It’s things like this, scattered around the world, these remnants of our earlier civilizations and our earliest incarnations and our earliest selves and our walking and talking with the arts and our pictures of ourselves and the world around us that I find fascinating. Because we haven’t changed that much, have we?
Tag: sculpture
Sunday
It still astounds me that people can take a block of stone and go, “Hey, there’s a person inside of here.” And then chip away at that block of stone until there’s literally a sculpture of a person sitting there. I don’t even know how they do it. It’s a special kind of magic.
Friday
I must be a complete weirdo because this is reminiscent of a bird; the shape, the strata, the overall… it’s very birdlike. I enjoy the variegation of the color and the texture and mixed media weaving throughout the piece. It’s actually much larger in scale than it looks in the photo, and up close is much more fascinating. I adore everything about this.
Thursday
I’m constantly amazed by the juxtaposition of complexity and simplicity in this piece. On the one hand, the lines are achingly simple – and yet they are unerringly complex in design and execution.
Wednesday
I fucking fangirl frakking puffy heart this glass sculpture like omg whoa. It looks like a block of lousy blue glass but it’s so much more than that. If you get all the way down by the right corner and peer up, you can see through the center open trapezoidal space of the piece (as I tried to do in the second photo and failed miserably because I couldn’t get the angle because of a damn wall in my way). It’s an amazing use of spatial compositional balance, and when the sun streams down in through the glass and catches the bubbles? Bellissimo!
Tuesday
This thing is weird as all hell and looks like a sea anemone gone wrong. Fight me.
Monday
This is one of the single most spiritual things I’ve ever seen. It tells a complete story without speaking a single word. You don’t have to speak the language or even understand any one part of it to understand the whole. It’s incredible.
Sunday
This casting is actually fascinating in person and doesn’t photograph well at all. It makes me sad because it’s so beautiful up close. The detailing and patina is exquisite!
Saturday
This is another one of those problematic American sculptures that smacks of institutional racism but at the same time is breathtakingly beautiful for what it is and the sheer bloody talent that went into the piece. It isn’t ideal, nor is it idealized except in the artist’s eyes, and it should be said as such. In fact, the features are over-exaggerated in a way that even the ancients would likely have cringed at and thrown away; instead, it is an approximation of an approximation and rather more like an idealized caricature of a female form than any idealization of a modernization. It even has a bit of the post-impressionism expressionism or slightly pre-Art Deco about it without really managing to be any of those things.
Saturday
A few simple lines, a simple form, and yet… it’s so evocative that our minds are tricked into seeing things that aren’t there.