Jan Aldenhoven

Jan Aldenhoven lives and works in Schijndel, where he was born in 1948. Schijndel has its own museum, the Jan Heestershuis museum, that also focuses on exhibitions featuring sculptures. In his own garden in 2010, he opened his own Sculpture Gallery: Jan Aldenhoven. 
He has had a decades-long career in education, first as a teacher and from 1986 onwards as a art education consultant for primary and secondary education in the Gelderland province for almost 20 years. He has been a “fulltime” sculptor as of 2005.
Nearly all of his works are constructed from entire European trees, such as oak, ash, elm, pear, cherry and nut trees. His sculptures are always made up of one piece: they are monoliths. The tree trunk remains more or less recognisable in his sculptures.
Once Jan has found a tree with a sizeable circumference, he first removes the bark. For vertical sculptures he levels out the basis, in a right angle to the trunk, before continuing vertically in his workshop. 
Jan Aldenhoven uses two different methods to create a sculpture:

Taille-direct (which he calls “intuitive”)
He often immediately associates tree trunks with a capricious shape and strong curves with a certain concept during the preparation phase, or an idea of what the sculpture should be grows over time. 

When we look at the sculptures that were created this way, we see that the base of the sculpture still exists of the original trunk. The shape starts to come out higher up on the piece and continues to become more defined. The sculpture is, as it were, peeled from the trunk. The tree reveals the sculpture, similarly to working with a piece of stone or marble. When using this technique, Jan works almost fully by hand. He lets the shape and design in the wood and trunk lead him: “you have too little feeling and contact with the wood when working by machine.” An example of the taille-direct technique is the sculpture “Lady in the long”, which is part of the collection of Beeldengalerij Het Depot.

After a model (conceptual)
This technique is always centred around stylised human figures. First, a photo series of a certain position of the body is made with the help of a model. Those photos then function as a guide for the creation of a scaled working model of the sculpture. A scaled copy of the tree trunk is constructed in clay to create the model of the sculpture. After it has dried, the sculpture is cut out of it. That is when the sculpture has been designed.
At this point, it still has to be sized up to the actual size. Using a raster, Jan Aldenhoven copies the model onto the trunk. He then saws the rough lines of the sculpture using a chainsaw. The final shape is created using a gouge. The surface is smoothed out using a grater, and finally sanded down after drying. Examples of sculptures created using this technique are “Adam en Eva”.