Bob Bagley

Although I was born in the heart of southern California within a year my family moved back to my fathers birthplace to continue a legacy of NW Oregon loggers. Before I started school I knew the difference between a whistlepunk, a catskinner and a haulback. My backyard was a forest - a world of wood to explore.

As long as I can remember I've built things. From model cars to model rockets - I always had a project, but it wasn't until High School before my attention was drawn into the world of fine art and I started exploring different medias from stone to stained glass. My art education continued in college but the real bulk of my knowledge of the visual arts came from the countless hours spent in libraries and online studying the paintings and sculptures of the great artists throughout history. Besides art, my formal education revolved around electronics which eventually led me to 2 decades of traveling and building pipe organs both at the factory and in the church.

My late 20's introduced me to 2 items that would shape my creative desires for years to come. One was a 35mm camera which began the long rollercoaster ride to learn about light. film and image and eventually computers. The second was a homebuilt wood lathe in which I only got to spend enough time with to get really hooked. It would be 20 years before I'd get to work with one again.

Presently my creative energy revolves around photography, image manipulation on the computer and woodworking but my interest lies not so much in the immediate results of what these tools produce - but in using those results as a starting point for what I can create. My love is the process - whether it be figuring out new ways to compose several different images together, coming up with a new method of texturing the surface of wood or finding a new angle for lighting an object. The results of what you see on these pages is not so much the end result of a particular process - but more of a stepping stone along the way of refining a new technique.