Victorian Marble Nudes Op-Ed

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Dear List,

I really can not help sharing my various excitements and
thoughts about stone and carving with you.  I really do
mean well and am always propelled in my postings by an
interest in stone issues, however scandalizing my manner
of speech may be.  A list member has written to me off
list about the carver Goscombe whose work I posted a URL
to under the objectionable heading of "Modern Marble Nudie
Pics".  I aplogize for that heading, but it really is what
these things are.  The Victorians were very into their
pubescent slave girls.  I am not responisble for this.
What I wrote in response I wish to share as it ties in
with what I think are important public issues and relates
to recents discussions.  It follows:

As I live to tittilate the stone list I am very much
possessed with the urge to raise what is perhaps a hoary
old question, but I have not seen it discussed and when I
see the excellent figurative carving of the late 19th and
early 20th century such as Goscombe.  They are pretty much
in obscurity at the moment and I am certainly no expert on
the history of european marble art.  But to me, figural
work really seemed to reach an apogee at Goscombe's time
period.  Actual observation of the real human figure and
the enactment of those observations have never been at
such a height or equaled since.  The Greeks are quite
stiff and full of stylization by comparison, and the
Italians full of dramatic flair but still retaining habits
of stylization and lack the quantatative observation seen
in workers such as Goscombe which can overule mental
assumptions about what a figure needs in the way of
recognizable characteristics.  Goscombe works so closely
 from life in matters of form of limb that he is ready to
risk awkward appearances for the sake of the living
reality.  His work gets very interesting because due to
this ventusomeness the non assigned shapes accquire a
presence or gestalt that takes primacy over the narrative
and the recognizable.  Goscombe allows the bunched knees
of the maiden, for instance, to very much become
compelling interesting shaped mounds of furrowed and
massed volume, very much in addition to their narrative
role as knees.    It is very much the same thing that
happens with Argent's scanned from life pillows (Argent
being the artist discussed in the Digital Stone Project
discussion famous for his large lip sculpture).  The
scanner does not care about the usual tropes that are used
to create the narrative of a pillow, ie seams, pooched
furrows and pointy corners.  His scan reveales qualities
of the gestalt of pillows that are quite poetic and
chimerical.  The lightness of the lofted down, the
pressing fullness of the packing of the stuff, and once
again the very weightlessness.  Such things will never
happen in the studio when one creates from one's mind  a
pillow in stone.  In the turn of the century, perhaps
Victorian era, sculptors strived for such liberating
acuraccy of measurement in order to create volumes whose
scientific accuracy brought into existence exciting forms
that had never before appeared in art and represented the
complicated and mysteriously unknowable nature of the
actual world.   The Digital Stone Project and the scanning
 from life that is starting to get a foot hold in
figurative clay modelling seem to set the stage for a
foray back into greatness of what now seems a lost art,
barring the very exception appearances of vivid figuralism
in the work of someone such as Peter Schwipperyn(sp?)or
suggested in the faces of Philippe Farout.  I do feel that
the representation of the figure in stone has fallen on
hard times and could perhaps in the future mount glorious
new heights.