Sculpture and the Books of Summer

Tim's Used Books is one of my favorite places in Provincetown, MA.,- there's only so much beach and eating I can do. Tim's has an amazing selection of books. I bypass the fiction room entirely and head for the art/architecture/garden room. I've gotten obscure Japanese sculpture catalogs, out of print garden theory books and many other finds at very good prices.

Tim's is a cell phone free zone. Nothing is computerized, there is NO computer. He has the inventory all in his head. Only in the last couple of years has there been an electric cash register.

Good books mean heavy luggage.

This year's books are

The World As Sculpture by James Hall. It's a vivid, highly entertaining guide, illustrated throughout, and traces the changing understanding of sculpture from menial labor, a blue collar trade, to the growing importance of sculpture as art. Essential reading for anyone interested in the arts.

Architectural Ornament - Banishment and Return by Brent Brolin "Architectural Ornament reveals the fascinating interplay of art, society, politics, and commerce from antiquity through modernism. It explains ornament's near demise and recent revival."
-I wanted more examples of ornament from different eras, but enjoyed it's premises: Sculptures rise from menial labor to art, and the concurrent, ongoing battle between popular taste and the avant guard.

Canterbury Cathedral and Its Romanesque Sculpture by Deborah Kahn.
The 11th and 12th century sculpture at Canterbury provides a wider range of sculptural styles than can be found in any English cathedral. Deborah Kahn here traces the development of the Romanesque from its sources in Northern France and its influences from Germany and Italy, and discusses its interaction with indigenous styles. Good photographs.
-Because somehow I cannot have too many books on Romanesque art.

The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder
These essays, first published in 1990, stand as centerpiece of Snyder's work and thought. Future readers will come to see this book as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture.

Sculpture- Babies and Boulders 2

Today Brandon and Abbey and I the boulder 40 feet to it's new location by the stairs. It looks like it has always been there. Only we know the sweaty truth. That's the final photo with Abbey showing her biceps of steel. Seriously, she is strong. We couldn't have done that rock without her.

Today's baby was Georgia, Abbey's 2 year old.
More contrasts: Georgia jumping up and down on the trampoline holding a red balloon, shouting "Look at me!" as we levered steel pry bars, ran roller pipe, chucked and pushed. Once we got to the compacted gravel it moved quickly. Cheered on my a tiny child.

Way more fun than deskwork.

Sculpture- Babies and Boulders

It a boulder.
The neighbor doesn't want it.
I want it too much.
It's part of the curse of being a sculptor. I lust for large heavy objects that are difficult to move. And then I move them.

My friend Brandon came over to help. Mondays through Wednesdays, Daddy Brandon cares for baby Vivian. It made for an interesting morning of contrasts.

Move the boulder a fractional amount,
pause, feed, change or bounce the baby.
Move the boulder another incremental amount.
Move baby out of path of boulder and pry bars....

Baby sleeping, move boulder very quietly.

Low frequency sounds, grunts and conversation are okay.
High frequency sounds of pipes clanging or sudden swearing not okay.
More later.

Sculpture and Animism

"Eventually all landscape painters become religious."

I'd say all sculptors, figurative AND abstract, are animists.

Sculptors love both the material and the processes we use to tell our stories. When we work, clay becomes flesh, wood becomes feathers, steel beams balance at precarious angles, forms manifest.

That's why I include animation as sculpture. It's another way of seeing and relating to objects. Stop animation means making thousands of decisions about inanimate objects, changing, re-fabricating, remodeling them. If you enjoyed Jan Svankmajer's Game With Stones, you'll love his take on Alice in Wonderland.

Follow the Youtube link to see the entire film. The caterpillar is amazing. Listen for how he uses sound as distinct objects to tell the story.

Sculpture and Making Things

Found this info on Robin Wood's Woodcraft. The following is from his post.

Dr Alan Reece of Pearson Engineering warns that “de-industrialisation” is causing national decay and the loss of skills in physical science. He blames the concentration of political power in the City, amid men who “know little about anything but money and, as we have painfully learned, little about that either.”

Well before the banking crisis, it seemed to me that there is little health in a society where the pinnacles of achievement are seen to be smooth talking, celebrity, gimmicky marketing, formulaic admin and moving money around in imaginary packets. I would go further and say the next layer, service and leisure providers and “caring” professions, while good and essential, are still not enough. Not for everyone: not for a society as a whole.

To feel good about your work, as an individual and a society, to be both emotionally satisfied and economically safe, you have to make stuff. Put things together, improve them, sell them to admiring customers. Ask any caveman rolling his first wheel; ask any small child trotting home from school with an eggbox model. Then ask the same child ten years later how satisfied he or she is with what passes for physical creativity in the modern risk-averse classroom: the desktop-published folder of design and technology, chronicling a project never actually made; the “food-tech” folder with cutout pictures of flans and lists of cooking temperatures, which somehow never led to an actual pizza.
To read the entire article click here

Sculpture and Fractle Relationships

From the book Fractals the patterns of chaos by John Briggs. He phrases the creative dilemma nicely.

"Instead of illustrating nature, the pictures want to work like nature. They should be like life forms, each in its own fractal way reflects the dynamic system of nature as a whole. The wholistic element is an essential feature of the new (old) aesthetic appreciation.

It's why when you see a colored pebble gleaming on a beach among a jumble of othess and take it home, it may not look as lovely on the shelf as it did in the natural chaos where you found it.

Chaos affirms that individual details matter. Artists know that like the sensitivity of a chaotic dynamical system, a change on small part of a painting or poem may destroy or transform the work."

Sculpture and "A Game With Stones"

Having just spent a week at the beach looking at beach stones, I loved Jan Svankmajer's "Spiel mit Steinen" or A Game With Stones. Using the simplest of materials, it's funny, a little ominous, an enigmatic delight.

Jan Švankmajer (born 4 September 1934 in Prague) is a Czech surrealist artist. His work spans several media. He is known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Quay and many others.

This and more of Svankajer's films can be found on DPT's Style Channel on YouTube