Skin and Bones

New Ad For Beef Business

I have made a brief movie ad for our fledgling beef business. (All natural, always pastured, grassfed, grass finished Angus.) We're targetting a niche market--the athlete on a training diet. ("Lean and clean protein for the athlete".) The ad will introduce our website, where we will make online sales.

 

West Virginia: Three Portraits -- New Cut

Coal mining, folk music and folklore, and the beauty of the land. 9 Minutes.

For this final cut of the movie, I improved the pan and zoom in the final portrait and updated the credits.

View at YouTube, or click below.

 

 

West Virginia: Three Portraits

Coal mining, miners, and mountain-topping; music-making and story-telling; the land and the landscape. 9 minutes.

 

 

Rain Gloom, Rain Glory

Passing time on a rainy evening.

 

 

Abraham Lincoln at Parliament Square

Replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue of Abraham Lincoln placed at Parliament Square in 1920.

Abraham Lincoln I see suddenly,
Standing at the edge of Parliament Square,
Wearily leaning, eyes tolling across
Glinting traffic chrome, vaulting beyond
Monumental London's history;

Gravity pulling his flesh tired I feel;
Hearing not car noise, through his ears I hear
Armies' distant news, Potomac cannon
Thumping flatly; mortars I feel shock,
Pulsing the ground with their questions.

Lincoln is a church, under his arching nod
Gathers children, tourists, flocking pigeons;

In this Spring: daffodils, mute horns blowing.

 

Photograph of the Standing Lincoln from Wikipedia.

I composed this poem in 1975, while living in London with my wife and daughter. I was taking a red double-decker bus to the Natural History museum, sitting in the open upper deck, when it went around the circus at Parliament Square. I did not know there was a Lincoln statue beside the Square. I was completely surprised and deeply moved. It was Spring. An orderly planting of daffodils in yellow bloom decorated the plot beneath the pedestal on which the statue stands.

I wrote the poem after only a glimpse of the great sculpture. For some reason, I did not return to study the statue, as I was doing other great outdoor pieces, notes about which I recorded in my journal (reprinted in this blog). Reading the poem, for the quality of which I make no case, I can see, in retrospect, the influence of Robert Lowell's poetry in it, especially Lowell's "For the Union Dead," which builds on another great sculpture by Saint-Gaudens, the monumental memorial to Col. Shaw that stands across from the Massachusetts State House in Boston. I visited the Shaw memorial often, for the first time when I was in college in 1961. Later, I took both of my young children to see it and photographed them in front of it. (Below. My daughter in upper right image in 1976, my son in lower left at left end of bench in 1993 [unknown girl at right end].)  I framed the photographs and hung the picture on the wall near the front door to our house, a reminder of the moral imperative under which we live.

 

Below is August Saint-Gaudens' memorial to Col. Shaw, depicted in my photographs above. From my adolescence, I had been moved by the moral struggle in the American Civil War. My maternal grandmother's father enlisted in the Civil War, serving in the New Hampshire Quartermaster Corps. At the end of the 1890s, always a patriot and admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, in his late fifties he enlisted to serve, again in the New Hampshire Quartermaster Corps, in the Spanish-American war. My grandmother left his officer's wardrobe to my father, who was named for him, and my father left it to me. He carried the chest in both the Civil and Spanish American wars. Today, it rests in my dining room and holds table linens. I think about my great grandfather, the moral causes for which he fought, every time I open the trunk.

Photograph of the Col. Shaw from Wikipedia.

Intrigue

Brown Iris

Brown eyes. Reddish brown hair. Brown skin. Skin the color of vanilla, cocoa, and banana. Smile of sunshine. Laughing tongue. Her open arms. Her open thighs. Spring.

Figure Study of Black Seated Man

This study of a black male model was one of my last pieces. I would date it from 1980 or 1981. 16" high. Fired clay, painted with a patina to resemble aged bronze.

In its current state, the figure looks like it was retrieved in an Italian archaeological dig in pieces and reassembled. Originally, it was over 20" high, with the arms stretched out and raised. The arms broke off, because they were too heavy for the base. One leg and foot also were broken.

The original figure was reworked to be twice as large as its first composition. I realized that I needed a much larger scale to express the dynamism of the pose and attitude. I added more clay for the upper torso. When the figure broke, it broke at the line where the clay was added.

I stored this figure and forgot about it. I thought I would retrieve it to show at least some artistic development in my brief sculpting study. I placed the piece in the outdoor light for a better photo; I did not intend it for permanent display outdoors. I have since return it to storage.

Figure Study of Seated Woman - Outdoor

I sculpted this piece about 1976. 14" high. Fired clay, originally painted with a patina to resemble aged bronze. This seated woman figure has rested out of doors in my gardens for over thirty years. The patina has worn off, but most of the detail remains unweathered.

Figure Study of Seated Woman

Sculpted about 1978. In the years 1971-1982, I trained in sculpture in art classes and by personal study of monumental sculpture on my professional travels in the US, Canada, and the U.K. I took life modelling classes with Robert Ortlieb, a Southern California sculptor, and one summer of classes in a San Francisco art college. In my classes with Ortlieb were several students who became professional sculptors, Catherine Irving, Alice Schonfeld, and Herb Conrad. I recognized that I did not have enough talent, even with diligent application in the studio, to pursue the art as an avocation. I kept a study journal over ten years, which I have published in this blog. Of the several dozen pieces I did in those years, only two remain. The one pictured below is in my home; the other anchors my garden.

Women in repose were always my favorite subjects. A woman friend who liked my work said that, what she enjoyed about my female figures is that I treated the women with respect and they had dignity. Those qualities are what I tried to express.

I sculpted male figures from life, too. The male poses had tension and dynamism that I did not have sufficient talent to convey convincingly.

I ceased active work in sculpture when the demands of family and profession left me no time for the pursuit of art. The models and figure studies I did of them thirty years ago are like old friends from another life, whom I remember with a wistful nostalgia.

Seated Young Woman, Aspect 1. 14" high. Photographed with a flash. The flash light fairly accurately shows the patina. Fired clay with painted patina to look like cast, aged bronze.

Seated Young Woman, Aspect 2. Photographed with a candle light setting. Better shows the three dimensional features of the face.