Grieving the loss of Nancy, his wife of nearly 50 years, and wanting to honor the impact she had on him both personally and creatively, Homer artist Leo Vait immersed himself in his studio. There, in the same space where he had created hundreds of pieces of work during their time together, he focused his energy on completing dozens upon dozens of works he had started throughout the years and left unfinished.
“For Nancy — celebrating the life we lived together and the art I made along the way” is the ensuing body of work. In this exhibit on display at Homer Council on the Arts, Vait showcases 36 individual works of art including paintings, drawings, wall relief sculptures and wood sculptures.
“Nancy always gave me her critical eye, which was constructive, even if sometimes she didn’t like the direction of a given piece,” Vait, 76, said. “I wanted to finalize the experience of the life of creativity we shared. The finishing of these works amounts to a closure of our life together.”
The oldest piece in this exhibit, “The Guardian,” is a face carved into refined soapstone that Vait began working on in the late 1970s and intended to represent a spiritual protector.
“I wanted to have this kind of guardian that as soon as you opened the door to your house, you would see that first,” Vait said. “It looks like a rough-hewn man and I had intended to bring it to a more refined state, but I liked it just as it is. It’s a little menacing, but it should be.”
A self-described multimedia artist, Vait favors none of the mediums he works with. Instead, whatever statement he wants to make is based on the material he works with.
“Nature never proceeds in a straight line, as it is always experimenting with possibilities,” he said in his artist statement. “Water seeps from a spring that becomes a brook, nosing its way downhill, searching a path that cleans pebbles and stones in no hurry. It excites the growth of mosses and trees in a bubbling language of meditation as it flows into a pooled glen. I approach my work in this stream dream as I nose my way into raw wood, ready to change direction as the grain of the medium dictates. No hurry. The echo of the stream and water sprites are the guiding principles when I develop sculptural shapes that may become an animal or an abstract vision.”
In his freestanding sculpture, “Three Part Harmony,” three round pieces are stacked one upon another. The top one is made from sandstone, the middle from red cedar and the bottom from colored concrete. Carved into one side of the top piece is a woman’s face. The piece is intended to share the beauty of stone and wood.
“On the back side, three abstract shapes relate to each other,” Vait said. “On the front side is the face of a woman. She’s not somebody I knew, but made up as I went along.”
“The Twisted Legacy of Chernobyl” is a standing sculpture made of wood and stone, with a seemingly desiccated face set back in stone and placed on a cross. With this piece, Vait intended to depict a deformed death.
“You can see that it’s a deformed face, with bones that are disintegrating,” Vait said. “It’s a message about nuclear energy and all the potential dangers of it even as time goes on.”
In this exhibit, many of Vait’s pieces are abstract, while others depict realism, with the artist bending that realism into a stylistic shape, making animals into flowing entities, for example.
“Desert River” is an abstract stained concrete wall sculpture in bas-relief, intended by Vait to show the starkness of desert stone and a small creek going through the desert.
Vait’s sculpture “Old Man Otter” is carved from red and yellow cedar and shows a large otter form turned in on itself, almost in repose.
“I wanted to take the basic shape of a sea otter and in an abstract way shape it down to its essence,” Vait said.
The wall relief sculpture, “Serenity,” is a mediation of shapes intended to replicate stones and give the viewer a feeling of peace. In this piece, concrete covers a layer of foam to give depth and the concrete is covered with fine sands and stained vermiculite to replicate granite.
The intentional message of connection runs throughout Vait’s work.
“My message is of a cosmic connection to the breathtaking beauty of nature expressed through my sculptural shapes and drawings,” he said. “My vision for this show is that people viewing it will feel, perhaps without even realizing it, the touch of magic that I perceived in the completion of the artwork.”
Vait’s creative journey began on one very specific day on his family’s dairy farm in Minnesota. On this day, he and his brothers were cleaning out a weed-choked drainage ditch and they exposed a layer of smooth red clay. So excited at the sight of the clay, the then 12-year-old Vait scooped up as much of the clay as he could fit in his arms and made what would be the very first sculptures in his life as an artist.
“I plunked some clay onto a couple of fence posts and began sculpting gargoyle-like monster heads,” he said. “It was like I was elevated out of that impoverished farm and, though I didn’t realize it until years later, that was a salvation. My muse had caught me.”
In junior and senior high school, Vait took whatever art classes his school offered, excelling in all of them. Moving to Southern Oregon, he majored in art in college, studying design, sculpture and painting, and just like during his earlier school days, received recognition from his peers and teachers for whatever he created.
In Oregon in his 20s and for the next 15 years, Vait began showing his work and participating in statewide exhibits. Inspired by artist Henry Moore’s abstract and realistic bronze cast sculptures, Vait created a number of pieces based on his admiration of Moore’s work.
“Without knowing him, just his work, Henry was a mentor for me,” he said.
Vait married Nancy in the mid 1970s. The young couple moved to Alaska in the early 1980s, first settling in the community of Nanwalek across the bay from Homer. Nancy taught in the village and Vait offered art workshops in several communities through Artist in the Schools residencies while continuing to produce his own work.
“Life in the Native village influenced me in a certain direction,” Vait said. “I did a lot of work based on all the Native artworks I was seeing, not copying them, but inspired by them. There’s a raw instinct and spiritual element to Native sculptures that I welcomed into my life and it was during this time that I began to develop this feeling that I had spiritual helpers. I couldn’t see them, but I recognized their presence when I looked at my work.”
In 1983, Vait had his first solo show in Alaska at the Pratt Museum, showing sculptures and drawings. He went on to exhibit at galleries around the state. Today, he has participated in group shows around the state and exhibited in Homer at the Pratt Museum, Bunnell Street Arts Center, Homer Council on the Arts and Ptarmigan Arts, and in Anchorage at the Artique art gallery.
Vait has also found success through commissioned public works across Alaska, including “Bone Music,” a large steel sculpture he created in 2005 for the Atwood Center in Anchorage, inspired by his fascination with spirals and with the concept that if the wind was blowing through the sculpture just right, a musical sound would be made.
“Abstract steel arms come out of the ground and relate to each other,” he said. “They are the beginning of a spiral and don’t wrap into a complete spiral, but if you use your mind’s eye, you can see the full spiral. The message is about sharing.”
A full-time working artist, Vait has continued to create his art for shows and galleries. To ensure a paycheck, he has also created work through his business Leo Vait Stone & Timber Work, carving bigger pieces of wood for fireplace mantles as well as the entrances of homes. He has also designed and built fireplaces, including the one in the Fireplace Reading Lounge in the Homer Public Library, with stones collected from Bishop’s Beach and the mantle carved from a piece of thick spruce he found on a beach. He also created a series of shelves near the fireplace and the concrete curved surface at the circulation desk. You will also see his work, a collaborative effort, in the University of Alaska Kachemak Bay Campus sign.
Vait is proud of every piece on display in his current exhibit, but one piece stands out for him over all the others and is one he completed years ago. This is “Nancy’s Fox,” depicting a fox in motion, carved from red cedar and mahogany, and inspired by his late wife’s fascination with foxes. This is one of just a few sculptures in the show that were completed prior to his wife’s passing.
“Nancy loved it from the very beginning and it makes me very happy that she got to see it completed,” he said.
On display in the gallery, “Nancy’s Fox” will return to its home with the couple’s son, Andrew.
Dedicated to Nancy, this exhibit is a retrospective and the culmination of Vait’s life’s work during their time together.
“This show is what I’ve been dreaming about my whole life, being able to showcase all the different kind of work I do, to have my art be relevant and for people to soak up some of the magic I felt while producing these pieces,” Vait said. “This show is dedicated to Nancy as a memorial to her because she had seen a part of all of these pieces, but never saw most of them finished. I felt that as an artist I needed to complete them. Losing her was the impetus to finishing them.”
“For Nancy — celebrating the life we lived together and the art I made along the way” is on display at Homer Council on the Arts through July. To learn more about Vait and his art, visit leovaitartist.com.
“Three Part Harmony” is a sandstone, red cedar and colored concrete sculpture by Leo Vait. Photo by Linda Smogor
“Old Man Otter” is a red cedar, alabaster and colored concrete sculpture by Leo Vait. Photo by Linda Smogor
Leo Vait has his artist portrait taken in 2024. Photo by Linda Smogor
Homer artist Leo Vait is photographed on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, with his sculpture, “Nancy’s Fox,” in his exhibit “For Nancy – A Leo Vait Retrospective,” multi-media work on display at Homer Council on the Arts through July. Photo by Christina Whiting
”For Nancy – A Leo Vait Retrospective” is an exhibit of multi-media work by Leo Vait, photographed on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, and on display at Homer Council on the Arts through July. Photo by Christina Whiting
