James Blain Blunk was born in Kansas in 1926, and he remained a quintessential. Midwesterner – plainspoken and hard-working. Yet he was also a sculptor of tremendous creative power. His masterwork The Planet (1969), a feat of environmental reclamation on permanent view at the Oakland Museum of California, is carved from a single redwood root structure, all that was left of a majestic tree felled long ago. Like his other large-scale seating forms, it is endlessly inviting, a vast compendium of textured marks or sculpted incident.