“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything – anger, anxiety, or possessions – we cannot be free.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation
Buddhist God
Dharmapala Vajrabhairava
Tibet 18th century gild bronze
Dallas Museum of Art
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Sculpture
Jason Mehl
The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
“What is happening to me happens to all fruits that grow ripe.
It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Andrew Rogers
Australian
Ripening
1999
Frisco, Texas
“She was like a drowning person, flailing, reaching for anything that might save her. Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
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Sculpture by Jason Mehl,
The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
At some point we’ve got to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of everything, maybe it’s not so very important what it means. It’s probably more important what the sense of it is.. they are two very basic and different things.
—-Tony Cragg
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Tony Cragg
English, born 1949
New Forms
1991-1992, Bronze
I have been a fan of the sculptor Tony Cragg for some time. During a tough time I was buoyed by visiting an exhibition of his work at the Nasher Scupture Center here in Dallas.
There is also a nice piece of his work called Stevenson in the garden at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Tony Cragg, Stevenson, Dallas Museum of Art
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One of the cool things about sculpture is finding work by familiar artists at new locations. I enjoyed finding a Tony Cragg work, New Forms, at the Cullen Sculpture Garden in Houston.
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Tony Cragg
English, born 1949
New Forms
1991-1992, Bronze
“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Lee Bontecou
American, Born 1931
Untitled
1962
Welded steel, epoxy, canvas, fabric, saw blade, wire
Museum of Fine Arts
Houston, Texas
“The power of the machine imposes itself upon us and we can scarcely conceive living bodies without it.”
—-Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Large Horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
My favorite sculpture – one I have gazed upon many times in the Nasher Sculpture Center, here in Dallas, is Large Horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon. I wrote about it more than three years ago.
At the time I said:
I like to stare at it, walk around it. I’ve taken some pictures of it. I would like to take some more.
To me, it’s clear that it is a statue of a horse – but that horse has been morphed into a complex machine, full of pushrods, pistons, and gears. It has an impressive, solid bulk, but feels like it is about to propel itself out through the glass and speed down the street in a blur, smelling of ozone and oil.
It is cast in very dark bronze – almost black. It swallows a lot of the light, but what does escape is subdued by the power and mass of the horse. It shines with dark energy.
The sculptor was a cavalry doctor in World War I and must have had a close relationship, knowledge, and a deep connection with his horses. He chose this animal to convert into a cubist bronze. He was able to preserve the essential horseness of the shape while implying the obsolescence of the animal – overtaken by the more powerful, rugged, and easily controlled energy of machines.
Duchamp-Villon died too young. He contracted typhoid fever during the war. He died before he finished this sculpture. All he left was the finished small scale model. After his death, his famous brother, Marcel Duchamp (Nude Descending a Staircase) finished the job and had the sculpture cast in full-sized bronze.
Thanks.
Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Over the holidays, I was in Houston to visit my mother and my sister and her family and was pleased to discover another Duchamp-Villon’s Large Horse in the Cullen Sculpture Garden at the Houston Museum of Fine Art.
It was like running into an old friend unexpectedly.
Large Horse, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, in the Cullen Sculpture Garden, Houston, Texas
“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.”
― Henry David Thoreau
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
The Founders’ Statue, Texas State Fair Grounds, Dallas, Texas
From The Historic Heart Tour – Founders’ Statue & Frank P. Holland Court
At the statue’s base is an iron crypt. Made of ore mined in Cherokee County, Texas, it once contained the front pages of three-hundred Texas newspapers for October 8, 1938, the date of the dedication. At the ceremonies, attended by some three-hundred descendants of the founders, the statue was unveiled by the Fair’s 1912 president, Mr. J. J. Eckford. Senator Tom Connally was the guest speaker. The key to the crypt was handed over to the Texas Press Association for safe-keeping until the crypt’s scheduled re-opening, fifty years from the date it was sealed. Unfortunately, when officials took a “sneak peek” inside the crypt, just before the 1988 State Fair, it was discovered that the vault had not been well-sealed and had leaked. When the bundle of deteriorating newspapers was touched, they crumbled into dust. As a result, ceremonies for the opening of the crypt were cancelled.
This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis…. We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed and awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.
—-Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten
20 Elements
Joel Shapiro
Northpark Center
Dallas, Texas
“Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn’t tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn’t fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
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Anish Kapoor (India, 1954)
The World Turned Outside In, 2003
Polished stainless steel
Northpark Center
Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 