Everything starts somewhere. Girly Curl punctuates my career and starts a chain of challenges I shall never finish. But what happened?
Fear, I guess. Fear of being like everyone else.
I spent over a decade paying my dues with clay and wax and figures big and small. I studied Rodin. Rodin studied Michelangelo, learning from his stalking horse and then creating like never before. At first, I wanted to be like Rodin, the sculptor genius who changed sculpture forever, not a bad goal I figured. But I figured wrong.
Trumpeter Miles Davis said, “It takes a long time to sound like yourself.” True for music and true for any art. I knew how to copy others’ style but I didn’t have my own style. In my 200 some-odd books on art, maybe three are actually on art and the others are on art technique. One in particular blasts “second-hand art” —art like everyone else’s—art that has been done before. So I set out to sound like myself, not Rodin. First, I had to dig down to find that kernel which most motivated me, that element creating the magnet. It took a while, but finally, I hit it.
Gesture.
Communication of emotion from a human form. Gesture energizes the sculpture and energizes me. Everything I now make has to stand the test of gesture. Girly Curl simply turns for her gesture. The head, the torso, the hips and the foot each point their own direction, then the symmetrical doppelgänger does the same. Gesture twice!
So many elements, the white color, the flowing shape, the negative space, all came together to tell me I was on the right road—alone—but on the right road.
Commissioned by the Loveland High Plains Art Council for permanent collection, Benson Sculpture Park, Loveland, Colorado, 2013 2020 Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Permanent collection Sheridan, Wyoming, 2023