Monday, January 18, 2016

Horse Culture



One of my early works was this Paleolithic
Horse shown at left.





Horse Culture evolved slowly beginning with a piece of steel I believe is a catalytic converter heat shield found on the side of a road in New Hampshire.  In combination with the toe section of a woman's white shoe (formerly my wife's), a head emerged.


By itself, this was a suggestion of a head.  In mounting this on the section of a mortised beam from an demolished barn, a figure developed.  The mouth, formed from the heel of the same shoe and wire clippings plus a vertebrae from an unknown animal pushed the figure towards the horse-like shape shown here.

The significant move towards the title came when I added a previously made figure as the rider.  Discovering both the logic of the form and the import of humanity's connection to the horse both in the time when it was transportation, a war machine, and a revered animal with a unique spiritual link to humankind, brought other elements into play as well as the first use of oil paints (from a 50 year-old painting box).





Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Martyrs and Saints

The appearance of martyrs and saints as figures in my work may seem strange as I am a Jew.  Yet, as Carl Jung observed, we have access to a 'collective unconscious' or ancestral memories that are causal.  If artists stopped to ask the why and where of their every stroke, we wouldn't get past the studio door.
Fukushima
I can attribute these figures to the process that creates them, a balance between intuition and intention; they grow from the found objects and are shaped by my sense of symbolic 'rightness'.

Shackled

Saint Mona