John Cody

“Art and creativity is a passion in my soul. Creativity leads me on an unending or never ending journey. I’m constantly looking for a way to relate to humanity through my creative expression, trying to find a relationship between the universe, animals, and the human condition.” – John Cody

John Cody, born in New York City in 1948, started his prodigious career at an early age. Though his parents and doctors were not aware, Cody was partially deaf and severely dyslexic. As a result, he spent his time during school drawing sketches, cartoons, and paintings. Creating art was a way for him to express his emotions and feelings. He came to realize that art would become the focal point of his life.

In 1964, working with archaeologists in South Carolina on excavations of Indian tribal grounds, Cody was amazed and intrigued by the stone carvings done by the early Indians. Since then, Cody has not stopped carving. Cody’s dominant emotions and the manner with which he’s viewed the world around him cannot be hidden in his free flowing, organic sculpture.

Cody moved to California in 1967 and settled in Solvang, near the San Rafael Mountain, where the community and the Copenhagen gallery embraced his creativity and talent.

In 1972, while searching and prospecting for sculpture quality serpentine boulders in the canyon bottoms of the San Rafael Mountains, Cody discovered his “Shangri-La”, where he built his own house. In 1984 in an interview with National Geographic, Cody said: “I was climbing out of a dry riverbed and found myself in the most beautiful meadow I’d ever seen right at the foot of a spectacular mountain pinnacle. This is the place to build a home.” Cody designed and built a house using his ingenuity. The result is “a rustic architectural gem, beautiful as a piece of driftwood, solid as a butcher’s chopping block, supple as a suspension bridge.” Next to his house he built an open-air studio where he forged and made his own carving tools.

For more than 37 years Cody has personally quarried the serpentine boulders from the canyons. He carried them to his studio to study them before he picks up his tools to start carving. When weather permits he works outside. “With the sky as my canopy I feel alone in the universe. My vision starts with the stone pulling force, like a magnetic draw, allowing me to focus on my creative endeavor; my goal is to learn new ways to release the images and life in stones and to keep exploring the field of sculpture.”

His comparatively remote existence ensures that the voice of nature is a far more powerful presence than the sounds of society. “HTF”, for Hacienda Tortuga Felice (Home of the Happy Turtle), is found on every sculpture after his signature, and represents his well being since he built his home and studio.

Although John’s life style borders upon that of hermitage retreat, his sculpture reflects his concern with society, expressing his reactions to man’s moral and spiritual dilemmas. The combination of his direct carving methods and choice of stone results in works that seem to reach out and create an appearance that suddenly acquires a life of its own. Whether representing human or animal, Cody’s heavy sensitive forms turn upon themselves in poses of concentration. The highly polished, warm-toned sculptures are irresistible to touch.

While Cody’s sculpture may serve as a shelter into which he can retreat, the public forum of gallery exhibitions for 37 years provides the feedback necessary for him to maintain an established artistic vision. No one can bring life, vibrant and flowing, from the minerals of beauty in the California coastal ranges like John Cody.