It's been some time now; I'm in the process of trying to broaden my quest for models in marble. In work done throughout the 1980s and 1990s ( see curriculum vitae here) I worked with live models, making photographs of them and of various other landscapes and objects, folding them all together in silkscreen prints with as many as 153 colors (once only, five months) and in sizes ranging from 15 x 22 inches up to 30 x 44 inches. I've been out of circulation as I trashed both wrists 15 years ago and had to stop printing silkscreens. Technology as in software and a used Epson 9600 printer caught up with me last year and I've been printing up a storm in sizes ranging from 12 x 18 inches to 27 x 39 inches.

 

In the past couple of centuries, sculptors have sought to reiterate the classic, providing me with models from various times and ideals of beauty. I seek the deep feeling through time, touching on moments, gazes, gestures of the past century, or of twenty centuries ago. It’s like a travelogue but it happens in time instead of space.


My project is to discover, when a particular model was used, who that person was. In exploring cemeteries (where death is always female, welcoming), antebellum plantations and some few museums’ holdings here in the American south, I’ve found a modest number that are obviously a specific person. With few exceptions, the women who modeled for these marbles are dead by now but their emotions, their person and our ability to see and feel them are themselves timeless. You or someone you know experiences things this way, expresses themselves similarly. The actresses have changed but the parts have not.


And of course there are 20th century examples, of a differing aesthetic: the 1970s homage to taqueria calendar art, or the oddly humorous shepherdess who can’t find a stitch to wear hoisting a newborn lamb on her shoulders in 1941. One, sculpted in 2006 or 2007 for a grave in Macon, Georgia, provided the impetus to broaden my search for these marble models, as I found in researching the statue that it is a copy of one at a cemetery in Genoa, Italy. While in the United States the women weeping over graves are angels, in Europe they are not, and those European original sculptures are often finer, more nuanced emotionally than those in this country. I would very much like to go make new photographs of some dozens of those marble women to use in new prints revealing the constancy of humanity through time.


All these women are of their times, it falls to me to see who they were and show them to you. It may happen that what you see is just the start of a story: “Oh, hello,” said the wise woman. “And who, pray tell, are you?”