Two days ago we past a major milestone in the recovery from Hurricane Maria. After seven months of candles, flashlights and warm beer, we now have electricity. Let's hope that it's not a will-o'-the-wisp.
But the elusiveness of today's paintings, done rapidly one after the other, can fit that definition. In the same way a child will boast, "look no hands" when showing off riding a bicycle; my boast is, "look no lines". My washes have been given the freedom to find their own way and to run as they choose.
I only dare work with this degree of freedom when I have a model that understands what I am reaching for and accepts that it's a hit and miss affair. Verlena is one such dedicated model. Incidentally, she was brave enough to attempt that upside down pose that I mentioned a few posts ago, but after twice toppling over we both came down to earth!
"Sculpture, I should say, is about the most expensive mode of making a living. I cannot think of any other occupation into which you have to put in so much. When you come to reckon your out-of-pocket expenses against your remuneration, the balance is invariably on the wrong side...It takes some courage to remain a sculptor." (Jacob Epstein 1880-1959)
I can vouch for that. When, after 18 months of hard labour, I had completed my group of four life-size figures in bronze for the City of Leeds, the Income Tax Inspector was on my tail. After a year of producing every receipt and all my bank balances, it was found that I was at fault: I had paid too much tax, not too little!
For the last 15 years I have worked in obscurity on a small island in the Caribbean. In that period I have produced, both as a painter and a sculptor, what I believe to be by far my best work, hundreds of paintings and scores of sculptures. As the artist James Abbott Whistler said of his own best paintings: they have successfully resisted the danger of being sold! No doubt their time will come but it may well be after my time.
Today's picture is of a half life-size reclining figure I made over a year ago. It was followed by a life-size reclining figure. Annabelle modelled for both, in between working double shifts at a call center. Hence, sleeping poses!
Today's post follows on from my diary entries dated February 13th/21st and March 2nd. The first picture shows the figure emerging from the waste mold followed by pictures of the finished sculpture.
I have held back on revealing the figure in its final form because my model has been away and I wanted her to be the first to see it.
Her reaction: Wow...it looks incredible...I'm lost for words! Thank you Verlena for your part in the creative process.
For the sculptor the standing nude figure poses a problem. In modelling and casting the spindly legs have to support the rest of the body. You can get around it by swathing the legs with drapery, as in the Venus de Milo, or by adding the stump of a tree, as in Michelangelo's David.
Today's picture is from a press cutting that I saved many years ago with this problem in mind. Turn the figure upside down and therein lies the solution.
Perhaps it is time for me to try it out in practice.
Fifteen years ago, when my studio was in the North of England and I had the luxury of the Times newspaper, mention was made of a sculpture to commemorate the painter James Whistler.
The sculptor Nicholas Dimbleby had been chosen to produce the memorial and I clipped out the picture of his maquette thinking, I wish I'd have made that! The sculptor's intention was to make the whole piece very impressionistic and loosely modelled, as if Whistler himself had made his own self-portrait in clay.
In the maquette this he certainly achieved. But a few days ago I searched the Internet for a picture of the finished sculpture. Alas, as Rodin himself found - and I can equally vouch for - the spontaneity of the maquette can seldom be carried through to the finished piece.
While we are on the subject of taking the rough with the smooth, it is now six months since Hurricane Maria devastated Dominica. We are still without electricity and 50% of Dominicans are still living under tarpaulins.
