Sculpture and the Cryptic Mark Jenkins

A man of few word, Mark Jenkins lets his subversive sculpture and installations do the talking. There's darker work on his website.

Sculpture and Bourdelle's Hercules the Archer

Encountering famous art unexpectedly is like running into a unicorn.
"What are YOU doing HERE?"

This sculpture was at the same ongoing estate sale where I found Oscar. The deceased gentleman had an incredible eye and a long time to collect. I'd love to know the story of how he came by this sculpture. Too late to buy it myself, I could only rend my garments and gnash my teeth and hope that the purchaser knows what a great deal he got.

The sculpture, a plaster cast from the table sized edition, is known by the grand title of Herakles the Archer Killing the Stymphalian Birds.

Created in 1909 by French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, the sculpture depicts Hercules' Sixth Labor. Hercules was required to destroy a huge flock of man-eating birds at a lake near the town of Stymphalos. After Hercules was aided by Athena who gave him a pair of clappers to scare the birds from their hiding place, he was able to pick them off with his bow and poison-tipped arrows.

But like seeing a unicorn, meeting Bourdelle's Hercules made my day....

Contact Improvisation and CITV

Years ago, after seeing us dance, a child asked us if "we danced in the river?" We both loved that question. Here's a performance
Carolyn Stuart and I did at The West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival.
This video resurfaced after a couple of years... The color is off ( we're wearing soft blues) and the camera shaky, but it's better than that vanished space dance disappears to when it's finished.

A lot of Contact Improvisation performance is high flying, high energy. We wanted to create a gentle flowing dance instead, and called our piece "in the River".

Sculpture and Bruce Johnson

photos from Johnson's website: FormandEnergy.com

My friend, Janet Yang, visited the Ren Brown Gallery in Bodega Bay, California and turned me on the powerful sculpture of Bruce Johnson.

His current body of work is called “UPROOTED". He uses redwood stumps and roots and fabricates copper "boulders" to play with the juxtaposition of lines of energy, mass, gravity and energy. His large scale work is just stunning. Check out his Poetry House on his website to see a wonderful marriage of art and architecture.

See more of Bruce Johnson's work here

Sculpture and Bubble Rings

Anything to do with water has my attention. I'm calling these bubbles sculpture because they're perfect dimensional circles of air moving through space. There is no more primal shape than that.

This lovely video (music: "Half way through the woods", by Stephen Sondheim) shows dolphins playing with bubble rings that they generate by blowing air out their blow holes. The ring has surprising strength and tenacity. (a whole study needs to be done on that!)

Inventor David Whiteis has created what he calls "BUBBLE RINGS, " just like the dolphins. They're beautiful, totally ephemeral, and raise more questions than they answer. (my favorite aspect of creativity.) It turns out that there's an entire category on youtube of folks blowing these beautiful shapes.

Click here to see four simultaneous videos on the WaterShapes site.
or go to David Whiteis's website: Bubblerings.com

Sculpture - Placement and Context

Sculpture doesn't have to be large or expensive to be wonderfully effective.

Selection, Placement and Context, are often as important as the art object itself. They frame how we see art.

Selection means means taking it out of it's retail context - perhaps ignoring dozens of others just like it, and putting it in a new situation. Selection means knowing what you're looking at and exactly what you can do with it. Or maybe it's loving a sculpture enough to purchase it and then being patient enough to wait and discover what it's perfect placement will be.

Placement gives new context to sculpture.

This plump little figure ceramic figure is holding calla lilies. In this NW Portland garden, her place of honor is just outside the living room. Standing at the base of the flower garden, it's as if she has her own little flower stall, selling flowers to anyone on the deck.

To the gardener her meaning might have begun as a memory piece, bought on a trip to Mexico, but to visitors to the garden, her placement gives her meaning. Often the art itself evokes a meaning, but it's totally ok to give your own private symbolism or meaning by how and where you place it..

In our damp climate mosses and lichens grow easily on the porous soft fired clay surface, adding another layer of beauty and meaning that speaks of the passage of time.

Sculpture and "a musing on trees and carving"

photos from "From Flitch to Ash"

What do you do when your life goes up in smoke?.

Diane Derrick's book "from flitch to ash, a musing on trees and carving" takes you on her recovery after twenty years of wood carving is burned. All that is left is a pile of ash and a box of slides.

There's much in this short book for any wood carver to identify with: picking up that first mysterious stick that needs your help to tell its story, finding and storing and carving ever larger pieces-( a 300 pound oak stump), to meditations on what is the nature of wood and what is the nature of the woods?

She develops a scent for wood, finding it in dumpsters and acquiring wood from sculptor Barbara Hepworth's private stash. Diane says she was tempted to sacrifice it (after learning that Hepworth died from a studio fire) but "It is not easy to give up a piece of premium wood and instead, I hid it at the bottom of my stack."

The fire took her work, her history, but freed her from the physical work that carving demands. "Althought I felt empty, I felt liberated. No longer need I recoil from the thud of blows,the glint of sharp blades, the staccato of successive taps, or the ever mounting piles of chips,..No longer need I restrain the impulse to throw down my tools and run."

What wood carver hasn't felt that at least twice on every project? If you carve wood, there's much to enjoy in this book.

Sculpture and Wild Things

The little one painted a picture for my birthday. A BIG picture of a lion.

What did Picasso say? “I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child”. I'm still blown away by how big and fierce it is.

Sculpture and Wild Life Up Close

Want to have tiny messengers from G-d sipping nectar from your third eye? Need a good reason to sit quietly?

A novel use for studio safety equipment, a modified protective helmet serves double duty as hummingbird feeder and bird blind. I'm going to modify my own helmet to include UV protection and a long tube to sip my own beverage.....

This first video is a parody of artists I know, myself included.
Except that I don't have a handy assistant Jasper, or cameraman.

Sculpture and The Architectural Heritage Center

Jason Bird took these photos of my fountains and some of the architectural element on permanent display at the Architectural Heritage Center's show Found Portland.

I'll be featuring the work of other artists in the show in future posts.

Sculpture and St. Francis

Somehow the 13th Century keeps demanding my attention.

I've got a St Francis carving that seems to be generating back up since he's been neglected on my work bench for months.

First Guedelon and now a new book on St. Francis. The Saint and the Sultan: the Crusades, Islam and Francis of Assisi's Mission of Peace by Paul Moses.

Before you roll your eyes and think of badly cast concrete statues of the poor saint serving as bird feeder or bird bath, ask yourself what you actually know about his life and why we have any memory at all of a man who died almost 1000 years ago.

You'll be surprised by the real story of Francis's journey to Egypt to meet with Sultan al-Kamil trying to stop the bloody carnage of the 5th Crusade. Maybe not too surprised, as it's all too current again. The spin doctoring of his myth began during his life by a Church hungry for power and control. (Also that story about the wolf of Gobbio, that was an allegory....)

Moses work became separating myth from history. Moses writes "the accounts in question need to be viewed in the context of their own times; the audiences they were written for, the political pressures at hand, the writers' theological goals in telling the story. By doing that, it's possible to decode the early documents and uncover the story of Francis, the sultan, and what their encounter can mean today.''

Moses points out correlation between Francis's vows of living very simply and his opposition to war- Francis had experienced viscous battles between his own village and the next and spent a year in a dungeon as a prisoner of war. In his experience greed and military engagement were invariably linked. Choosing poverty was a radical act that freed him and his followers from participating in clan warfare.


Read Melinda Henneberger's article: What Christians and Muslims Can Learn From the 'The Saint and the Sultan'

Sculpture and Guedelon

From Youtube's video tours of Guedelon, the 13th Century Castle being built from scratch in the French countryside. Everything comes from the quarry site, the stone, the wood, etc.

Wonder if they'll integrate solar power into the structure? "Jamais!"

Sculpture and (New) Romanesque Art

Despite the library's groaning shelves, I can't resist books on Romanesque Art, and so must find room for the two volume "Masons and Sculptors in Romanesque Burgundy, The New Aesthetic of Cluny III" by C. Edson Armi

I was showing the books to David Bales, when he said, "We can't build anything like this! For safety and speed, we have to use steel. And anything made with steel won't last a thousand years."

It was a strange feeling to realize that any of today's great buildings, the sky scrapers, the Starks, et al, won't last half that long.

It was an even stranger feeling to learn that Yes, we can build like that. Exactly like that. Guedelon is a new 13th Century castle being built in France, using the same ancient methods.

It is part archeology thesis, but instead of examining and cataloging ruins, they are building something new to learn how it was done in the past. It's also part aesthetic quest and part science experiment. Oh, and part job training and employment for at risk teens and craftsmen and women. (Anyone who's life/livelyhood is tied to art is at risk in my book!)

Amazing for such a cooperation between the historians and the visionaries.Click here to see Guedelon (photos from Guedelon site.)
Click here for Linda McCabe's blog post and photos on Guedelon.

All I can say is "merveilleux!"

Woman as Sculpture

Sculpture is too often seen as macho man's work, yet there has always been talented sculptors who happen to be women.

Two articles in New York Times style magazine epitomize the dichotomy.

The first article is by Pilar Viladas, is about Woman as Object. (Not Again!)
Stephen Bayley, the English critic, has a new book, "Woman as Design: Before, Behind, Between, Above, Below"

He states "How on earth could you design such a thing, so flawlessly functional while infinitely beguiling too?" ( He sounds like Professor Harry Higgins from My Fair Lady.) Borders Books :"Description: A completely original reappraisal of that most familiar, yet mysterious, of things, the female body."

(Why does this make me want to scream "Who? not What!")

Bayley created design briefs for various areas of the female body. The breasts are "self sealing nutritional resevoirs allowing flexibel responses to unpredictable demand cycles," the subsidiary purpose include being "tactile objects exciting powerful, if confused, urges in Males." Bayley says "In any given age, the ideal woman is the embodiment of (Male) ideals and fears."

I find this utterly boring because Mr. Bayley, like so many men isn't remotely interested in Who is in that female body. All the attention is focused on the package. Zero interest in content.

Which is perfectly illustrated by the Dolce & Gabbana ad (photo above) also in the NYT's style magazine. It's very seductive. Scarlett Johansson appears to be channeling Madonna, who was evoking Marilyn Monroe, who was lit like Marlene Dietrich, who was citing Jean Harlow. Throw in some Cindy Sherman and you have an icon of desire made of smoke and mirrors fogged up by collective heavy breathing.

"Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda... and woke up with me." Rita Hayworth