Exit David

     Though the figure of David is small, I had expended a large amount of time on him—more than on Goliath, who was two or three times bigger. Why are Big Bad Guys more interesting than Small Good Persons?

     Size was a factor, for sure: at 14” or so, and with his heavily-muscled body, exaggerated posture, and extreme facial expression, Goliath was better suited to my fingers and tools, and simpler to characterize. David, on the other hand, being a mere 6” or so, and of slender build and serene expression, and built around such small armature wire, was a real challenge. I changed his position again and again; I improved, or tried to improve, the accuracy of his anatomy & musculature;  I browsed through Google Images and You Tube, for help depicting the “proper” techniques for sling throwing (discovering, of course, a world of sling throwing methods—Apache, Comanche, Greek, etc); I worked to give better definition to his facial expression, on a head hardly bigger than a peach pit.

     Finally, I felt satisfied: Ah! Now I have him! Then I stepped back, revolve the whole sculpture, evaluating David from every angle, and became dissatisfied all over again: I’d worked him over too much! He’d gotten older—no doubt because I’d been modeling from myself, in a mirror—and he looked vaguely like Clark Kent, mild-mannered and indisputably Western European. Hardly a shepherd boy from Biblical times. Michelango wasn’t troubled by the lack of historical veracity, in carving out his magnificent, Grecian David--GQ in marble; nor was Donatello, whose David is lightly poised, with girlish beauty, over the head of Goliath. But I was bothered.

     Finally, the Radical Edit, one of my favorite strategies, and voila! Exit David. Leaving Goliath to claim the field, in his agony of collapse.

    

     Brilliant! Hmm. Maybe. No, just unfinished. But now what?

David & Goliath

In early 2011, I saw on the front cover of the Christian Science Monitor magazine, a photograph of a group of Taliban fighters: a few men in turbans and sandals, holding an assortment of weapons, and with ammo pouches like small purses slung over the shoulders of their long turbans. The photograph begged the question: how was it possible that such men could effectively combat, for ten years, the United States of America, the greatest military power in the history of the world?

During the same period I had studied this picture of Taliban fighters, I was, along with millions of other Americans, hearing and reading a lot about the “Arab Spring” protest movements in Egypt, and the eventual overthrow of Hosni Mubarek, the strong-featured dictator who had been in power for decades. Who could have imagined that young people with cellphones and Facebook connections could have toppled such a autocrat, with his secret police, vast wealth, obsequious and corrupt political system?

Under the influence of such images and news reports, I began a sculpture based upon the Biblical story of David and Goliath: Goliath, the nuclear bomb of his age, from whom whole armies fled in panic; and David, a shepherd boy with a throwing sling and the power of God in his arm, who walked out calmly upon the field of battle, in sight of thousands of his trembling countrymen—and felled the giant with a stone to the head.

In my first version of this mythic encounter, I presented the two combatants just as David is launching his killing stone: Goliath stands like a monolith, arrayed in all his battle gear. David, slender and lightly muscled, clad in a simple, one-piece tunic, has just released the stone, with a pitcher’s accuracy. There is a moment, or so I imagined, just before the stone strikes, when giant and boy make eye-contact, and recognize their kinship: Goliath had once been such a shepherd boy; and David will become a king, capable in his own right of cruelty and abuse of power.

I liked this first presentation, which was completed in August of 2011. However, over a span of three months or so, my enthusiasm began to wane. I’d stop and look at the sculpture, and see problems: David’s sling, and thin arms, would be hard to mold, and harder to cast. Worse, I felt  the absence of evident and dynamic relationship between giant and boy, as forms. And finally, regrettably, I had to concede that I’d gotten engrossed in Goliath’s “war decorations”: the breastplate and bucklers, straps and spikes; the feather in his wild hair. I love that stuff! But too much detail clutters.

So I went back to work, and over a period of about three months, as you can see from this succession of images, began a process of  extreme deconstruction, and then rebuilding and readjustment, searching for fundamentals. These fundamentals involve both “narrative content,” and “formalistic elements”—the size, placement, and relationship of the physical forms.

I stripped off most of Goliath’s war gear: the huge shield and broadsword, his breastplate and leather strap hung with scalps, the feather in his hair. I replaced these extraneous items with more muscle and massiveness. He’s powerful enough in his physical arrogance alone. I also made him uglier in the face, almost monstrous—difficult to do, when I realized that I had given him strong, handsome features, because in some way he had been charismatic to me!

The really important change with Goliath was to push him backwards, off balance.  I became more conscious of this after talking with Robert Smith, a friend and Tai-Chi instructor, who noted that it just takes a little upward lift to upset the balance of even a large, strong person. So I even lifted one of Goliath’s feet off the ground: a giant, teetering. Also, with his leg up, and arms splayed out, he’s become a “multi-planar” form, rather than, as he was at first, “uni-planar”—a wall—which heightens the sense of precarious moment, and impending disaster.

In thinking of David, I thought of Tiger Woods, with his long, slender form, extended even further by the shank of his golf club, winding up like a corkscrew—and then unwinding, to strike a ball about the size of the stone which David had loaded in his sling. That stone, when it struck Goliath, must have been travelling at least as fast as a baseball: 90 or 100 mph! Goliath, equipped for “conventional warfare,” and mockingly impervious to spears, swords, and clubs, was utterly unprepared for David’s tiny weapon, which, launched from a distance, only needed 2” or so of impact area at the thin skull plate of Goliath’s forehead.

Yet while manipulating clay, tools, and my fingers around David’s figure (about 5” tall) was challenging enough, figuring out how to mold/cast his sling—a mere thread—left me with “no good solutions.” Thinking conceptually and technically of David himself as the essential weapon helped immeasurably.  If he is the real stone and sling, then the stone picked from a creek, and leather strap gripped in his fist are only mechanical devices, and could be dispensed with. Then my wife Ann suggested that I depict David in the instant after he has released the stone, or at the completion of his “follow-through.” This was a great suggestion, allowing me to try to convey that powerful, unwinding release of energy.  And maybe I could also leave out the sling, except as a remnant of strap.

Now, again, rest: set aside David and Goliath. Return later, stroke the chin, and consider . . . .

Wagner Witte3 Gallery

Where Word & Art meet and spark,
An arc across the sky ensues--or so it seems--
Until the cosmos intervenes.
Though 'writ on water' we may be,
What delights are here for thee!

And one of those delights, for me, has been the chance to exhibit a broad selection of my sculptural works in the Wagner Witte3 Gallery, in downtown Easton, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Thanks to gallery co-owners Jen Wagner (an awesome and energetic mosacis artist) and Kathleen Witte (a woman with a quick eye for "what works"), and longtime friends Steve Leocha and Renny Johnson, I have felt warmly welcomed. With Steve's excellent advice and ready assistance in arranging the sculptural works  (and with loan of tables and cloths from Sharon Stockley, a WWG glass & metal artist), I was able to stand back, in the late afternoon of December 15th, 2011 ("last year"--already), and say to myself: "Great!" "Best Ever!"

While in Easton, perhaps as prelude to its annual November "Waterfowlers' Festival," when a huge number of visitors converge on the town for an arts festival which features wildlife-related paintings and sculpture, I had two unusual "bird experiences": I supped on goose which I saw shot from the sky, and I watched a pair of bald eagles wheeling in the wind.

Transition for a new year

Twenty years and more ago, I began a log, called "Sculptor's Notes," written out by hand (imagine that!), in pen, on lined paper, in a 3-ring looseleaf binder. The log began with pages of quotes meticulously copied out from books, the first one from Henry Moore, as quoted in Henry Read's The Art of Sculpture: "This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed within the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all around itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air."

Following these pages of quotations, I began my "Miscellaneous Reflections." The first entry, which opens with the remark that D.H. Lawrence (the subject of my Master's Thesis at Virginia Tech in 1985) "rails against anthropomorphism." This entry is not dated. My first dated entry is from November 11th, 1990: "I am sketching from Dega (Dega by Himself); a wonderful experience! Visual quotation, I would call it. Not slavish imitation, however, but attentive analysis of Dega's interpretation of the world. His roughest sketches become treasures of revelation."

Over time, I filled that looseleaf binder with my reflections, commentary, and, much less often than earlier, quotations. I began a second loose-leaf binder; filled that one, too, with hand-written entries, regularly dated, now. The subject of these entries expanded, even as my handwriting grew larger, and I must say, "messier," to include personal matters, confessional at times, and, almost for historical purposes, mention of "topical" events, "the business of the day." I filled this second binder, as well, and began a third, by this time not only dating the entries, but noting the time of writing, and "elapsed time," even, if the entries required a couple of pages to complete.

My "Occasional Journal," as I came to refer to it, became a kind of refuge for me. The sitting down to it, in the early morning, with a hot cup of coffee beside me, and then beginning a new entry, enabled me to establish a feeling of order, of constructing, or carving out, from the flow of daily experience, a meaningful narrative, or at least a denotation of important episodes in that narrative. Was I simply being self-indulgent? This question troubled me from time to time. I wondered whether I was attempting to build up some kind of absurd archive, which, after my death, would be opened, and preserved, as the lasting tribute to my life on earth. Fine for Wittegenstein, maybe, or Winston Churchill, but for my small life? Oh, fool! I thought. Who cares! Ozymandias, in lower-case!

However, I have decided that, small or not, I am myself a"lens"--the only lens--available to me for observing, registering, comprehending, and taking joy in  "life," not in the abstract, and through the actuality of my unique experience of living, as a human being, on Planet Earth, at this time in history. Writing about my experiences is therefore, as I see it, a "bearing witness," from the perspective of that which is "me," to the life through which I move. If I don't write down what I have known, and experienced, no one else will do it for me; that small skein of woven color which is my life will be missing from the great, grand, terrible, and exquisite tapestry of the human experience.

Ah, well. Whatever. So now, on the first day of the new year, 2012, I begin, with trepidation and anticipation, the transition of Sculptor's Notes to this online blog, A Long Arc.

Like a folded boat, this wordy blog
I release upon the cybersea,
And wait to see who will write back to me.