Carving Wildlife

Wildlife can be very graceful, whether it is birds in flight or in repose, fish swimming, or eel grass wavering in the ocean. When nature’s creations and motions are captured in sculpture, the three dimensions come to life with the energetic striations of the wood with which they are reproduced or reflections of a certain metal.

Artist John Magnan has tackled all of the above for the Buzzards Bay Coalition.

His fish sculpture “Abundance” features a school of wooden fish swimming above the top floor conference table at the Coalition’s New Bedford headquarters. “Habitat” is a permanent outdoor public sculpture of seven stainless steel sculptures representing eelgrass in its habitat in the walkway outside of those headquarters (Magnan designed them; New Bedford steel fabricating outfit Horacio’s produced them). He is also the woodworking talent behind the Coalition’s unique bay scallop Guardian Awards.

Now, in a collaboration with furniture maker Gary Adriance, Magnan is producing four works that will be sold at Adriance’s furniture studio in South Dartmouth, of which a portion of proceeds will go to the Coalition.

Magnan has already completed Blue Heron in Flight, which has a 40-inch wingspan, in mahogany. His current project, a yet-to-be titled standing blue heron produced from the same slab of wood, is in progress in his Mattapoisett basement studio. A significant challenge with having a standing heron is whether the bird’s accurately sized skinny legs will support a body of solid wood. That is why Magnan had bored holes in the legs to buttress them with thin but strong metal rods.

He says that getting the overall shape of the bird right is the hardest part, and that once he is satisfied and moves on to the surface details, he can relax a little. “It is subtractive sculpture, so I can play with the feathers,” he explains. “If it is not to my liking, I can sand it down and try again.”

He uses a lot of templates for visual reference, and has loved studying the shape of a heron. After completing his second heron, he is moving on to another wildlife species. “It’s not that I am sick of it,” he says. “I’ve expressed its life as best I can.” He is thinking of tackling the cormorant, specifically one drying its wings, a very familiar but haunting pose associated with the native bird. Other sculpture subjects have yet to be determined.

Magnan has not been an artist his entire life; he came to it through a career reset. After 28 happy and successful years as a National Security Agency senior executive, Magnan, a long-time woodworker, realized he had a craft skill but no art training. “I took advantage of early retirement buyouts to pursue formal art training,” he says. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and then UMass Dartmouth for his Masters in Fine Arts in 1999. When I asked him what brought him here, he replied “a state art school on the water.”

In addition to the Buzzards Bay Coalition, he has produced permanent public installations for Eli Lilly and Company, Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, UMass Dartmouth School of Law, and Southcoast Hospital Group. His traveling exhibits have appeared locally and toured nationally, and he enjoys working with private clients to create unique installations for their homes. Magnan credits his prior management experience with giving him the skills to handle more complicated art projects and coordinating the tours of large and complex exhibits.

If you would like to see Magnan’s current project or purchase one of his project’s pieces, please visit:

Adriance Furniture Makers
288 Gulf Rd.
South Dartmouth