Sculpture – Soul Needs

Beauty in Bronze

I saw these two statues and thought them to be of the same order as the David and Venus di Milo statues

Today Reggio’s National Museum hosts many remains of history and art, as well as archaeological collections of Basilicata and Calabria, but the real attraction are the “Bronzi di Riace“. Two human size statues made out of bronze. The reason why they were found at the bottom of the sea bed of “Riace” is unknown.

The bronzes look human and divine at the same time, at the very close edge between reality and myth. They represent the Greek conception of heroism and beauty, the classical composure and dynamic vitality. These elegant bronzes are wonderful works showing a very refined taste and consequently they date back most probably to one of the most flourishing periods of the Greek civilization and of the culture of the whole mankind, the representation of the human body is very expressive and realistic in many anatomical details.

A question rises… who do they represent? no one knows exactly which two characters they are supposed to represent, neither the paternity or origin, but surely they were warriors armed with lances and shields.

Willard Wigan – small is beautiful – but would the ArtWorld say it isn’t art?

Willard Wigan creates sculpture in the eye of a needle or on the head of a pin.

Sugar (?) and…..

Liberty’s statue

Is this thinker’s thoughts small or large?

Elvis on his pin-head.

Visitors to Willard Wigan’s exhibitions view his work through a microsope!

The match.

The Titanic

The Wizard of Oz

The Six wives and Henry VIII+

Of course ‘skill isn’t art’ the ‘ArtWorld’ would say – but it certainly cheered my day!

But how does he do it? According to

Willard Wigan is a “micro-miniaturist,” an artist known for creating some of the world’s smallest sculptures. As he and his work are described on his web site:

Willard Wigan was born in Birmingham, England in 1957 and is the creator of the smallest works of art on earth. From being a traumatized and unrecognized dyslexic child, he is now emerging as the most globally celebrated micro-miniaturist of all time and is literally capable of turning a spec of dust into a vision of true beauty.

Willard can create a masterpiece within the eye of a tiny sewing needle, on the head of a pin, the tip of an eyelash or a grain of sand. Some are many times smaller than the fullstop at the end of this sentence.

Many are even smaller still, with some being completely invisible to the naked eye yet, when viewed through high power magnification, the effect on the viewer is truly mesmerising. Willard, who is completely self-taught has baffled medical science and been the subject of discussions among micro-surgeons, nano-technologists and at universities worldwide. His work is ground-breaking — partly because of the astounding beauty of vision which challenges the belief system of the mind and partly because it demonstrates that if one person can create the impossible, we all have the potential to transcend our own limiting beliefs about what we are capable of.

He works in total solitude at a quiet retreat in Jersey mainly at night when there is a greater sense of peace in the world and less static electricity to interfere with the immeasurable precision and tolerances required to create the pieces.

The smallest sculptures can only be measured in thousandths of an inch which is why they can sit, very delicately, on a human hair three thousandths of an inch thick. When working on this scale he slows his heartbeat and his breathing dramatically through meditation and attempts to harmonize his mind, body and soul with the Creator. He then sculpts or paints at the centrepoint between heartbeats for total stillness of hand. He likens this process to “trying to pass a pin through a bubble without bursting it.” His concentration is intense when working like this and he feels mentally and physically drained at the end of it.

Willard Wigan works with materials such as toothpicks, sugar crystals, and grains of rice and sand, spending months meticulously carving his materials into micro-figures like the ones displayed above.

And the great driver of ‘rarity and monetary value’ has slapped the art mafia in the face since Wigan’s site tells us ;

Former England Davis Cup captain turned entrepreneur, David Lloyd purchased the remaining Willard Wigan collection of micro sculptured art in February 2007, The collection was subsequently insured by Lloyd’s of London for £11.2 million.

A long time anonymous collector of art, David Lloyd’s purchase has been viewed by many as a significant coup in the art world.

Willard whose work has been described by many as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’ received his MBE for services to art from HRH the Prince of Wales in July 2007.

Thereafter, Willard was commisioned by Lloyds of London to replicate the iconic Lloyd’s of London Building as designed by the award winning architect, Lord Richard Rogers. The difference however being that Willard’s masterpiece was on a pinhead,, which was then sold by Eric Knowles (Bonham’s Fine Art) for £94,000.

From October 2007, the David Lloyd Gallery will be undertaking a touring exhibition of Willard’s work around the United Kingdom. Willard is then scheduled to tour America and Canada.

Willard Wigen’s site is HERE

BBC interview with Wigen is HERE

Other source Snopes Urban Myths HERE – but this story is true!

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Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney; resonance, memory, self-understanding and depths of the soul

Sculpture the ‘Well of Life’, Zagreb – source

I chose the following poem by Seamus Heaney (1996 p.14) as ‘the poem’ for my doctoral thesis because it shows beautifully how we resonate now, in relation to what we sensed and experienced as children. It also shows how, through metaphor, the objective connects with the subjective to thrill, to the very quick of our being.

About the poem, Personal Helicon Pelligrino (2003 p.1) explains;
Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the “dark drop” into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells in his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry – and, thank God, so do we.

Of course if Heaney was reading it we would have that wonderful voice, like an aromatic tree giving up the sap, and perfuming the air with all the good things from the soil.

Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Everything you wanted to know about kissing (and philosophy) – HUMOUR

NB Marc Quinn’s sculpture – NB SEE Great museum-based learning content resource!

The Philosophy of Kissing (HUMOUR)

This witty view of kissing that satirically is in the style of the respective philosophers deserves even more readers so here it is. My favourite is the Hegelian kiss – what’s yours?

Dear Doctor Rude,

I think I understand what a “platonic kiss” is, but could you explain to me the difference between the following kisses?
Aristotelian kiss
Hegelian kiss
Wittgensteinian kiss
Godelian kiss

Signed,

Flummoxed in Florida
————————————————————————————————————————
Dear Flummoxed,

That’s a very good question; nowadays most sex education courses focus on secondary and tertiary sources, so much so that few people really get exposed to the classics in this field any more. I’ll try to make a brief but clear summary of some of these important types of kisses:

Aristotelian kiss
a kiss performed using techniques gained solely from theoretical speculation untainted by any experiential data by one who feels that the latter is irrelevant anyway.

Hegelian kiss
dialiptical technique in which the kiss incorporates its own antithikiss, forming a synthekiss.

Wittgensteinian kiss
the important thing about this type of kiss is that it refers only to the symbol (our internal mental representation we associate with the experience of the kiss–which must necessarily also be differentiated from the act itself for obvious reasons and which need not be by any means the same or even similar for the different people experiencing the act) rather than the act itself and, as such, one must be careful not to make unwarranted generalizations about the act itself or the experience thereof based merely on our manipulation of the symbology therefor.

Godelian kiss
a kiss that takes an extraordinarily long time, yet leaves you unable to decide whether you’ve been kissed or not.

Socratic kiss
really a Platonic kiss, but it’s claimed to be the Socratic technique so it’ll sound more authoritative; however, compared to most strictly Platonic kisses, Socratic kisses wander around a lot more and cover more ground.

Kantian kiss
a kiss that, eschewing inferior “phenomenal” contact, is performed entirely on the superior “noumenal” plane; though you don’t actually feel it at all, you are, nonetheless, free to declare it the best kiss you’ve ever given or received.

Kafkaesque kiss
a kiss that starts out feeling like it’s about to transform you but ends up just bugging you.

Sartrean kiss
a kiss that you worry yourself to death about even though it really doesn’t matter anyway.

Russell-Whiteheadian kiss
a formal kiss in which each lip and tongue movement is rigorously and completely defined, even though it ends up seeming incomplete somehow.

Pythagorean kiss
a kiss given by someone who has developed some new and wonderful techniques but refuses to use them on anyone for fear that others would find out about them and copy them.

Cartesian kiss
a particularly well-planned and coordinated movement: “I think, therefore, I aim.” In general, a kiss does not count as Cartesian unless it is applied with enough force to remove all doubt that one has been kissed. (cf. Polar kiss, a more well-rounded movement involving greater nose-to-nose contact, but colder overall.)

Heisenbergian kiss
a hard-to-define kiss–the more it moves you, the less sure you are of where the kiss was; the more energy it has, the more trouble you have figuring out how long it lasted. Extreme versions of this type of kiss are known as “virtual kisses” because the level of uncertainty is so high that you’re not quite sure if you were kissed or not. Virtual kisses have the advantage, however, that you need not have anyone else in the room with you to enjoy them.

Nietzscheian kiss
“she/he who does not kiss you, makes your lust stronger.”

Zenoian kiss
your lips approach, closer and closer, but never actually touch.

Doctor Rude

Source

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