Rodin (1.)
"Drawings are always more intelligent than photographic reproductions." This statement is the thesis of who I am as an artist. Drawing is the soul of the graphic arts. I am looking at the life of Rodin because he is a sculptor and I believe that sculptors have a greater sense of form then do painters. By nature they see the other side of the form and their drawings emphasize this. I their drawings for the most part, the rendering of value gives the sense that the form is to be turned to see the other side in the viewers mind.
"My childhood was quite arduous, comparable to that of a workers son." At the time of Rodin’s birth, Jean-Baptiste, his father, had worked his way up to the position of a police inspector. The family lived on 1,200 francs a year. That income placed them in some comfort above many of the laborers they lived among in a very poor neighborhood in the Paris of the 1840’s.
Rodin did not do well in his early schooling. "Modern writers have placed him, retroactively, among the great dyslexics..." He became interested in the realm of art. "When I was very young, as far back as I can remember, I made drawings. A grocer patronized by my mother used to wrap his prunes in paper bags made of pages torn from illustrated books, or even prints. I copied them; they were my first models."
"His hands had the vision". He had a myopia of the eyes. He was always "manipulating pieces of clay with his fingers like an inveterate smoker constantly rolling cigarettes."
He was sent away to boarding school to the old Gothic town of Beauvais where he developed a love for Gothic architecture. "The child with its imagination catches a glimpse of marvelous things-- it is that which the Gothic has accomplished, with its order and structure, in transmitting the magic of nature." The unfinished cathedral close by the school, unfinished because part of it collapsed in 1284, its 150-foot vaults having exceeded the limits, was an inspiration to him, "looking like a living giant."
The artists life must be the pursuit of truth. I know this sounds corny but the objective is non the less important. Seeing form and then transcribing it in such a way as to communicate the essence of the form to the viewer is the goal. Study of nature is critical. The world around us has the information for us to create knowledgeable. Seeing and understanding light, color, shape and line played out in nature is critical to achieving the goal of producing work truly beautiful. The word beautiful is not used here in the sense of "pretty" but in the greater sense of relationship, harmony and mood being communicated in a particular work of art.
An example is the sculptor Barye who was an early influence upon Rodin. He once wrote of Barye saying, "in a shop window, I noticed two greyhounds in bronze. They ran. They were here, they were there; not for an instant did they remain in one spot. I saw them running: they were signed Barye." Later he said of him, "He clung to nature like a god, and he thus dominated everything. He was beyond all and outside of all art influences, save nature and the antique. He was one of, if not the most, isolated artists that ever lived. Emphatically original ... He was himself and himself alone." As one can see Barye was single minded in his search to understand form and to be able to communicate what he had learned in his sculptures.
(1.) Quotes from "Rodin A Biography by Fredeic V. Grunfeld
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| The Shade |
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Celle qui fut la belle heaulmiere
c. 1880-85 |
