Primož Jakopin, photo diary
Ivan Najger
The art of dry overgrown tree cavities
October 9, 2024 in the morning, 12 pictures
Most images are approximately 768 x 1024 pixels in size, numbers in front of the picture
descriptions are serial numbers of the original photo files.
Jože Stražišar from Dolenja vas helped Ivan and the author meet.
Page, texts and photos copyright (c) Primož Jakopin - Klok 2024.
54355. Ivan Najger lives in the last house at the southern end of Dolenja vas, the starting point for visiting both Karlovice caves and other caves in the southwest of Cerknica lake. He was born on October 14, 1946 in Bizeljsko, after school he found a job in Brest, Cerknica, where he was engaged in woodworking. From 1976, first on a small scale (in addition to working in the factory, he played, between 1968 and 1974, bass guitar in the ensemble Stalactites), and after retirement more seriously, he started making useful products from wood, mainly trays and bowls, as well as abstract sculptures, mainly from parts of tree stumps found on the Javorniki ridge above the village, and he also restored furniture. In the forest he selected suitable pieces of wood, and then at home he first removed the bark and weathered parts. If during this treatment it turned out that the ravages of time had damaged the selected piece too much, it ended up as firewood. During further hollowing, polishing, oiling with pumpkin or olive oil, he followed the principle Less is more and tried to preserve as many forms as possible during the growth of the tree or, more precisely, when mother nature tries to restore the edges of a tree stump after felling. If the path from these forms to useful products is clear to his experienced eye quite quickly, Ivan's talent, his artistic streak, came to the fore in the recognition of natural forms as basis for the motifs of faces, mythological creatures, forest animals or abstract plastic, and the subsequent realization.
In the photo - the gallery space in Ivan's home.
54338. Nondoomsday, 2018, white hornbeam burl with metal mirrors, 37 x 34 x 25 cm and 3.68 kg.
The author found this sculpture the most outstanding. The preapocalyptic time we live in and one of its most visible harbingers, the plague of our days, which has touched, if not every family, at least someone from a wider kinship, found an elegant reflection in many works of Ivan Najger. The tree cancer, which also spread a lot in Slovenia, especially after the experiments in the earth's atmosphere that reached a peak with the explosion of a 50-megaton thermonuclear atomic bomb in 1961 over the Arctic Ocean - the destiny had it that Ivan was also the codename of the project - has created a rounded wooden body with a grooved surface. Ivan had a lot of interesting work with it, all the time with great care to take away as little as possible, and Nondoomsday was born.
54339. Front detail...
54340. ... close view of the right side from a bird's eye view ...
54342. ... and from a frog's perspective.
54343. Finally, a wider view from the right side.
54344. Wall lamp shade with abstract motif, 2024, fir stump, 46 x 15 x 22 cm ...
54345. ... and with a vineyard motif, 2018, fir stump, 50 x 26 x 24 cm
54352. Wayfarer, 2020, burnt fir stump, 39 x 20 x 41 cm
54351. Wayfarer, head only
54353. Cauliflower (detail), 2022, beech tree stump, 9 x 6 cm
54350. A portrait of Ivan, with a small addition as a memory of old times and with an almost one meter long tray, which stands upright in the corner of the space in the first photo, used as a background.
Related pages:
Cave Under the Karlovec Castle, October 3, 2024
Jama pod cesto (Cave under the road), October 9, 2024
This page, text and photos by Primož Jakopin,
member of the Ljubljana Cave Exploration Society (DZRJL).
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Page initiated on October 10, 2024; date of the last change: October 16, 2024.
URL: https://www.jakopin.net/primoz/slike/2024/PJ20241009D_en.php
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