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?
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