sculpture 3 (where trouble melts like lemon drops)

Insights from sculpture class, again:

- My teacher explains why it does not matter if our works are exact replicas of a model, in this case of Giacometti's Head-Skull (1934), tacitly evoking Benjamin as he maintains that it is capturing something of the essence of the original form that is the goal, because essence is why we still care about Praxiteles done a thousand times over, he says: when the germ is so potent, we can have copies of copies of copies, and the magnetism will still be there...what he is talking about, I quickly realize, is the special frequency of certain artistic energy signatures, templates whose resonances are enduring because they contain within them a spark of the total, the godly, the numinous, however you'd like to put it. As my other teacher (Maryam) said today, the reason we are often called to work with flowers and the natural world is because their templates cannot be corrupted by the human ego...and when we are unlearning ego encoding to serve as vessels for the divine, which isn't always simple or pretty, these organic templates help to guide us past the mental, into true knowing...into essence.

- Mulling over the thought that painting is a kind of ventriloquism, where the artist has something distinct to say and it is brought out of him through the conduit of materiality, technique—the doll's speech—to animate the doll, or the physical surface. Even as the painter might not know what the doll will say before word passes through him and out of her, he is still initiating an experience of digestive transference. Ironically, with sculpture, the doll figurine metaphor falls off because clay is already this deeply living thing—alive just as color is living but without necessarily requiring great animation, the way we stir pigment into oil into mass. How I work with clay is that I ask it what it needs from me. I listen to it breathe. I do talk to color while I'm painting to learn what to do next, but these conversations transpire entirely without thinking—in a very rapid pre-cognitive language. I barely "make" decisions about color so much as act upon them, which is a bit crude, I know. I would refine this method further yet the intuitive dimension is my scalpel and what I am refining. But I am also learning the language of clay and going slower now.