By JIM KEVLIN

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COOPERSTOWN

Seriously, guys, how many of our wives STILL consider us “brilliant” after a decade of marriage?
But spend any time with sculptor Torsten Gipperich, and you suspect spouse Abby Amols may have a point.
Drivers who’ve been braking lately and slowly passing by Glimmerglen Cottage on West Lake Road to see the voodoo-like totems, this one reminiscent of ET, that one of the stone statues of Rapa Nui, might suspect the same.




Torsten is working behind the main house, sanding away at an assemblage that looks like the heavy frame of an antique barn, only pregnant. A chain saw is over there on a log.That sculpture, still unnamed, is being installed in the next few days in front of 22 Main, Cooperstown’s village hall, which also houses the Village Library and the Cooperstown Art Association.
It will be there for a year, part of a program that has made the stone sculpture of Fly Creek’s Walter Dusenberry and the silver-ribbon-like camel of Hartwick Seminary’s Don Gialanella (recently departed for New Mexico) a surprising part of walking down as traditional a Main Street as any in the country.
Torsten, who was born in Ghent, and wandered with his family through Belgium to Vancouver and Toronto before finally settling in Watertown, up on the St. Lawrence River, at age 4, has been immersed in art since third-grade fingerpainting days.
That was long before he met Abby in the 1990s. He was working in Ellen Weir’s Homescapes, (where Alex & Ika’s is today), and she – then Cooperstown Art Association executive director – followed her mother, Jacqueline, into the store. They’ve been married 12 years now; (son Peyton Reid, 18 months, is the latest novelty.)
Back to voodoo.
Abby, an art historian, toured Cameroon in 2001 while researching her doctoral thesis on the topic of voodoo art, which strives to put life into inanimate objects, and Torsten embraced and was inspired by the concept. The fecundity of his latest work in a case in point.
“He takes the garbage that people make, and the garbage that nature makes,” Abby said, “and fills it with a magic breath. He tries to start the pulse, to bring back the life force.”
Or as Torsten puts it, “I take dimensional lumber and add organic shapes.”
As far back as he remembers, Torsten has been “doing art.” Seriously, his third-grade teacher did send him to the back of the classroom to continue his fingerpainting while students went on to multiplication tables and similarly exciting topics.
His father, Rudy, was an architect with Bernier Peck, the Watertown firm, and his mother, Ursula Mickle, was a potter, so creativity was all around him.
He studied art for two years at Munson-Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, then three more at SUNY Purchase, then another few wild years on Dingman’s Point, barren and remote during the long winter, when the population of nearby Alexandria Bay dropped to a few hundred.
Here was a neighborhood where there was plenty of room, “a spontaneous place to be,” and no one around to complain about the noise. Torsten found himself ranging the woods near his one-room cabin, creating his art from stumps, logs and standing trees.
He and a painter, Christine Tisa, adopted the “open studio” concept, and people began wandering in and around while the artists were at work.
Suddenly, it was enough. It was too isolated. He rampaged through the woods, chainsaw in hand, destroying his creations.
“They belonged there,” he said. “They needed to stay there.”
Stints in Rochester and Albany followed, before Torsten found his way to Otsego County, and Homescapes, and Abby, and a home/studio in Westville, where the family lived until returning to Glimmerglen Cottage a year ago to help her mother prepare the property for sale.
Torsten is a carpenter as well as a sculptor, or perhaps a carpenter-sculptor. He works at each, although commissions – most recently, columns installed at the First Landing Foundation in Virginia, to delineate the theatre area – keep coming.
Like many artists, Torsten is resistent to telling you what he’s “trying to do.”
“Just respond to it. Don’t think about it. Just respond.”

Labels: Arts, Glimmerglass, Sculpture, Torsten Gipperich