Choose your battles

Rearing horse, graphite and white chalk

I started my “Rearing Horse” relief sculpture with a drawing based on Leonardo’s study for the “Battle of Anghiari”(see previous blog).  Then I did a drawing study of the skeleton of a rearing horse, and then a drawing study of the muscles.  Once again, I try not to look too much at Leonardo’s drawing after I start the clay, because my work is never going be anything like his.  It’s presumptuous to make a sculpture based on Leonardo’s work.  However, all of my life I’ve looked at Leonardo’s horse drawing and thought that it would make a terrific relief sculpture.  So I finally decided to try it, with thanks and apologies to Leonardo.  I'm one of many artists who have attempted to work from Leonardo's drawings.  It's almost a rite of passage.  Kind of like a violinist trying to play the Brahms violin concerto - you have to try, if only to find out how much more work you have left to do.

Meanwhile, I had a challenging week.  My “Trotting Horse” relief was rejected from an exhibition, which really bothered me, even though it’s the only exhibition rejection I’ve had this year, it’s late June, and I’ve already been in many exhibitions.  I was so disgruntled that I didn’t even check to see the results of another show, consequently, I didn’t know I’d won an award the same day I got my rejection.  You can’t have a fragile ego or thin skin to be a practising artist.  Rejection is part of the game, and you have to accept your losses and move on.  But this one got to me.  So I trudged around, feeling like a failure for four days when I could have at least felt good about the award I won.  Dumb.  I chose to hang on to that pain instead of feeling positive, or at least neutral – one win, one lose.  Very dumb.

Meanwhile, I’ve been glazing, firing and mounting the “Trotting Horse” to ship next week to an equine art exhibition across the country.  These horse reliefs are an experiment.  I don’t know anything about horses except that they’re beautiful.  I've never done any horse sculptures before.  I’ll find out what the equine art people think of my horses; they will let me know if I’ve made some anatomical bloopers or not.  I’m also experimenting with porcelain for the first time with these reliefs, which is techincally difficult and challenging.  This makes me think of Leonardo.

It’s difficult to associate Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest of artists, with failure, but not everything he did was a glorious success.  Two Leonardo drawings that I used as a basis for relief sculptures were preparatory drawings for lost works of Leonardo’s that were not successes.  One drawing was for the monumental “Gran Cavallo" horse sculpture that was never completed and which 16^th c. soldiers used for target practice.  The other was a preparatory drawing for the lost painting of the “Battle of Anghiari” in which Leonardo experimented with painting materials new to him and which literally slid off the wall.  As I’ve worked on these two reliefs, I can’t help thinking about this:  Leonardo, the greatest of all great artists, had failures, too.  Both the Gran Cavallo and the Battle of Anghiari were failures largely the result of experimenting with new materials and/or new techniques.  It’s interesting that Leonardo forged ahead trying out new things, apparently without a backup plan in case something didn’t work.  And he did his experiments in public, for the whole world to see.   

The Battle of Anghiari was intended to be part of a tryptich for a huge long wall in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.  The opposite wall was supposed to have been painted by Michelangelo, but he didn’t finish his wall, either.  I like to think of these two guys backing up to see their work, as painters do, and bumping into each other.  What a shame they didn’t like each other and instead of commenting, “Hey, great leg!” or “Wonderful horse!” there was only silence and hostility.  But the space is dark and unpleasant.  I can see why nobody wanted to work there.  And if the paintings had been finished, nobody could have ever seen them properly, because there isn’t enough room to step back and look at the painting from a distance.  (Like the Guggenheim, another stupid exhibition space by Frank Lloyd Wrong many centuries later, but that’s another story.)

Leonardo’s final self portrait drawing in red chalk does not show the face of a happy, peaceful man gratified with the rewards of a life well spent.  I see an embittered, discouraged man, his unflinchingly clear eyes haunted by failure and his lips pulled down with disappointment and disillusionment.  His expression is one of almost grim determination.  This is a man who is discouraged, but not beaten.  When I was young, I thought this drawing showed Leonardo’s sorrow and exasperation with the ignorance and foolishness of his time.  Now that I am the same age he was when he drew it, I think it was probably his own failures, frailties and errors that created that expression.  Those are the hardest to live with. 

"I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have."

    Leonardo da Vinci

Rearing horse, about half finished Perfectionism is not easy, and no one aimed higher than Leonardo.  He tried to draw everything he saw and he saw everything.  But not even the supremely gifted Leonardo was always successful.  He wasn't afraid to experiment or risk failure.  You can’t win them all.  But you can’t win if you don’t enter.  Failure is part of learning.  So go ahead, make mistakes.  Learn from them.  And then do it again, only this time, make new mistakes.   deborahdendler.com www.facebook.com/DeborahDendlerSculpture "Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind." Leonardo da Vinci

Anatomy, Leonardo, horses

Indestructible

I love anatomy. Like all students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), I studied extensively from life, working from the model every day, all day and many nights.  And like all students at the PAFA in the 1970’s, I attended the anatomy lectures of  the legendary Robert Beverly Hale (Drawing Lessons of the Great Masters.) For more understanding of the bony landmarks of the body and the major muscles, I took private lessons in artistic anatomy with sculptor EvAngelos Frudakis.  Additionally, a friend of mine studying at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School sneaked me into the dissection labs so I could draw his cadaver.  I discovered that I was not bothered by the smell of formaldehyde, and it wasn’t creepy or weird, but fascinating.  I remember a “Eureka!” moment when I picked up a pectoralis and discovered that which may be a statement of the obvious, but I had to learn through actual experience:  muscles are not intellectual configurations, constructs in a book.  They are physical objects with mass and weight that obey the laws of physics, in particular, gravity.  This is a big deal for a sculptor.  I drew the human skeleton a lot, and one exercise I found particularly useful was to look at a model posing in one room, and draw the model’s skeleton from memory in another room.  I also remember liking to draw Houdon’s Ecorché. 

Leonardo was the father of artistic anatomy and remains the greatest of all.  But of all artists whose work remains an unanswerable mystery, Leonardo is the most incomprehensible to me. Unlike artists whose work is baffling for technical reasons (Rembrandt’s glazes, for example) or artists whose work contains a breadth and scope of almost inhuman creativity (Shakespeare, Mozart) Leonardo’s work is unfathomable intellectually.  How could anyone dissect and analyze the human heart before dissection, anatomy or even science, as we know it today had even been invented?  How could he have understood the valves and ventricles of the heart five hundred years before anyone else? And then drawn the heart so accurately it can still be used in medical textbooks today?

Leonardo’s drawings are almost shocking in person because of their size.  They’re much smaller than the reproductions, which usually appear in books, which make them even more inscrutable when you see them in person.  They’re so finely drawn, so delicate and so absolutely correct.  They are so beautiful and so perfect.  All of my life I’ve thought that two of Leonardo’s horse drawings would make great relief sculptures.  One drawing was a study for his painting, “The Battle of Anghiari.”  The other drawing was a study for Leonardo’s only sculpture, the monumental "Gran Cavallo", also known as the Sforza horse, which was tragically destroyed centuries ago. 

Many artists have attempted to recreate Leonardo’s sculpture and some of the results are spectacular.  However, none of them seem right to me.  None have that ineffable delicacy and grace that characterize Leonardo’s work, nor the gentle sweetness that his work shares with that of his teacher, Andrea del Verocchio.  In particular, none emphasize the S curve and the spiral, which Leonardo seemed to see in everything.  So I decided to try making a relief of Leonardo’s Sforza horse.  Using a drawing of Leonardo’s as a basis for a sculpture is necessarily an exercise in humility; anything I do can only be a pale shadow of the original.  But I wanted to try.  First, I made of drawing of the trotting horse based on Leonardo’s Sforza horse drawing.  Since the horses in the Sforza stables were Andalusians, I tried to draw a horse that looked like an Andalusian in its proportions, long mane and flowing tail. Next, I drew the skeleton of the trotting horse.  Then I did a drawing of the trotting horses’ muscles.  Finally, I sculpted a clay relief referring constantly to all three of my drawings.  (I try not to look at Leonardo’s work at this point because the comparison is just embarrassing.) I use my anatomical drawings to work from, so the drawings become crumpled and battered through use.  It’s OK.  These aren’t meant for exhibition; they’re work drawings. 

Even though I’ve drawn horses for years, it was only during this drawing of the horse skeleton that I realized that horses have no clavicles.  Comparative anatomy is interesting and full of surprises.  Of course, compared to humans, mammals with tails have lots more vertebrae.  And most mammals have their tibia/fibula and tarsus bones in surprising places if you’re used to human anatomy.  But that’s what makes it so interesting!

A couple of years ago, I was working in clay on two life size sculptures of fawns.  I was working from my own clay sketches and my usual drawings of the skeletons and muscles.  It didn’t go well.  I floundered around, struggling with every detail, until I happened to find on my daily walk in the woods a skeleton of a fawn.  Of course I brought it home, and from then on, my terracotta fawns went well.

Incidentally, there is an amusing connection between the PAFA, horses and anatomy.  When Thomas Eakins was director of the school, from 1882 – 1886, he caused an uproar doing various things that were scandalous in the 19th century.  Rumor had it that the thing Eakins did that finally got him fired was to bring the cadaver of a horse into the life studios so that students could learn animal anatomy directly from the source, straight from the horse’s mouth.

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Everyday magic

When I started walking three miles a day, I walked in the unbuilt two hundred acres around my house, where the foxtrails and deer paths are the I-90 and Route 66 of the animal world, but there are no people.  But as I get older, I decided I’d better walk in a place that if something went wrong, someone more helpful than a coyote or black bear could find me.  At first, I worried about stepping into a skunk hole in the woods and spraining my ankle; now I’m thinking more about strokes and heart attacks. Either way, now I walk on a paved road, that isn’t heavily travelled, but if I keeled over someone would see me within two or three hours (unless it’s Sunday morning and then I’d be in good shape because of the church on the corner.)  At first I found walking on the road boring.  Now I can’t understand how I could make any progress in the woods; there’s so much to see.

This morning I was often stopped in my tracks by the drama of the ferns in the various stages of their unfurling process.  Some were still in the fiddlehead stage; some were upside down tripods with dots; some were already feathery fronds.  So improbable a process, I can never really believe it.  This is magic I can pay attention to, unlike the numerous popular movies and shows on TV about vampires, ghosts and fairy tales, which slide past my brain like they were coated with Teflon.  The work of Mother Nature is always more strange and beautiful than you can possibly imagine.  

I always think wild flowers must have been named by poets, or by people indulging themselves with a little poetry.  And certainly the names of things came about when people still travelled slowly, with time to think uninterrupted, either walking or riding.    “Lady’s slipper, columbine, trillium,” I recall the names of my old friends every spring and hope I don’t sound like Ophelia, or worse, Simon and Garfunkel. “Trout lily, Solomon’s seal, Indian pipes.”  This far north my gentle friends appear in mid May or June, not in April or early May as their southern relatives do.  “Forget-me-not, cowslip, jack-in-the-pulpit.” 

Our beautiful English language is quirky and xenophobic, particularly with the French imports so humorously mangled that they no longer sound anything like the original.  I’m thinking of dandelion, or “dente de lion” (tooth of lion), which perfectly describes the notched leaves we see so often.  It’s interesting that the loss in translation of the teeth didn’t include ditching the lion idea; possibly the poetry in language is as hard to kill as dandelions.  My favorite English mangling of French has always been “Marylebone” which call to mind a foul, whiskered bone collector, instead of “Marie le Bon”, Mary the Good and Beautiful, dressed no doubt in blue.

Accused of being a recluse and a hermit, I admit I find refreshing company in the woods – no political, religious or philosophical opinions ever intrude.  Solitude is not loneliness.  The deer, rabbit, fox, woodchuck, skunk and porcupine enliven my days, not to mention the pine snake, mouse, vole, tree frog, dragonfly and bee. I enjoy the antics of the blue jay, thrill to the exaltations of skylarks and ponder the business of crows.  Hawks amaze me with their spiraling and effortless gliding; eagles inspire us all.  Owls, doves, bluebirds, and robins – all have their virtues.  But I’m worried about the bluebirds because I haven’t seen any this spring. 

“Society is all but rude,

To this delicious solitude.” 

The Garden, Andrew Marvell, 1681

I love the spring wildflowers best, so joyous of life and so fierce in their survival.  When late frosts have killed the tips of wild asparagus and the buds of my favorite iris, the wild flowers are untouched.  It’s a good thing that Congress isn’t in charge of spring; they’d really mess it up. I have to admit that the spring version of my behaving badly is a longer and further walk, whereas during high summer my worst behavior is torpor and indolence, when it’s all I can do to turn pages of a book.  Soon enough will come the Shakespearean sounding mid-summer wild flowers “toadflax, Queen Anne’s lace, bellflower” when the sun is too hot for anything but an early morning or evening walk.  And a daydream.

	“Tell me where is fancy bred,
	Or in the heart or in the head?
	How begot, how nourished?
	Reply, reply.
	It is engender’d in the eyes,
	With gazing fed; and fancy dies
	In the cradle where it lies.
	Let us all ring fancy’s knell:
	I’ll begin it,—Ding, dong, bell.
	All.  Ding, dong, bell.” Merchant of Venice, Scene 3, Act 2

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