If you've followed my blog since back in 2009, you may have seen photos of one of my sculptures. It hangs out in my Gallery Downstairs nowadays. It comes with a story...
And I have made other figurative sculptures as well. But it has been some years since I worked that way.
At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem a week ago I came across this terra cotta young lady, reading, as bourgeois young ladies in the 1870s were sometimes depicted. By Aime-Jules Dalou.
The guard did not mind when I got out my camera, so I walked all around and photographed her from various angles; sitting on her chair, engrossed in her book, all alone in her museum case. The clay (terra cotta is earthenware) was roughly modeled, yet she is remarkably lifelike all the same. Her face is smooth. She is as fresh a subject as if the model had just sat for the portrait last month.
(Woman Reading, 1874, by Aime-Jules Dalou. Collection of Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
From her tilted-up shoe to her engrossed reading, she is the very symbol of poised absorption.
I don't know if I'll do figurative sculpture again anytime soon, but this young lady makes me remember how exciting and fun it was, and how the hours flew while I worked with the clay in this way.