Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time; in Toronto, I went to the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I was in Toronto for the Tango Marathon, but Saturday afternoon I took off on my own. I rode the electric street trolley through town, which otherwise looks like Chicago.
At the AGO there is a large hall, and there are there displayed, some 20+ original full-size plaster models of many of the best known large public works by Moore.
I’d been up ‘till 4 the night before, and I hadn’t had much breakfast, and when I entered that hall I felt humbled and bit sick to my stomach, and I thought of Prince’s Little Red Corvette:
I guess I should of closed my eyes
When you drove me to the place
Where your horses run free
‘Cause I felt a little ill
When I saw all the pictures
Of the jockeys that were there before me
These are all very large sculptures – 8 to15ft – far above life-size. There is a lot of surface area at this size. They’re different from the bronzes in this way: I know the bronzes have a rich surface texture of marks and scrapes, cuts and gouges, which are essentially Moore, but the metal is so dark, the patina so dark, that it can be difficult to really see the forms being evoked out of that surface of markings. On the plaster versions, these marks are very much clearer, and I can easily see the drawing-like gestures, and the painterly slinging and shaping of plaster. I love plaster as a medium. It applies like paint or clay, and carves like clay or stone. These works were all done in the 50’s and early 60’s, and you can see Moore working in full-blown abstract expressionist mode across the full surface of these large forms. The entire surface of a sculpture is a drawing surface.
The structure of his process makes this fully abstract and gestural surface possible. I think most of his designs start as small, complete models, of the size to be held in the hands. He worked these in the hand, at the size which can be easily turned and examined, and discovered, until certain. Then a greatly enlarged armature is built to the final size of the piece, by a crew I presume, who also skims it with first surface of plaster. Now Moore has a complete full-size form he can be confident in. No major adjustments need to be made to the form. Now he can go over the whole surface with wet plaster as if a drawing surface freely and without restraint.
I love Moore. I don’t want to be Moore, but I want a structural approach to building sculpture which also allows for the totally free expression of the spirit through material forms.
In my own work, I have not dealt much with the surface. This is because ordinarily I let the material itself reveal itself as the surface. It is an integrity thing. The material itself is topical to the work of sculpture. However, I’m beginning to see some ideas which I would work out in clay or plaster – universally plastic material – which has no definite quality of surface except what it made intentionally upon it. It will become necessary to be responsible for the surface of the clay or plaster object; I must discover the surface, and now it seems that the path to that is in drawing. I been doing drawing which I’ve thought of as very thin sculptural shapes. It may be next to think of sculpture as extremely thickened drawing surface.
matthew DG 