Facets of the shin

Part-finished crucifix figures, Upper Rhenish, c. 1500. Historisches Museum, Basle.

Which are most instructive for the shaping process, stripped down as they are to facets and an outline.
Technical thoughts:
Few of the facets are directly facing the viewer, which may contribute to the sense of jutting 3d form.

The mannered shins are , especially in the second figure, impossibly attenuated and give full play to the curved blade of the tibia. The tensile strength in the wood can be felt, as a tense, brittle stiffness. There is great discomfort in the toes. In each figure at the stage where the carving was abandoned the leg on our left is more curvaceous and expressive.The leg on our right in each case is cut very straight, perhaps to maximise the straight grain, and being behind, is more load-bearing.

The drapery is surprisingly well finished on the left, and would have been rather vulnerable during the remaining carving.

Worse things happen at sea

The Royal Navy 's 19th century medical journals have been made available by the National Archive

Sardines

Mike Goldberg's "Sardines", the subject of Frank O'Hara's "Why I am not a painter"


More O'Hara images here

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

(1971)

A bone of which I am fond

....is the calcaneus, or human heel bone. Many years ago an old friend made me aware of its robust , compact form and surprising size when he showed me x rays of his: a rock guitarist, he had, intoxicated in the moment of performance, stepped off the front of an 8-foot high stage and, landing heel first, shattered it. Pinned, it was clumped back together and he hobbled in plaster for months. Until then, I had never really paid it any attention when drawing skeletons as an art student. Now I know it as the anchor of the Achilles tendon, and knowledge of it is key to drawing or sculpting convincing feet.

As a by-product of my search for crucified legs images whilst carving the lower half of my dying man for Belgium, I found an archaeological calcaneus, of a man in his 20s found at Givat'ha Mivtar, a Jewish district in North - East Jerusalem from about the time of Christ. The nail is 11.5cm long and bent against a knot in the upright of the cross after it was hammered through the bone. Note the nasty practicality of the wooden washer between the ankle and the head of the nail, designed to stop the victim from pulling his leg away sideways, a carpenterish refinement of the procedure. The legs were either nailed to the sides of the upright, or doubled sideways against the front of the cross as shown above. The calcaneus must have proved solid enough to support the body, whereas passing the nail through between bones would not. A torturer's knowledge of anatomy never ceases to impress me - but then, they must have had a lot of experience.

Tomoaki Suzuki

Sculpts very recognisable friends in wood, rather small. He sculpted the sister of an ex-student of mine. His gallery is Corvi - Mora.

Statue of Newton at Trinity Cambridge

And from my pillow, looking forth by light

Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold

The Antechapel where the Statue stood

Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,

The marble index of a Mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

(said Wordsworth after 1805)

1755, sculptor Louis Francois Roubiliac

Looking at details of facial anatomy

Today's task on the workbench had me running for more detail in the anatomy textbooks, as I worked on modelling up nasal cartilage that was both accurate and idiosyncratic, and lip muscles that did justice to the interlacing of muscle fibres into other muscle fibres and skin tissue that seems to happen . Buccinator was a surprise to me , being larger and shapelier than I had seen on specimens in the DR, and the accessory cartilages shown in the netter drawing of the nasal structure , while perhaps subject of individual variations, make me want to go back again and look at my embryological development books. They make me think of a coelacanth....

Some useful illustrations and resources here:

I am s-ee-k to death of Albert

Reading David Kennedy's book of poems from Salt, "The Roads" , and drawn in by a poem at the grave of someone I'd not heard of - Anton Walbrook at St John's in Hampstead.

A little investigation turned up the Good German Officer from Colonel Blimp, an Austrian half - Jewish actor who fled to England and was in many of the afternoon matinee films people like me remember from their childhood Sundays. He died in Bavaria but had asked to be buried here in London.

An interview with him is here

He had been a number of Austrian and German heroes -- Johann Strauss, Ludwig 1, Prince Albert, acted in La Ronde, The Red Shoes, even as Esterhazy in J'Accuse.

I won't break Kennedy's copyright by reprinting his poem here; suffice to say it's a grower (like his whole volume) , available from Salt Publishing, and Anton's ghost gives utterance.

Note to self: DK also dedicates a poem to Jack Beeching. It ends with him drinking with the fictitious Australian poet Ern Malley. Priceless.

So today at 44 I discover for the first time Walbrook, Beeching and Malley. Education by poet.

Thai wax festival

A suitable passtime for the rainy season. Film of it is here:

Face down on the slab

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
An écorché figure (life-size), lying prone on a table: the right arm hangs down below the table. Red chalk and pencil drawing, with bodycolour, by C. Landseer, 1813 (?).
1813 By: Charles Landseer
Size: sheet 54.5 x 75.2 cm.
Collection: Iconographic Collections
Library reference no.: Iconographic Collection 583992i
Full Bibliographic Record Link to Wellcome Library Catalogue

1813! Our corpse is likely to be a hanged man, although nothing disturbs the elegance of that nape. This is one of the choice exhibits in the Wellcome Collection's "Skin" exhibition, and I was pleased today to see the actual drawing which I have long admired in reproduction.

The red chalk is added after the pose has been laid in lightly in black chalk , which is how the muscle fibres are so confident, so taut. The pose, its back to the sky, is quadrupedal and reminds one of the gleaming racehorses and greyhounds of Charles's more famous brother. The red flanks are groomed like a pelt, visually edited to exclude the ooze , fat, vessels and imperfections of a real dissection.

The strokes which describe the choppy hair and the shadows concealing the face are skilled and schooled - hours spent in the Academy rendering plaster busts and light on geometric solids have trained the life out of that part of the drawing. It's not the bit Charles is interested in; he's after the sleek organic mechanism, the life that's just been suspended, the abjection (face down on the slab!) which makes the handsome form all the more denuded, the hump in the spine that tells you the body's weight and pliability. The beastlike pose makes you wonder what this individual did not live to regret.

From the Strasbourg museum

The Glory of the Trenches

By Coningsby Dawson.
Each night we panted till the runners came,
Bearing your letters through the battle-smoke.
Their path lay up Death Valley spouting flame,
Across the ridge where the Hun's anger spoke
In bursting shells and cataracts of pain;
Then down the road where no one goes by day,
And so into the tortured, pockmarked plain
Where dead men clasp their wounds and point the way.
Here gas lurks treacherously and the wire
Of old defences tangles up the feet;
Faces and hands strain upward through the mire,
Speaking the anguish of the Hun's retreat.
Sometimes no letters came; the evening hate
Dragged on till dawn. The ridge in flying spray
Of hissing shrapnel told the runners' fate;
We knew we should not hear from you that day--
From you, who from the trenches of the mind
Hurl back despair, smiling with sobbing breath,
Writing your souls on paper to be kind,
That you for us may take the sting from Death.

Candles at Selfridge's

Dolls in performance with Perchten

Researching the Perchtenslaufen I come across Gisele Vienne's dance performance "Kindertotenlieder" which brings teenage dolls onstage with Perchten ( Is this the etymolgy of Berchtesgarten - the garden of an Alpine Freya - goddess?) G_V has a back catalogue of performances involving dolls and a novellist called Dennis Cooper, whose seedy and trendy novels and pop-culture journalism I have noticed but not read and who won a Sade prize in France a few years ago ; better than an Orange or a Booker then.

http://www.g-v.fr/creations/ve-kindertotenlieder-frameset.htm
Dolls’ creation, Raphaël Rubbens, Dorothéa Vienne-Pollak, Gisèle Vienne

She has a show in Cardiff on Feb 5 2011.
Jerk ( creation 2008 )
Gisèle Vienne / Dennis Cooper / Peter Rehberg / solo for Jonathan Capdevielle


February 3, 2011 / Manipulate Visual Theater Festival - Edimbourg (UK)
February 5, 2011 / Chapter Arts Centre - Cardiff (UK)

Gerhard Demetz carvings

Exhibition details here:

Video is here:

Fon sculpture from ebay

From the Tate's Voyeurism show

Lee Miller, The suicided Burgermeister’s Daughter, Leipzig, Germany, 1945, © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008, All rights reserved.

Polish coffin portraits

On a stranger's blog.

Robert Motherwell

"I belong... to a family of 'black' painters and earth colour painters in masses, which would include Manet and Goya and Matisse." Robert Motherwell.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859–May 25, 1937) was an African American artist best known for his style of painting. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim.

In 1879 Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His decision to attend the school came at an exciting time in the history of artistic institutional training. Art academies had long relied on tired notions of study devoted almost entirely to plaster cast studies and anatomy lectures. This changed drastically with the addition Thomas Eakins as “Professor of Drawing and Painting” to the Pennsylvania Academy. Eakins encouraged new methods such as study from live models, direct discussion of anatomy in male and female classes, and dissections of cadavers to further familiarity and understanding of the human body. Eakins’s progressive views and ability to excite and inspire his students would have a profound effect on Tanner. The young artist proved to be one of Eakins’s favorite students; two decades after Tanner left the Academy Eakins painted his portrait, making him one of a handful of students to be so honored.^[3] At the Academy Tanner befriended artists with whom he would keep in contact throughout the rest of his life, most notable of these being Robert Henri, one of the founders of the Ashcan School. During a relatively short time at the Academy, Tanner developed a thorough knowledge of anatomy and an ability to transfer his understanding of the weight and structure of the human figure to the canvas.^[4]

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Gateway, Tangier, 1912. Oil on canvas, 18 7/16" x 15 5/16". St. Louis Art Museum.

[edit]Issues of race

Tanner’s non-confrontational personality and preference for subtle expression in his work seem to belie his difficulties, but his life was not without struggle. Although he gained confidence as an artist and began to sell his work, racism was a prevalent condition in Philadelphia, as massive numbers of African Americans left the rural South and settled in Northern urban centers. Although painting became a therapeutic source of release for him, lack of acceptance was painful. In his autobiography The Story of an Artist’s Life, Tanner describes the burden of race:

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.^[5]

In an attempt to gain artistic acceptance, Tanner left America for France in the winter of 1891. Except for occasional brief returns home, he would spend the rest of his life there.

Portrait by Thomas Eakins, 1902

“Mr. Thomas Eakins… gave me a criticism which aided me then, and ever since… I had made a start on a study, which was not altogether bad, but very probably the best thing I had ever done. He encouraged but, instead of working to make it better, I became afraid I should destroy what I had done, and really did nothing the rest of the week. Well, he was disgusted. ‘What have you been doing? Get it, get it better, or get it worse. No middle ground of compromise.’” (qtd Mosby Tanner 59)

Floyd

Floyd Davis's wood sculptures from the 1960s - keen amateur and self-taught carver, more here.