Found at: http://www.anguillaguide.com/article/articleprint/5805/-1/131/
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Douglas Hazelton: From "Captain Crunch" To "Sinbad" by Penny Legg
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Built in 1930, the floating workshop and gallery Sindbad is an imposing ship. Douglas Hazelton, whose recent exhibition in Marigot was a resounding success, has owned her since 1990.
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Mahi Mahi - photo courtesy Douglas Hazelton
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“We had four boats before this one,” he says, “old wooden trawlers and they gradually got bigger. If you are going to live on a boat on the sea, which became the most important thing for us, any mode of transport will do. This is a big old cargo ship which we converted and put in cabins and my workshop. It is enormous; we have a ping pong table we set up on deck, it is that big! We have a beautiful area too where we can sit and watch the sunset and the kids can scream and you don’t even hear them.”
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Douglas Hazelton
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Space is important to Hazelton as he is an artist whose exquisitely detailed works are made from ‘proud metals,’ which he welds together to form the turtles, pelicans, fishes and other aquatic life which makes up the bulk of his work. “I have been welding a long, long time,” he explains, “I tried some stainless steel artwork twenty five years ago. If you have a steel ship you have to know how to weld but copper just came naturally. I love copper, silver and silver brazing. This is different welding, done with a brazing torch, heating the copper and beating it, repoussé, which is producing metal relief by hammering or punching a sheet of metal from the back into a mould and then engraving it. Then it is welded together with silver solder. Out of old copper boat nails from a wooden boat, heated up and pounded flat I made the plates with a shingle effect for a Hawksbill Turtle shell.”
Hazelton did not train as an artist, “I was terrible in school,” he laughs. “I bought old wooden boats in the beginning and I had to fix them myself. I have always been a handy guy I guess, I used to break something just to see if I could fix it.”
Hazelton’s work will last more than a lifetime, “I am so pleased with my work because it is all copper and silver and it’s proud, these are all proud metals which don’t dissolve, don’t disintegrate, they are going to be there for a long time. You can throw it into the sea and not find it for fifty years and it will still be good, so I like to think of my work as something not throw away.”
The intricacy of Hazelton’s pieces mean that his art is not created swiftly. “Most of my things come from the sea, things that I know,” he says, “They can take up to a month to make. The Mahi Mahi for example, took forever because it is a three dimensional thing. It’s a good size, about three or four feet high and jumping out of the water to eat fish. It is quite a trick to put all that together and I usually take pictures of it when I am half way through. I look at them on the computer and turn it around and see where the proportions are wrong and then go down and slice it down the middle and open it up and add some more, so it is not something that I just start, it takes a week and it’s done.”
Hazelton, still known to many on Anguilla as ‘Captain Crunch’ from his glass bottom boat days, belongs to the Art Lovers Association on St Martin. The Association holds an annual exhibition to which each of the fifty members sends one piece. Visitors are then given a map with directions to those artist’s studios whose works they have enjoyed. Over two hundred people visited Hazelton, many from Anguilla, over the weekend of March 15 and 16.
Hazelton makes only about ten works a year and these are available to view by appointment outside of the annual show. “I cannot work on copper all day long, every day of the year. I cannot even do it for five days because it is very toxic. After a month you start to taste it in your coffee and it is not a great feeling. So I become intense with it for a month or two at a time and then I drop it for a while and get away from it,” he explains. “So I only make a few pieces a year, this show I had 22 pieces.”
Douglas Hazelton can be contacted on (599) 526 5032 or (590) 690 456 272 or by email:
sindbadaxa@yahoo.comor
antaraz2000@yahoo.co.uk. The next Art Lovers Association show is 14, 15, 16 March 2009.
Penny Legg