Last week, to show extra appreciation for how they had looked after our cats and the farm animals (their efforts making our trip to Tucson possible), I wanted to give some friends one of my sculptures. I let them choose from several. It was only after they had gone with the one they chose that I looked more closely at these two.They were not done at the same time nor with the intent of showing the same woman at two different places in her life, but it seems that's what they do show. I like the smoothness of texture on the young woman sculpture while the old woman has roughened texture as well as her aged face and posture. One looks out at the world, while the other is reminiscing or meditating on what was. The young woman looks ahead while the old woman's work is internal. The young woman's hand is strong, larger even than it might naturally have been to illustrate her physical strength while the old woman has a hand withered with age.
I suppose their connection struck me because I am thinking about aging and what the next 20 years might bring to me if I should be fortunate enough to live to the age of my mother. When I did these, aging myself was not so much on my mind. Now as part of reworking a dream for my last years, the aging body must be taken into consideration. The aging process is fascinating and not to be denied.
6 comments:
Getting older opens as many doors as it closes. Rain, read the Stoic Seneca's "Letters from a Stoic"...
I like to think of the stages of life as rooms. We just pass from one room to another. We stay the same internally, but the rooms hold changes. Each room has it's challenges but also it's rewards.
A couple of years ago I went to see some art work during Santa Cruz's Open Studios (people display their art in their studios for three consecutive weekends in October). I saw a fantastic four-painting wall-sized mural that depicted one woman in the four seasons of her life. It was quite stunning. I bought card-sized images and kept them where I could see them. Your sculptures and thoughts about aging remind me of them. At the moment they are packed away in storage.
Aging and death enter my own mind all too often, Rain. I love these two sculptures. Do you have a website where you sell your work?
These two pieces are beautiful Rain...what a nice gesture of repayment. I'd much rather have something handmade by you than bought in a store.
Getting older certainly enters my mind more than it ever use to...but not necessarily in a bad way. But for the niggley aches and pains that come with the territory of aging, I'm kind of battling some of the other medical rituals expected of all of us as we get older...you know all the tests and yearly exams and things they want you to go through to stay on top of things. I've been the best I've ever been about these things lately...but I'm not loving it. This is one area where I'd just as soon never grown up. I probably feel this way because I'm actually petrified at the idea of actually becoming ill with something that could be bad and change my whole life. Yeah, that wasn't hard to figure out, was it?
I do have a site of my sculptures but have not sold any from it. I did a lot of them for awhile, most of which reside in the attic or I use in the house. Maybe someday I will get back to it but the galleries wanted bronzes and I didn't want to do bronzes. I liked the clay. this is my site: Rain's Sculpture Gallery. Not all my work is on it but enough to give an idea of what I did. Some were intended for bronzes but the cost of casting, the whole process led me to working with clay that I could fire in my own kilns
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