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Design
'Working drawings' to scale, interrogative
not merely descriptive, meditations on form, serving as conceptions.
Some are pictures, but anticipate carvings by opening up the two
dimensional plane of the paper. Drawing is a parachute, the descent
into matter, evidence of vision, virtual reality, the crystallizing
of sensibility. If one can't draw one can't see, then what on
earth is one about to do? Without a conception, what kind of expansion
can there be?
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Virgin and Child after Veit
Stoss, ca.1510.
An extraordinary image expressing the union of opposites, conceived
on the cusp of the Northern Renaissance. Her face derives from stone
carvings of the gothic cathedrals, but the high forehead and plucked
eyebrows belong to a woman of her time. The face is a mask, its
quality of inwardness suggesting the world of Buddhism touched by
the Holy Ghost. Her crown prefigures the tortured twistings of the
crown of thorns. From one side she has the profile of an old woman,
the drapery falling in featureless passive folds; from the other,
she has the face of a young girl, the drapery active, dynamic, lifted
and tossed about by the force of an unseen wind. The drapery is
everywhere symbolic, moved by divine energy, full of conical chalice
forms signifying her rôle as perfect vessel. On her right
hip are curious folds resembling female genitalia external to her
inner body. The child with tightly coiled spiral ringlets and radiant
expression is a little sun god.
A working drawing for a still unfinished carving in limewood.
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