It all began with a daring date proposal. “About seven or eight years ago, I’d been dating a girl for a couple of weeks,” recalls Quadra Island-based artist Alex Witcombe. “She was really arty and creative, like me, so I was coming up with various creative date ideas. One day, I texted her: ‘Do you want to build a driftwood dinosaur on the beach?’”
His date turned down the offer in favour of other plans, so Witcombe decided to do it himself. “Three hours later, I had a finished dinosaur. I texted her a picture and she said, ‘I didn’t think you were actually serious!’”
The rest is history. The dinosaur, named Sheila the Velociraptor, attracted so much attention at its home on Stories Beach (near Campbell River, B.C.) that Witcombe decided to give it another go. Establishing himself as a business under the name Drifted Creations, his success became such that within a couple of years, he left his day job to work full-time as a driftwood artist.
The transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional art came naturally to Witcombe. “I was incredibly deep into Lego, as most kids are, but I was really, really into it,” he says of his childhood proclivity for working with his hands. “After Lego, I started building car models. At one point, I think I had 50 or 60 car models all over my room. I never limited myself to the instructions; I did a lot of customizing and detailing.”
Witcombe began his art studies in 2004, at a Comox-based satellite campus of Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (now Emily Carr University). During his first semester, he was introduced to sculpture and immediately became hooked. But after graduating in 2007, he focused his career on graphic design, murals and illustration. It wasn’t until his spontaneous driftwood creation that his passion for three-dimensional work was reignited. He has now produced hundreds of driftwood pieces and sculptures for public and private clients across Vancouver Island and beyond.
Witcombe finds most of the driftwood he uses on the beaches of Quadra Island, where he’s lived and worked since 2017. “It’s like the driftwood mecca,” he says. “Quadra is blessed with, I think, 11 kilometres of coastline that’s just packed with it.”
Still, he’s particular about the pieces he selects. “My sculptural sensibilities demand a certain quality, so I’m very picky about the type and shape.” He’ll go out on solo scouting missions and often find very few pieces that meet his criteria. These trips are physically demanding, too. “Tracking the driftwood down on rocky beaches is not particularly fun, especially when you have 100 pounds [of it] strapped to your back. But I’ve never broken or sprained an ankle yet.
This story has been edited and condensed for clarity. Read the original version in the Fall/Winter 2024 edition of driver magazine.
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