Author: Marion-Lea Jamieson

This blog describes the process I have used to create the armature for a sculpture. Warning: It will only be of interest to sculptors working in this particular way. Once completed, the armature will be covered with hand-applied concrete to shape the final form. As I had requests to expand on the process I’ve been using, I’ve written an earlier blog, this blog and another blog on the topic. That’s why this is called The Singer Redux. The piece is to depict a melded bird-human figure as part of a series called Back to Nature that has been described in yet another blog. I have been carving away on my hunk of recycled Styrofoam (polystyrene) and The Singer is beginning to emerge.  Here is its present state of completion.

On Blogs and the Internet

It has been very interesting creating this blog recording progress on this piece and previous works.  I have had many comments on my blogs, many of them appreciative of the information provided.  Some commentators  have requested that I provide more detailed information about the process but I have to clarify that I am a working artist and my priority is my artwork.  I am not in the business of writing how-to manuals.  That said, if anyone has a specific question, I am happy to do my best to answer it.  I’m just not willing to provide a detailed account of my fabrication process without knowing what specific information will be useful to others.

Speaking of my blog, I have to admit to being a little dumbfounded by many of the comments I have received.  Some of them are simply incomprehensible and I can only assume that they are scripts generated by a robot & sent out to every website for some obscure purpose.  Here are samples of comments that arrived today & yesterday ostensibly about my blog On-Frogs:

1) from ghd straighteners australia:
“it is wise to keep your garden tools in low humidity area to counteract them from getting rusty”

2) from cheap uggs for sale:
“after i had been a child, i’m already very interested in business and business investments this is why i took profitable business course”

3) from ugg boots on sale (I have received a surprising number of comments from ugg boots(!)
“Can check out a handful of the posts because they may be quite. Thanks much. Zoey Olsen”

4) from sexcams:
“Form regards on the enjoyable associated knowledge appropriate right here to your article, here??s regularly a bit quantity of ask for any web log people. Who in truth noted our next use a quote from? . . . .Choose always is in poor health person, get pleasure from occurs to be type of. Your covet, this may not supply, intention very. It??s truly now now not tense, it isn??t necessarily self-seeking, discovering out efficiently angered, the particular controls now not document along with errors. True love would possibly now not take pleasure in improbable yet sadly rejoices when utilizing the certainty. Receiving this done ensure you covers, continuously trusts, in each and every case case, you might want to definitely perseveres”.

I am told anyone who has a website gets this stuff.  Perhaps the point is to generate more traffic to their site, but I am puzzled as to how sites for Uggs, sexcams, Tummy Tucks, LA Bail Bonds or any of the other myriad sites that send me comments benefit by sending comments to an artist describing her fairly idiosyncratic working process! The internet moves in mysterious ways and I am willing to take the good with the bad.  It is unfortunate, however, that this wonderful global resource is abused by self-interest.  It is yet another tragedy of the common where self-interest ultimately depletes a shared resource.

Back to the Work

Undaunted, I return to the topic of this blog – progress on The Singer. In earlier blogs on this topic -back-to-birds ; more-on-birds and  on birds, I described the methods I was using to cut the polystyrene and remove dust.  I neglected to mention the way I scaled up the original 20″ (50.8 cm) plaster maquette to create the 90″ (228.6 cm) polystyrene armature. First I marked off the x horizontal axis on the wooden base of the maquette at 1/2″ intervals and gave each interval a number from 1-26.  Then I marked off the y horizontal axis on the wooden base of the maquette at 1/2″ intervals and gave each interval a letter from a-z. Then my partner built a measuring frame for the maquette to show the vertical z axis, I marked it off at 1/2 ” intervals and gave each interval a roman numeral from i – XL.

To carve the final work at a scale of 1:4.5, I marked off the x horizontal axis on the wooden base of the styrofoam piece at 2.25″ intervals and gave each interval a number from 1-26.  Then I marked off the y horizontal axis on the wooden base of the styrofoam piece at 2.25″ intervals and gave each interval a letter from a-z. Below shows a corner of the base with the intervals.

Then my partner built a measuring frame for the styrofoam piece to show the vertical z axis, and I marked it off at 2.25″ intervals and gave each interval a roman numeral from i – XL. The image below shows the top corner of the measuring large frame.  On the cross bar I added the same intervals as on the base to assist in measuring a straight line from top to bottom. Intervals have both letters of the alphabet and numbers so that the vertical measure can be used on both the x & y axis. The vertical measure closely fits the base of the piece and is supported on a two pieces of 1/2″ x 8″ wood.

Using this system I could constantly refer to measurements on the maquette in order to make cuts to scale on the final work.

Though this system has worked well, it is cumbersome as I am constantly moving the vertical measure around.  The classical way of scaling up a sculpture is to use the point system, where a number of points are placed on the maquette and the location of these points are reproduced to scale on the final work. Perhaps with more carving experience I will be able to visualize where points on my maquette should be on my final work.  But at present I am astounded by how far off the actual measure I am when I eyeball it.

If anyone out there has come up with a more elegant system for scaling up sculptures from maqutte to final size, (not including sending the work out to a pricey CNC shop) I’d love to hear about it.

In earlier blogs I also talked about dust control and our ugly but effective extraction system. I am also including a photo of myself in full styro-dust protection gear.  I bought a painters’ paper overall for the elasticized wrist, ankles & hood as the small particles end up glued to every inch of me. I put on this full get-up for using the sander for finer work. But the paper overalls rip so I just wear a regular cloth overall & put elastic bands around my wrists & ankles to keep particles out of the overall and wear a shower cap to keep styro dust out of my hair.

Several of my posts are about artworks that feature birds and in this post I have gone back to birds. A project called The Singer first took the form of a smaller sculpture and a plaster version of the piece is shown below. It is a half-bird/half/human figure with its head thrown back singing.  The Singer celebrates the human instinct to make music and to create art. Biologists usually explains the singing of birds as a way of defining territory but it is difficult not to interpret bird-song as springing from the same impulse as human-song and The Singer is transported by the uplifting power of singing his/her bird songs.

Versions of this plaster model were also cast in hydrostone and concrete as described in another blog.

I decided to make a monumental version of The Singer and in an earlier post,  On Birds, I showed progress to date on it.  Since then, I have been carving away on the chunk of discarded styrofoam that will serve as the armature for the finished work and will be clad in concrete .  Here it is at the stage where I had finished using the big wire cutter I showed in that previous post.

The first wire cutter described in that earlier post had problems so my partner Colin designed this larger cutter with a more powerful transformer. But there were further problems with this bigger, better hot-wire cutter design that I used for taking doing the rough cuts shown above.  It got too hot & the transformer died. So we bought another transformer:

The new transformer for hot-wire cutter design #3 is slightly more powerful than cutter design #2. But in order to keep it from overheating, it can only be used  for about 10 minutes, then it has to be shut off  to let it cool down.

That’s why there’s a sign on the cutter saying “5 minutes on – 5 minutes off” as a reminder.  The other change to hot-wire-cutter design #3 is the addition of a spring & chain on the opposite side to the wire to maintain tension.  Without some way to maintain tension, the wire heats up, expands and cuts off a concave piece rather than a straight piece.

This is also a much smaller cutter as the wire is about 18″ long.  It is designed for more detailed carving. Cutter #2 was about 36″ long in order to cut large chunks off at a time.

After using cutter #3 for rough carving, I’m now using other tools for final shaping.   A “Sawsall” or reciprocating saw works well for some largish cuts.

It took a while to get the hang of using this saw as it can dig in and gouge unwanted holes.  Because of its length, it is also limited in that it can only cut from certain angles. It is not as clean as the hot-wire cutter, but the smoking styrofoam created by the hot-wire is certainly a health hazard and must be blown away from the operator so it’s probably not a good idea to spend too much time hot-wire cutting.  The Sawsall does create styrofoam dust or particles that are messy and no doubt shouldn’t be inhaled.

For more detailed shaping, or where the hot-wire cutter and the Sawsall can’t reach, I’m using an electric drill with a rough sanding disk.

This is very effective & takes off a surprising amount of material, but it makes a horrendous mess of the studio.  Styrofoam particles become electro-statically clingy and stick on your body & clothes.  I wear a spray-apinters’ paper overall with eleasticized wrists, ankes & hood, but inside I’m still coated in particles. They get in the eyes(very painful) & nose (can’t bee good for the lungs) so a particle mask & goggles are needed and the whole get-up is hot & stuffy.

Afterwards, sweeping and vacuuming the studio can take forever, so I’ve set up the soon-to-be-world-patented extractor designed by my partner Colin Race.  He originally designed this to extract steel particles from grinding welds, and it can be hung over the grinding area and works well.  As styrofoam sinks to the floor, it is placed below wherever I am working and extracts most of what doesn’t stick on me. Here’s the extractor in all it’s elegance & beauty:

Most artists can’t afford a manufactured extraction system, so most artists are probably suffering from the long-term effects of inhaling the nasty stuff we work with.  What this system lacks in efficiency & style it makes up for in economy.  It is basically an electric extractor fan sitting on a cart with a length of flexible ducting attached to the front of the extractor extending to the work area and another length of ducting attached to the rear of the extractor leading to the exhaust port. The ducting accordions into itself for storage.

The front or intake point of the ducting is held open by duct-taping a pail with the bottom cut out (the handle is handy for hanging the intake above the workspace.)

The exhaust port is a little painstaking to set up. There are several styrofoam insulation boards that have been glued together to create a “plug” for the bottom of the roll-up garage door. The exhaust end of the ducting is inserted into several pieces of plywood glued together for rigidity & to support the weight of the door:

Here is how it looks from the outside:

There’s also a piece that fits at the top of the roll-up door to block sound if I am working with very noisy machinery but it’s not shown here.  The studio is in a residential neighbourhood and there are complaints if I make noise.  it seems to be acceptable to use leaf blowers for hours on end (I’ve watched neighbours chase one leaf down the sidewalk with a leaf blower at 75 dB) and guys seem to love using the things especially on sunny days. Many of the neighbours use lawn care companies that use  two-stroke, gas-powered weedeater or line trimmer that typically run at approximately 115 decibels, equating to the upper limit of a live rock concert (the average human pain threshold is 110 dB) and gas powered lawn mowers at about 95 decibels.  The other favourite neighbourhood activity is pressure washing.  On a hot day, it appears to be a mindless, cooling activity and it’s something people can spend a whole weekend doing despite the fact that pressure washers  emit 78 – 85 decibels.  After finishing the house, my neighbours get their driveway and sidewalks clean enough to eat off.  But no one complains about this as it must be considered part of being a scrupulous homeowner and keeping the property values up.

But making art is completely different and any noise emitting from my studio is likely to engender unbridled rage.  Especially women seem to find the sight of another woman using power tools to be unacceptably irritating.  I’ve had neighbour women screaming in my face while I’m trying to do a delicate cut with a router. Another told me what I was doing (grinding & polishing a concrete sculpture) was “unnecessary” and shouldn’t be tolerated. A little later she had her sidewalk moved to another location which involved days of deafening jack hammering.

There are no complaints about any of this activity even though the Noise Bylaw for the City of Vancouver states that: “No person shall in a quiet zone (ie residential area) make, cause or permit to be made or caused, continuous sound the sound level of which during the daytime exceeds a rating of 55 on an approved sound meter when received at a point of reception…”.  But it is very difficult to find affordable studio space in Vancouver, so to placate the outraged Philistines, I work inside with the sound muffled, sweating amid clouds of styrofoam dust.

For re-creating the piece at a scale of 1:4.5 & I carved a polystyrene armature out of a large chunk of polystyrene dumped in an industrial area. Below shows the beginning stage of drawing the figure on the polystyrene. This is also described in detail in this blog and that blog.

This was a departure for me as a sculptor because I have been driven by commissions or creating work for particular exhibitions for sale.  This piece was worked on purely as a learning experiment.The armature was not a thing of beauty.

To carve the polystyrene I used a hot wire.  I found information on making a hot-wire polystyrene cutter on the internet using a model train transformer as the heat source. As a first attempt it was fairly successful but kept shorting out then the transformer overheated & died.  Another design found on the net used a 9 volt power supply, but it wasn’t hot enough.  So I substituted a 12 volt transformer and a heavier gauge wire than most hot-wire designs recommend because I was cutting very dense polystyrene.

Using a hot wire to cut polystyrene is much neater than sawing it as it comes off in tidy chunks rather than a studio full of white flakes.  But the fumes are toxic so I cut with doors open and a fan going.

Sculpting with power tools is satisfying in that a person without a great deal of muscle, like myself, can create monumental sculptural forms that could not be done without these tools. But they are noisy, dusty, smelly and polluting and do not lend themselves to pausing to listen to bird songs. This is why I eventually returned to 2D work – oil painting and printmaking.

To the right shows progress in more detailed shaping of the armature from the rear view.

In a previous post I described some of the work I have been doing in exploring bird/human imagery.  This post continues on this theme and also illustrates the process in which an idea takes shape. This idea is for the next sculpture I will be working on after finishing the current piece shown in that earlier posting (bear with me, I have just discovered hyperlinks). Below is the clay maquette of The Singer that I used as a model for  the plaster maquette of The Singer. But before getting into the technical stuff about howthe idea was developed, I would like to get back into the theoretical stuff behind the idea.

The EMU agrees with most religions throughout the world, that the human being is made in the image of God, i.e. a miniature universe; and that to understand the universe is to understand oneself, and vice versa. The Ancient Egyptians. understood  that man was made in the image of God, and as such, man represented the image of all creation. This is an interesting revelation as it helps me to understand how the idea that man was made in the image of God has been misinterpreted.

In an earlier post I suggested that the anthropocentrism of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions has provided a rational for human domination of the planet at the expense of all other species. The statement in the Book of Genesis, “ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” has been interpreted to mean that  human beings have special status in nature based on unique capacities and that therefore God has somehow ordained unlimited human expansion and resource use on a finite planet.

However, this glimpse into Egyptian mysticism helps to clarify the original idea of man as made in the image of God. The idea was not that man was god-like or more like god than other species, but only that if a person can fully understand themselves, they can understand the universe. The EMU goes on to explain that the reason a human image was used as the image of God is because the only way to explain anything to human beings is on human terms and in human form. And just as human beings can represent divinity, other species could be used as well.  In order to represent divine powers/attributes/functions/forces/energies.

Egyptians identified certain animals with specific qualities that could symbolize certain divine functions and principles. These animals were chosen as symbols for that particular aspect of divinity so animal or animal-headed  gods & goddesses are symbolic expressions of a deep spiritual understanding. When a total animal is depicted in Ancient Egypt, it represents a particular function/attribute in its purest form. When an animal-headed figure is depicted, it conveys that particular function/attribute in the human being.

I find it encouraging to confirm that humans have in the past understood the commonality and interdependency between humans & other species, and that the current human disregard for the natural world is not an ingrained human attribute but a recent development in human hubris.  I am convinced that the anthropomorphism of the Abrahamic religions is at the heart of the crisis facing the planet as human habitat and human aquisitiveness wreak havoc on the natural world.  It is my personal Theory of Everything.

This is why I continue to explore the animal/human fusion images and why these images have interested (not to say obsessed) me for 25 years.  It is such a simple but powerful idea: that all we carbon-based life-forms subsisting on the thin skin of earth on this 3rd rock from the Sun are all in this together and if we mess things up for the other life-forms, we mess it up for ourselves.  Somehow the birds represent the most vulnerable of the life-forms and also the most beautiful.  Their demise through human hubris is most clearly morally insupportable (though why the demise of any insect species should be any less insupportable is unsupportable).

So I continue to work with bird/human images and have been working with ideas for communicating these images in steel.  Translating a realistic figure into steel is effective because it demands that the figure be simplified, stylized & abstracted.

The trouble with realistic images of people, birds, big-eyed puppies etc., is that they tend to be sentimental, stereotypical and schmaltzy.

But translating an image from realistic clay to hard steel circumvents these pitfalls.  I began by printing out a photo of the clay maquette, and traced it on a light table to make a line drawing. Then I imagined how to make the image out of steel and drew that.  Here is the line drawing:

Instead of trying to make the image as realistic as possible, the intention was to make the fabrication as much fun and as little work as possible.  Anyone who has worked with steel knows how much work it is to fabricate a volumetric component such as a cube with all those seams to be welded and ground.  So instead, I created a design that would use manufactured components like pipes and rods.

The Singer would be constructed using .3 cm thick mild steel for all components. Fabrication will begin with an armature about 155 cm high made up of two intersecting planes welded at the centre.  The perimeter of these planes will create the form of the figure seen from the front & side. This armature will be welded onto a plinth comprising one large & one small capped steel pipes welded together. The plinth will be about 75 cm high x 90 cm in diameter.

Encasing the armature will be a series of bands made from 4.5 cm x .3 cm flat stock .  These are welded to the armature.

Arms & legs will be created from steel tubing using fittings at elbows & knees.  The knees will also serve as  reducers to accommodate larger thigh & smaller shin. Hands & feet will be made from rectangular steel tubing and fingers & toes will be made from steel rods about 2-3 cm in diameter.

The feathers will be plasma cut from sheet steel and welded onto the encircling bands.  The feathers will be welded to the plinth & body from the bottom up so that they overlap & the welds are hidden.  The beak will be made from steel tubing with a flat inner facing and the eyes made from either found hardware or plasma cut.

I am excited about using manufactured components as they create an interesting abstraction of the form & add a “ready-made” aspect to the work.

Once I had the outline of how I would approach transforming this very sensuous bird-person into metal, I honed my elementary Photoshop skills on trying to make it look like 3D steel.

So here is the same image with Photoshop/Window/Tools/Gradient Tool/Gradient Picker/Black&White/Edit/More/Metals/Steel Bar.

Photoshopping is such fun but can turn into an obsession ie trying to get those gradients just so. And it can devour hours of time, especially for me because I forget how to do things if I’m away from it for a while.  Or the program will do buggy things that take me hours to figure out.  For instance, the original line drawing above had been somehow changed into a bitmap. I had actually constructed the drawing in GIMP then brought it into Photoshop. I should have been alerted when I went to re-size and the resolution was 1200 pixels/inch. So when I tried to save it it couldn’t be saved for the web as a jpg. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out why it was stuck until I stumbled into Mode/Bitmap.

For a while I used GIMP as my drawing program because I thought you had to pay a fortune for Photoshop.

I just love things like GIMP that people put out there for free.  But it kept crashing on me & I had a huge sign on my comp “save every 5 minutes!!!”

Then I found out you can buy Photoshop Elements for way less, which is a fact that is not easy to find out on the Adobe site. Now I use a combination of the 2 programs because some aspects of GIMP are better than Photoshop.

test

This post, Bird Songs, describes my delight in working with bird images, why they are particularly interesting and their historic and cultural significance. My work using bird images has melded human and bird characteristics as a way to indicate our closeness to, reliance on, and affinity for, these creatures. They are the most familiar and ubiquitous, but at the same time the most mysterious and incomprehensible of our companions here on this planet. How can Hummingbirds, weighing about 0.1 of an once, fly 4000 miles? How smart are crows? What do bird songs mean?

The first piece I did using a melded bird/human figure was called The Three Graces, in the form of a lino-block print.

Birds and Myth

This print suggests that the similarities between humans and birds are greater than the differences. It questions the anthropocentric view that beauty resides in human females but not in other species such as birds. It refers to the myths of every culture in which birds & humans transform into each other. 

Human/animal figures are characteristic of myths in every culture in the world and create a recognizable common thread among cultural traditions.  Human/animal myths originated at a time when humans were more highly attuned to other species and all cultures include stories about animals that take on human characteristics to pierce the human/animal divide. In prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures this work reconnected with the wisdom of ancestors who understood the inter-relatedness of all forms of life and the need to protect all species and ecosystems. This print explored the inter-connections between humans and bird species.

I am interested in the human/animal fusion images in that they stem from an earlier period of human development when people regarded the natural world as benign.  The earth and its many & diverse forms of life were seen as benevolent as long as humans stayed in tune with its forces. In earlier religions  the animal or animal-headed gods/goddesses are symbolic expressions of a deep spiritual understanding. For instance, when an animal was depicted in Ancient Egypt, it represented a particular function/attribute in its purest form. When an animal-headed figure is depicted, it conveyed that particular function/attribute in the human being.

In addition to understanding the inherent connection and identification with other forms of life, earlier forms of religion recognized the importance of a balance between male & female energies.

Balance between Male & Female

J. J. Bachofen (1861) postulated that the historical patriarchates were a comparatively recent development, having replaced an earlier state of primeval matriarchy, and postulated a matriarchal society and chthonic mystery cults as the second of four stages of the historical development of religion. The first stage he characterized as a paleolithic hunter-and-gatherer society practicing a polyamorous and communistic lifestyle. The second stage is a matriarchal “lunar” stage of agriculture with an early form of Demeter the dominant deity. This was followed by a stage of emerging patriarchy, finally succeeded by the stage of patriarchy and the appearance of civilization in classical antiquity. In the later Abrahamic monotheistic religions, God is the Father, dominant, powerful, fatherly & masculine. This theory has its adherents and detractors, but it is a compelling and useful idea to explain the imbalances & conflicts between natural/human and male/female in current societies.

Many believe the anthropocentrism of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions is the underlying reason why humanity dominates and sees the need to “develop” most of the Earth for human habitat at the expense of all other species. The Book of Genesis states, “ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” This belief that human beings have special status in nature, based on unique capacities, provides the rationale for unlimited human expansion and resource use on a finite planet. That is why earlier concepts of the relationship between humans and the natural world are important to understand so that, as artists, we can re-brand the human species in a more earth-friendly format.

This is an area I explored for over 25 years, for instance, in this drawing called “Flying Dreams” from 2003.

Birds & the Divine

The Early Egyptians

In early Egyptian mythology, Nekhbet was an early local goddess who became the patron of Upper Egypt and one of the two patron deities for all of Ancient Egypt. She was seen as a goddess who had chosen to adopt the city, and consequently depicted as the Egyptian white vulture, a creature that the Egyptians thought only existed as females (not knowing that the males are identical). They were presumed to be reproducing via parthenogenesis.

In art, Nekhbet was depicted as the white vulture (representing purification), always seen on the front of pharaoh’s double crown. Nekhbet usually was depicted hovering, with her wings spread above the royal image, clutching a shen symbol (representing infinity, all, or everything), frequently in both of her claws. As patron of the pharaoh, she was sometimes seen to be the mother of the divine aspect of the pharaoh, and it was in this capacity that she was Mother of Mothers.

In some late texts of the Book of the Dead, Nekhbet is referred to as Father of Fathers, Mother of Mothers, who hath existed from the Beginning, and is Creatrix of this World.

Another example is the Ba that is represented as a human-headed bird, which is the opposite of the normal depiction of gods/goddesses as human bodies with animal heads-in other words, as the divine aspect of the terrestrial. The Ba is depicted as a stork. The stork is known for its migrating and homing instinct, and is also known worldwide as the bird who carries newborn babies to their new families. The stork returns to its own nest with consistent precision-hence a migratory bird is the perfect choice to represent the soul.

Birds in the Bible

There are early reference to the stork in the Biblical Old Testament books written between 1450-1410 B.C. These early references categorize this bird as such a sacred bird that it should not be killed, though there are other interpretations that the stork is an unclean animal and should therefore not be eaten.

The following dictionary topics are from the M.G. Easton Illustrated Bible Dictionary:

Stork

Heb. hasidah, meaning “kindness,” indicating thus the character of the bird, which is noted for its affection for its young. It is in the list of birds forbidden to be eaten by the Levitical law.

( Leviticus 11:19 ; Deuteronomy 14:18 ). Two species are found in Palestine, the white, which are dispersed in pairs over the whole country; and the black, which live in marshy places and in great flocks. They migrate to Palestine periodically (about the 22nd of March). Jeremiah alludes to this ( Jeremiah 8:7 ). At the appointed time they return with unerring sagacity to their old haunts, and re-occupy their old nests. “There is a well-authenticated account of the devotion of a stork which, at the burning of the town of Delft, after repeated and unsuccessful attempts to carry off her young, chose rather to remain and perish with them than leave them to their fate. Well might the Romans call it the pia avis!”

In Job 39:13 The object of this somewhat obscure verse seems to be to point out a contrast between the stork, as distinguished for her affection for her young, and the ostrich, as distinguished for her indifference.

( Zechariah 5:9 ) alludes to the beauty and power of the stork’s wings. He wrote, “Then lifted I up my eyes, and looked and, behold, there came out two woman, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork…” (Zech 5:9).

Other Early References

The Bestiaries, is a collection of manuscripts written between the 8th or 9th and 15th centuries. It also touched on the stork among other birds. Pliny, Aristotle, Indian, Hebrew, and Egyptian animal myths all contributed to this book’s insights.

In the Bestiaries, Storks are best known for having a strong responsibility to their young, and pull out their own feathers in order to keep them warm. This self-sacrifice shows the mothers put their children’s needs above their own comfort. This book also says, “their enemies are snakes”. Serpents are obviously associated with evilness and corruption and the large beaks of storks often kill these “evil thoughts or evil brothers”. Some of the reasoning behind the stork’s high status is connected to the fact that its main enemy, snakes, represents wickedness. Also, the stork migrated to Asia, which “signifies heavenly things”, people travelling to Asia were thought to “aim for higher things”, just like the stork.

The Bestiaries also described the supernatural power of the Caladrius, a bird which can tell if a sick man will die, and can cure disease. “The caladrius is an all-white bird that lives in the king’s house. If it looks into the face of a sick man, it means that he will live, but if the caladrius looks away, the sick man will die of his illness. To cure the sick man, the caladrius looks at him, and drawing the sickness into itself, flies up toward the sun, where the disease is burned up and destroyed…The caladrius represents Christ, who is pure white without a trace of blackness of sin“.

The Chinese also referred to the stork in their ancient folklore. They believed the stork had the ability to bring people up to the heavens. In their ancient legends they believed, “A young flute-player and wandering minstrel who carries a basket laden with fruit. His soul-searching songs caused a stork to snatch him away to the heavens”. In this instance the stork has the power to bring this man to heaven for his enjoyable songs. The Chinese depiction of the stork went along with other views and proclaimed the bird as a messenger of God.

Storkwomen

I’d been drawn to stork-like images, without knowing of their spiritual significance for decades. I would have used a stork for “The Singer” except that I was worried that a long beak in the air on a sculpture would be too delicate & get damaged.

About the same time as I did the Three Graces, over 25 years ago, I did the oil on canvas painting below, also called the Three Graces. These were interpretations of the famous oil painting by Italian painter Raphael who in turn was inspired by a ruined Roman marble statue in Siena.

I was interested in using this celebrated image of female grace & beauty and applying it to another species. Like the earlier print, the painting questions the emphasis placed on human beauty and invites appreciation of grace & beauty in other species.  The melding of human & bird again suggests our interdependence.

Later, I explored the stork image in a painting called StorkWoman Waits.  This painting began in a life-painting session at Basic Inquiry Studio at Main & Georgia in Vancouver.  I often re-paint canvases to incorporate whatever ideas I am currently working with. On the left is the painting as it began in 1995 – a terrible painting by any standard.  I took the figure from the studio setting & set her on a beach. But as discussed in other blogs, it is difficult to work with the human female figure without the problem of Kitch. The human female has been done to death in drawings, paintings, photos, sculptures& films such that in the 21st Century any depiction is stereotypical. So I experimented with applying the human/animal theme.

At first, a stork’s head was substituted for the woman’s, (this iteration was not documented). Then the image made into a sculpture study, imagining how it would look as a sculpture in concrete, installed on a beach.  The sculpture would be entirely composed of flat planes so that it could either be fabricated out of welded steel or hand-built in concrete.For this, and other sculpture studies, I experimented with a restricted palette – using only Alizarin Crimson, Viridian Green & white.

The semi-naturalistic landscape setting didn’t work, so the whole painting became a sculpture study.  In other words, the restricted palette and planar surfaces were applyied to the entire canvas.  The idea was a world carved in stone – as though sculpted out of the side of a mountain. It may yet be re-worked again in the future.

In keeping with the interest in characteristics that previous civilizations attributed to animals in myths, this painting, originally called StorkWoman Waits, was re-named Nekhbet. The name of a painting tends to evolve with my understanding of what they are trying to say.

This study could fabricated in 3D, ideally at a much larger scale – about 3 m high, in concrete.  It would be an interesting experiment to use integral pigments to attain similar colour values to those in the study.

Flying Man

The human/bird fusion myths described above tend to characterize these figures as female and they are on the whole benign entities.  The exception would be the Harpies.

In Greek mythology, a harpy (“snatcher”) was one of the winged spirits best known for constantly stealing all food from Phineas.  Hesiod calls them two “lovely-haired” creatures, and pottery art depicting the harpies featured beautiful women with wings. Harpies as ugly winged bird-women are a late development, due to a confusion with the Sirens. Roman and Byzantine writers detailed their ugliness. This transition of animal/human mythical creatures from beautiful and benign to wicked and ugly over time is a common theme that emerges in an investigation of animal-human figures.

The Flying Man

The Flying Man theme relates to the human desire to move unhindered through space like a bird.It relates to our own inevitable transformation to the non-human plane and asks if it is worthwhile to be earthbound by worldly concerns and neglect one’s spiritual development. It is about self-propulsion and the freedom inherent in leaving the internal combustion engine behind. We are not meant to be always weighted down by tons of motorized steel, rubber and plastic.

There have been many iterations of the Flying Man image. The first was a set of drawings that were studies for a sculpture to be fabricated with a steel body and copper wings.

Flying Man is partly a self-portrait.  In my younger days, I frequently experienced flying dreams in which, if I just put myself in the right frame of mind and concentrated fully, I enjoyed exhilarating flights at dizzying heights.  With the advent of kids, mortgage etc., the dreams stopped.  Flying Man asks if it is worthwhile to be earthbound by embracing weighty responsibilities and neglecting one’s astral self.  Up, up and away!

Next Flying Man appeared as a small maquette for a larger work in steel & copper.

This figure would have had a stainless steel torso, arms and legs with copper bird’s wings and tail.  The copper would be allowed to develop verdigris so that the feathered areas turn watery blue-green over time. The bird/human figure would be cut from sheet metal and assembled along the lines of balsa wood glider construction.  The sculpture would be roughly 12′ long, 3′ high and 10′ wide.  The wings would be built up in two layers from sections of feathers cut from copper sheet.  The tail would also be constructed from copper. The completed stainless steel and copper figure would be bolted into a steel  pole.

While the flying man maqette above was never created in steel and copper, a small mild steel version was fabricated in 2014. Here is the original drawing for it and here is the final version in steel:

Variations on this idea included a concept for  a flock of flying figures supported on a tree-like structure about 20′ high, for which I have no drawings of maquettes. Called Flying Folks, the idea entailed many flying half-human/half bird figures in a variety of attitudes and with varying combinations of bird/human attributes.  There might be 40-50 of these figures with stainless steel bodies and verdigris’d copper bird’s wings and tails tooled to create a quilled effect.  The flying figures could be mechanized so that they turn and/or tilt simultaneously or in a choreographed sequence.  As they moved, they would catch and reflect the light like a flock of birds.  Another possibility was for the flock of Flying Folk to be suspended in a cloud-like formation from overhead supports.

The other configuration I came up with for Flying Man was to make him interactive and kinetic using a bicycle as in the following drawing.

A human empowered sculpture, driven by a bicycle, would give a strong message about sustainable travel and would be a celebration of the bicycle as the most efficient, non-polluting machine ever invented for transportation.  The connection between the bicycle and the flying figure also evokes the freedom and fun of riding a bike that builds strength and a sense of self-reliance for the rider.  The kinetic elements in Flights of Fancy are the two wings of the flying figure suspended on a pole that are driven up and down in a flying motion by the bicycle mounted at the base of the pole.  The sculpture would invite and require interaction and engagement with the public to be activated. It would have made a wonderful piece.

The artwork on birds shown above has only touched on the possibilities of these divine creatures There is still much to be explored in further bird songs.