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ancient Cycladic figure

Cycladic Series

Over 5000 years ago in middle of the South Aegean Sea, people who were mainly fishermen and farmers rubbed life into chunks of their rocky islands, which happened to be the highest quality marble. They used no tools but the chafing emery found on Naxos. These shapely slivers of oat and pearl colored marble were abraded into figures of exquisite balance and simplicity.

Some of the earliest pieces have a ghost of a face and swollen hips. Others, such as the Kilia type, from Anatolia, have rounded upturned heads with a face indicated only by a dorsal ridge breaking the surface just slightly. These figures, referred to as Stargazers look upward toward the stars, making the unknown seem vast and wondrous.

Cycladic art evokes in me a sense of repose and balance. The schematic figures fromt these Greek Islands — eyeless, hook-nosed, with elongated necks and arms folded at the waist — are themselves islands of stillness. Their presence has inhabited my work since 1995.

The island of Delos, the legendary abode of the sun god Apollo and his twin sister Artemis, goddess of the moon and all things wild, was regarded as a physical and spiritual hub to a smattering of Greek islands by ancient Greeks. Delos, once part of an ancient land bridge, Aigeida, is actually the tip of a mostly submerged mountain. The islands surrounding it break the water's surface, in a roughly circular pattern earning the grouping the Greek name for circle, kyklos, or the Cyclades.

These series' of collages and paintings are based on sketches I made at the Getty Villa in Malibu, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Goulandres Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. I am attracted to them equally as to the sculptures of Brancusi and Modigliani. Time differences are erased in a way that is truly transporting when art is minimal in service of the sacred.

In the studio I transposed the drawings onto graphite and wax tissue, used fragments of them in mixed-media collage.

Antiquities