Figure Marble Sculptures & Drawings
The figure marble sculptures are a series of artworks carved by hand in Italian statuario marble due to its high detail and slight translucency. The human figure endlessly fascinates me. Humanity as a whole, never seems to be able to part from representing it in some form. Is it the selfie culture or body beautiful that brings us back time and time again to images of the human form? I for one, consider it my most challenging work in effect facing myself with myself whether it be man, woman, or child depicted, it is revelatory of our humanity. Our way of looking in the mirror. All of these works are leading up to my goal of carving a female figure at the scale of Michelangelo’s David, a Modern Athena.
The word “marble” derives from the Ancient Greek μάρμαρον (mármaron), from μάρμαρος (mármaros), “crystalline rock, shining stone.” Pure white marble is the result of metamorphism (heat) of a very pure (silicate-poor) limestone or dolomite protolith. The characteristic swirls and veins of many colored marble varieties are usually due to various mineral impurities such as clay, silt, sand, or iron oxides, which were originally present as grains or layers in the limestone.
One can never abandon their origins, and so it is with paint for me. Without going to the lengths of the Greeks and their colorful painted marble sculptures, I discovered that Chinese ink stains easily into the marble surface. These subtle traces of black and grey are used to emphasize and offset the whiteness of the marble. Marble is never uniform in color, each type is quarried and mined from a particular part of the mountain and these veins often mix into each other. Statuario is prized because of its seemingly white uniformity, but upon closer inspection it is full of traces of color and warmth. The marble sculptures should be seen as a symbol of fusion that includes the entire spectrum of color.