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Thoughts On Combining Sculpture and Poetry
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*** First Page Of Sculpture Section
From The Artist
“Emotions spoken in the Intimate River?” So opens the poem, “Intimate River.” It is a poem that came to me one night, about 6 years ago, while working on the sculpture. The sculpture was much smaller then, then it is now, but the eyes of the couple were still locked together in a deep emotional conversation. “Intimate River,” is but the first poem in a series of thirteen poems that belong to the collection, “INTIMATE RIVER SOUNDS.” This is a group of poems I have overlaid on the sculpture “Intimate River.” In the sculpture two lovers are intently gazing into each other’s souls, as the waters of life rush around them. Each of the thirteen poems is designed to broaden this river, and to expand the language of the lovers. The collection of poems, like the sculpture, can stand alone, or the two can work together as a unit, one piece of art, if you will, that becomes something more then the sum of its parts.
Lines in the poetry directly reflect movements in the sculpture, for example, let us look at the last lines from this opening poem, “Intimate River,” which read “Between these banks that hold fast, The Intimate Waters of our Life.” Here is a line that reflects the preexisting reality that a fountain was designed to run between the female and male figures in the sculpture. This is how the sculpture was designed from day one, but, having written these lines, when I went back to work on the sculpture, I was more aware of the metaphor of how the two torso’s formed the banks of a river. This awareness helped me, as a sculptor, give added life and meaning to the shapes and forms my hands worked and reworked. Now they really had to become the banks or a river, or the banks of a stream. In a way, I tried to capture the essence of the sculpture and the book of poetry all in the first verse of the poem, “Intimate River”
“Emotions spoken in the Intimate River,
Dance from the oceans to the mountains, and back again,
Touching,
tasting,
Holking the smoky gray clouds and blue diamond daydreams,
That cradle and nurse, the child of tomorrow,
At the breast of today’s wide open thirsting.”
In my own way, I took the second line, “Dance from the oceans to the mountains, and back again, touching, tasting,” and created the outside part of the fountain with this theme in mind. Both figures rise up from a bed of water, reaching out to each other, but there are other elements and metaphors working in the sculpture. The female’s world is more fluid while the male’s environment has a more solid composition. The whole fountain that surrounds the sculpture was laid out on the theme of, “On The Wings Of A Butterfly.” This construction gives a certain lift to the sculpture, as well as channels the water around and throughout the totality of the creation. In the poetry, the word “cradle” helped me define the feeling I wanted, not only in how tenderly the couple are holding each other, but in the feeling of the two of them being nestled in a river valley. When looked at in this way, not only do they cradle each other, but they also form a cradle. This helps establish the physical sense of gentle movement in the sculpture, which is so important to me.
Towards the end of the collection of poetry, there are four poems that go under the broad title, “Sun Up, and I’m On My Way.” Writing these poems helped to define the character and physical nature of the two figures. In the 1970s and early 80s I worked throughout the mountains of the Pacific Northwest as a tree planter, reforestation contractor. The poems took the two characters in the sculpture and placed them in that raw mountain and stream world. The four poems began one day as I was watching a VH1 special on the life of Shania Twain. She also spent five years in the Canadian Bush as a tree-planter, working for her father as a foreman. The first two of these four poems ended up being dedicated to her parents, who were tragically killed when their vehicle collided with a logging truck. As a writer, I began to tell my story through these poems. I had worked along side many strong dedicated men and women doing reforestation contracts. We were bonded like a family, and as a community shared many adventures. After writing these four poems, and then going back to work on my sculpture, I found that I was no longer just sculpting two figures held tightly in an emotional bond, but I also was sculpting a personal monument, of sorts, to this expanded co-operative of wood workers I had known. As a sculptor, I began to weave this real world intensity of a tree-planter, onto this clay creation of mine, and found that it gave it a certain amount of guts, the kind of guts as a creative artist, that can only come from working out of real world experiences. Now, when I sit at the base of the sculpture/fountain and look up through its legs and arms into the crevices around their faces, I feel I am back in the mountains, taking a break by a mountain stream. On a larger scale, I feel like I’ve just stepped out on a tree-planting unit and am looking out at the sides of a mountain my friends and I are about to reforest; then a moment later, I am back again looking at a figurative sculpture.
I don’t know that any photo will ever capture this image, it is such an odd angle, with such a long depth of focus needed, but I know it is there and that it adds an element to the sculpture that gives it some of its magic. It is but one of many, many interesting angles that have developed over the years, and taken shape out of the thousands of hours I, and my friends, have put into this sculpture. Over the decade I have worked on this sculpture, I have occasionally had other figurative artists and sculptors help me. I have also sought out the input and advice of people from all walks of life. Some of it I take, some of it I leave by the streambed of time, but including other artists visions has helped me push the piece far beyond my own limitations.
There is another magical quality to the sculpture that isn’t always apparent, and that is that the two figures are engaged in a physical dance. I have worked very hard over the last few years to add this quality to the sculpture. It is not only important for the life and emotion of the sculpture when it lays slightly inclined, but it also allows me to know that in the future, I can reconfigure the figures in an upright standing manner, increase the depth and movement of the sculpture somewhat, and have an elegant sculpture/fountain of the same couple engaged in an intimate dance. Working so hard on this element of the sculpture for so long, made writing the poem, “Dancing Across Heaven Together Again,” flow out of me with the ease and grace that only rarely do I experience as a writer. These are only a few of the many ways that the fountain, the sculpture, the poetry, and the experiences of my life wrap themselves in an intricate web where one unified piece of art emerges. A common, ordinary, yet magically dynamic composition titled, “Intimate River.”
I do have my own website where I keep updated photos of the sculpture, as well as the entire collection of poetry. It is appropriately named, “Intimate River” and can be found at www.intimateriver.com
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