John Rood sculpts Appalachia

John Rood was an Athens native, who attended Ohio University and later returned to teach fine arts. This piece, “The Silent People,” subtitled “The Mountaineers,” is a beautiful tribute to the people who surrounded him throughout his life. A mother, father, and child embrace in a pose akin to a family portrait. The child’s ribs are deeply carved, which in combination with the stoic faces of the parents, make the piece somber. Their description in the title as “silent,” adds another element to the family’s suffering. The sculpture is consistent with his affinity for woodcarving, but is not as smooth and polished as some of his more famous works. In a book outlining his artistic practice, Sculpture in Wood, Rood explains:

“In The Silent People, a life-size group executed in white pine, the actual marks of the tools used in fashioning the piece were left without alteration. I executed this work at top speed, using for the most part a two-inch carpenter's gouge. The entire work was done in a week of furious intensity. I was pressed for time; I needed a large piece for a New York show. The Laughing Man [another sculpture,] was carved in a leisurely way and, though it is only 20 inches high as compared with the other of 6 feet, I took longer to carve it. And when the carving was done I went over it entirely with a smaller tool to give texture and to refine the forms. I will not say that one way of finishing is better than the other, though I personally find the rougher, direct carving of The Silent People the more interesting. Nothing could be more direct than the carving of this particular group, for it was done without any sketch or model. In exhibitions of sculpture I am always looking for this sort of carving, for works which are ‘hot’ from the artist's hands. Even with their imperfections and general air of sketchiness, I prefer them ‘hot.’”

To me, the piece paints a portrait of a humble struggling working class family. His method of quickly carving leaves the piece not only artistically “hot,” but akin to the intense physical labor that mountaineers endure. Like the people depicted in the work, the wood is unpolished and reveals its physical abuse for all to see. Perhaps this work was a call for action, an image of suffering to reveal the abuse that manual laborers, the rural poor, and the mountaineers of Appalachia endured silently.