Warren brailsford

Warren Brailsford is a Canadian artist that is fortunate to live literally within a stones throw of beautiful Crystal Beach along the scenic and forever changing shoreline of Lake Ontario.  He and his lovely wife, Cathy, moved there in 1982.  They have faithfully walked their dogs at least one kilometer to the mouth of Corbett Creek (hence WunKwok) and back about two hundred times a year for over twenty-seven years. That's over 20,000 kilometers of "beachwalkin'".  Along the way they have continually harvested beautiful glacial beach rocks and the glistening lake-tumbled beach glass that makes one wonder if that is how Crystal Beach got its name. They even found some 490,000 year-old crinoid stems (sea lilies) from the Ordovician period of the Silurian era that look remarkably like "eyes".  Warren always said, "One day I'm gonna do something special with this stuff."

In 1999 he retired from being a Visual Arts teacher with the Durham Board of Education, and finally had the time to pursue some of his personal interests and goals.  At first he took up three-dimensional wood-carving, and met with much success at both Provincial and National levels.  One of his favourite pieces was a gorgeous native princess that he carved for his son's twenty-first birthday.  It took 2 1/2 months and about 400 hours of carving and painting time to complete.  It was worth the effort.  Another of his favourite pieces is an incredible large basswood and cherrywood blanket box that is lined with aromatic cedar that he made for his daughter's sixteenth birthday.  It has detailed chip-carving on five sides and took nine months (500 hours of carving time) to complete.  He found that wood-carving was a wonderful and personally satisfying pastime, but it took at least 100 hours to produce anything worthwhile. 

In 2004 he finally started experimenting with making mosaics from the lovely smooth beach glass, glacial rocks, and fossils that he and Cathy had collected and saved for so many years.  He hasn't look back since.  It wasn't long before 2-D mosaics gave way to 3-D sculptures.  The ideas kept coming and coming, and now he has a wide range of sculptures, with Mother Nature not only providing the materials, but also the inspiration for most of his pieces.

To have a true appreciation for his work, you must realize that almost all but a select few of his pieces use material totally "as found".  It takes 32 rocks (eight sets of four) the right size, shape, and colour just to make one set of spider legs.  It then takes a further 21 rocks and pebbles (again the right size, shape, and colour), to complete the spider(including the head, body, multiple eyes, and mouth parts). He must have many hundreds of rocks of each colour to choose from in order to get the right pieces to "fit together" and look right relative to each other.  That is an awful lot of bending over when you consider that the majority of his material is harvested one or two pieces at a time.  It honestly takes many years to collect the material to make just one "set" of legs.

Please feel welcome to explore his website. Each piece is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity explaining how the piece was made and telling where the raw material originated.  He uses an absolutely unique medium and humbly believes he produces "wunovakind" treasures.  Hopefully, you will agree.