Tag Archives: stone

How About Some Art

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2016-05-25SCulpture2368

As a fallen away sculptor, which means for a long time I was one and now I isn’t but I still think like one, I can speak to art. What it means, how it’s done, where it comes from. For years  I worked and taught in bronze, stone, wood and I still see in three dimensions. My photography is based on how I used to conceptualize when I was creating a new piece of sculpture. I could not begin a new work unless I could see it from all sides, including the top and bottom. When it was firmly fixed in my mind then I could begin.

My photography is much like that. I want to be able to think I can see what the back of the sculpture in the image looks like. I want the flowers in the background to give it the depth it needs. Basically what I’m really waiting for is that new Nikon holograph camera, the D99000x HoloStill VR 1.2 mm Infi-Zoom with revolutionary non-removable lens that lets you move around inside the image after you take it. I have repeatedly queried Nikon on its release but they’re being really close-mouthed about it.

The sculpture in the image above is from a collection called Chapungu from Zimbabwe and is made by the incredible Shona sculptors there. The gorgeous stone used is from the serpentine family of stone and dug from the Great Dyke that runs across Zimbabwe and is called Springstone. This particular form of sculpture seems to bring out more emotion and story content that I have ever seen in other stone. I don’t care if it is Carrara marble from Italy or alabaster from the mines of Colorado. When you see the black forms from this grey stone appear you are seeing life caught in stone.

Art is in the eye of the beholder and I think that is what every beholder sees when they first view these sculptures. I know I did and I’m an art guy. You can be one too, whether you are or not,  just get out and look.

Tsunami

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Frozen6873

Many, many moons ago, before people or any living thing was alive, the earth moved. It did not just move it convulsed. It was hot, the very foundation of what would be land was a molten sea of stone and storms of incredible size raged across the surface of the planet creating waves of unbelievable height. Since there was nothing solid to hurl themselves against they crashed into each other, plumes of stone rising into the air as if trying to escape the conflagration of which they were a part.

There was no escape. Everything was held to the planet by an invisible force which gave the illusion of freedom, seeming to allow the waves to rise to nearly unimaginable heights to escape, but actually keeping them bound forever to this new earth. The tempests raged on constantly over time that could not be counted. Eons of thrashing, and compressing, compacting, contracting, tossing spumes of molten rock impossibly high into the air, sending what would someday be mountains racing across the molten seas surface, the storms raged on endlessly.

But as in all things there came a time when even this constant turmoil had to cease. Through mechanisms that we think of as rapid but actually took millennia the seas of stone began to subside. Heat was lost and the stone began its slow process of cooling and congealing until at one point, nearly impossible to believe after the unending struggle, it stopped. It was over.

On the surface of this new landscape other forces were at work, wind, erosion, freezing and thawing, all conspiring to worry the naked rock away and create the terra firma we see today. But underground it was a different matter. Since the surface above protected it from the same forces that were changing the landscape, it stayed much as it had during its birth. Openings were left on the surface that would eventually allow people to enter this subterranean world and get a small glimpse of what it must have looked like when these formations were alive and moving. Not the scale, or the immensity but a snapshot as it were, of the tsunamis and magnificent waves that roared across the openness that was the world then.

Here is a brief glimpse of a Tsunami in stone.