Member Since: 2006 Media Specialties: Wood; City: Elkin State: North Carolina County: Surry County, NC Bio: Hello and welcome to my website. My name is Phillip Harrell George. I praise God for bestowing upon me the gifts I have and for the time He has given me, always a blessing to me throughout my days and years. To all the people who have helped me during my journey, I say a very big, "Thank you." The photos on my website were made when I was a commercial fisherman in the North Atlantic. I was fishing for swordfish on the Grand Banks. I use a signature mark at the end of my name: the pseudonym L7OO, which stands for "square infinity." If you slide the L into the 7 you make a square, the symbol for infinity. I don't like putting my full name on graphic art because it interferes with visual effects. I am self-taught. I have had no formal training. My creations, I guess, can be classified as folk art. My art is simple and unsophisticated, but based on old-time methods. When you look at my art, you have to take it as is. I put a lot of time into my art. It takes a lot of patience and imagination to create the art I do. My life runs in chapters. I am 53 years old, and I have experienced a lot of vocations over the years. I like to think of the vocations, as chapters in my life--like the years I was a commercial fisherman. My art runs in chapters, too. Each art series forms a chapter, and there is a multitude of chapters. I am an artist who thinks outside the box. Some of my graphic art runs to the infinity of space. I have a little sculpture of a black ant. My micro art includes a lighthouse with two sailboats and a sea gull flying--all on top of a straight pinhead. I don't know the number of chapters of my art because a chapter can have two or three styles, such as in woodcarving. I do animal carving, cane and stick carving, chainsaw carving, relief carving and sculpture carving. Over the years I have made many things and just put them away and not many people have ever looked upon it. To me, just thinking of making something and then figuring out how to go about it, is a challenge and I might spend a day or three or four months in the process before moving on to something different. I have replicas in miniature of tobacco barns and gristmills. I also have graphic ink drawings, sculpture, micro art, woodcarvings, pyrography and scrimshaw. Right now I am carving a fireplace mantel. My mantels are made from oak and pine logs that came out of a one-room cabin built in 1879. I will be carving more mantels this summer. I plan to do one with the Civil War as the subject, with images of cannons and a battle. Very special to me is the Hampton Roads battle between those famous ironclads--the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor--on March 8, 1862; the day modern naval warfare arrived. In my imagination are several new mantel projects. I pray the Lord gives me the time to enjoy doing the Hampton Roads mantel. If He does, I plan at least two more mantels on the ironclad theme. I have said a lot, but what I have told you about so far is like the tip of an iceberg. Twenty percent of an iceberg is above the water, the rest is under. I have seen icebergs in the North Atlantic, and each is unique. My art is like that. Right now you see only the tip of what I have. I don't care for copying someone else's art, and it's very rare that I do. It takes too much time--when you have a lot of original things to do all your own. In the movie, Jeremiah Johnson, Jeremiah meets an old mountain man in the wilderness, and the old man lets him sleep in his cabin. The next morning Jeremiah wakes up to the old man's howling outside the cabin and looks out and sees the old man, running toward the door, being pursued hot on his heels by a grizzly bear. The old man runs into the cabin and jumps out the back window, leaving Jeremiah and the bear in the cabin to fight it out. Then a little later, you hear the sound of gun from within the cabin. The old man yells, "Clean that one and I will go get another." Well, I 'm like that old mountain man. By the time you figure out how I made something, I have already made something else. Creativity and the concept of illusion are my driving forces. I like to reach out and visualize something and then bring it to life. Reaching out and visualizing can take you to regions of the mind that no one else has ever dreamed of. Phone: 336-835-3657 This Member's Galleries: This bio page has been viewed 2736 times.
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