originally i was thinking i’d entitle this blog with something about a phoenix, something rising from the ashes– something dramatic, in other words. but, after thinking about it for some time i realised it really wasn’t all that much of an extravaganza, rather it was a lot of hard work, lost skin and sweat.
when i was still living and working in Colorado i was gifted with four chunks of vermont limestone by my friend and boss Lee (tip o’the do-rag to lee here, world’s best boss!!)– leftovers from a fireplace she was having constructed. i stashed them away and they made the long trip to Mexico in my trailer. i’d begun work on one of the chunks by then, a piece that became “chac mool volador”.. a chac mool is a classic mayan figure. three of the four pieces became various forms of this “chac mool”.
with the fourth i made a departure from form– i decided i’d sculpt a crouching female figure. from the beginning this piece had me really struggling, and when i first “finished” it in 2004 i found myself not being happy with the results of my labours. it sat in various places inside my house, and i was always thinking i had failed to produce anything of interest. however, slowly i found myself envisioning a re-cutting of the piece– i wasn’t quite sure there was enough stone to do what needed to be done though, so i vacilated back and forth on it. finally i realised that, even should i ruin it, i would make the attempt– the worst that could happen was it would look crappy, and it already did that in my opinion.
so, i dragged it out into my studio and put it up onto the bench– it looked much like these early shots. the first thing i had to do was to give her a little bit of “neck”– she had the head seated way down between the shoulders, and i went at it for quite some time, slowly almost shaving it down. right away i could tell why i had abandoned the piece so early on my first try– the stone was really three distinctly different kinds of stone. first, there was a basic limestone that cut in a characteristic and easy manner, but then there were layers of a much harder material, less tractable and much less predictable. finally there were largish blobs of a dark brown material, and this stuff was almost impossible to cut in any easy manner. it blunted my chisels and blunted my desire for a while.
but luckily for me i’d done my huge marble piece in between the “first finish” of this piece and my current endeavours– one thing doing that taught me was to forget about duration and getting things done, to just take it one day at a time and whatever i did, to do it well and not worry about the finish line. with all those textures and hardnesses i had to move slowly and consider what i was doing at all times, lest i make a slip and do something really drastic and negative. this meant that many times it was more my using my chisels and grinding the stone away with them, not using a hammer and creating a lot of calluses and frayed skin where the stone was rasping away at my hands rather than the other way around.
this difficulty ran up another magnitude or two when it came time for me to work the “inside”– the area between the face, hair, legs and arms. it was pretty restricted access there and i ended up re-cutting the hair and other bits and pieces a bunch of times to give me “just a little more finger room” to work. it was tough sledding, and i had to develop new ways of holding the chisels and using the hammer to get little bits and pieces out of the way. i went to work on the hands too, carving them out from underneath and behind, leaving the fingers free-floating
finally it was time to work on the legs, and it was quickly apparent that i had a lot of limestone to cut away, but for the most part it was from angles that were difficult to reach. i separated the right foot from the hair and body, creating some nice negative space at the bottom.
all this time i was trying to have a “finishing concept”– was i going to try to make it super smooth, or at least as smooth as this porous stone would allow? my friend abd fellow artist frenkie happened to say that he thought i should leave it as it was, full of random textures, chisel and rasp marks, and this rough and tumble finish seemed quite attractive to me. but as the end of my labours came closer and closer i found myself leaning to a heavily-rasped finish, less texture but still giving the piece a certain rhythm and movement.
i had thought my work on the piece might take as much as a month or month and a half, but fully four plus months later i had what i wanted– my new “crouching woman”. hope you like it