Granite. 2007. 15" high with base.
A rock on a beach called out to be collected. Sitting in my stoneyard, it hinted at what it should become. When I didn't take the hint, the barnacle-covered boulder veritably SCREAMED at me to make an Anima of it.
And so I did.
Aside from anything this sculpture may mean to anyone - - including me - - or what we may think or feel about it, making it was an experiment in resolving forms and textures in salt-and-pepper granite.
What would it be like to reveal a darker, smoothly concave and highly polished surface on the inside of the boulder (which no one had ever seen) within the vastly rougher but still smoothly convex exterior that I "saw" on the beach?
Could I marry the work of a pneumatic hammer, literally pounding the rock into sand and gravel, with a finer, gentler, more integrative rubbing away of the inside, generating only dust and mud?
Could I make the edge sharp enough to define the inside surface perceptually without crumbling it away? Would the stone be strong enough?
As I carved, I wondered: Will the inside surface reflect light and sound? How well will it focus them? In what directions?
I made the red lines with a laser beam that I use to understand forms and find their "ugly parts". Each of those thumbnail images is actually one frame of a movie of Anima IV rotating in the laser light.
Soon you'll be able to see this and other movies here on my website. Stay tuned!.
Photos by Lee Gass
A rock on a beach called out to be collected. Sitting in my stoneyard, it hinted at what it should become. When I didn't take the hint, the barnacle-covered boulder veritably SCREAMED at me to make an Anima of it.
And so I did.
Aside from anything this sculpture may mean to anyone - - including me - - or what we may think or feel about it, making it was an experiment in resolving forms and textures in salt-and-pepper granite.
What would it be like to reveal a darker, smoothly concave and highly polished surface on the inside of the boulder (which no one had ever seen) within the vastly rougher but still smoothly convex exterior that I "saw" on the beach?
Could I marry the work of a pneumatic hammer, literally pounding the rock into sand and gravel, with a finer, gentler, more integrative rubbing away of the inside, generating only dust and mud?
Could I make the edge sharp enough to define the inside surface perceptually without crumbling it away? Would the stone be strong enough?
As I carved, I wondered: Will the inside surface reflect light and sound? How well will it focus them? In what directions?
I made the red lines with a laser beam that I use to understand forms and find their "ugly parts". Each of those thumbnail images is actually one frame of a movie of Anima IV rotating in the laser light.
Soon you'll be able to see this and other movies here on my website. Stay tuned!.
Photos by Lee Gass
