the show — “Sacred Journey” — a stoneware sculpture of a salmon swimming up stream, the water a bubbly blue glaze, the salmon a brilliant orange tinted by fire.
That statue and many other of Lundemo’s sculpture, vase work, wall hangings and saki cups have been baked in a giant wood fire kiln named for three dragons which he, Mel Wallace and Steve Somer built on Lundemo’s 20-acre studio/home in the Seabeck forest.
The Three Dragons Kiln is a 24-foot-deep flame encasing igloo of firebrick which can hold hundreds even up to a thousand pieces of stoneware during a single firing.
Unlike an electric or gas kiln which requires little to no human contact, the Three Dragons Kiln is fired for five days on average — 110-120 hours of round-the-clock attention.
Potters from all around the region come to fire with the Three Dragons. In fact, there was just an article about Lundemo and crew detailing the process in Northwest Magazine. In groups of six to 12 they work shifts to stoke the fire every three to five minutes for those five days, fingers crossed for the end result.
It’s quite a precise project with temperatures reaching up to cone 14 — cone being the measuring unit for kiln temp.
“It amazes me sometimes that they survive in that fire,” Lundemo said. “If you take it up too fast, you’ll break things; if you take it down too fast, you’ll break things.”
But when the fire reaches its extreme balance, that’s when you’ll get the wood-fire potter’s pinnacle — as Lundemo calls them, “happy accidents.”
“The really happy accidents only happen 10-15 percent of the time,” he said. “But the bummers are probably down in that category on the lower end.”
The 110-120-hour process is usually well worth it.
“You don’t get a look like that any other way,” he added.
There’s a Zen-like quality to Lundemo when he speaks of his work — it is what it is and what it will be.
“I haven’t reached the end of my journey, whatever it is,” he said. After a contemplative pause, he added with a grin, “And I’m past the point of no return.”
