The sketch for this month’s Sculpture of the Month, Cartesian Gambit, was created on the last day of my 1997 trip to Paris, I sat near the Luxembourg Gardens intuitively drawing a scene. What emerged on the paper reminded me, in part, of the painted ceiling in Florence’s Renaissance-era Uffizi Gallery with seal-like creatures showing up in the lower left corner as I sketched. At the same time, a figure that seemed to me like an overgrown knight rose from a chess board, as though strategically maneuvering to dominate the wildness of the animals with a more ordered and predictable world.
In the final sculpture, completed in 2002, the chess board under the dragon-like figure strikes me as a metaphor for the tension between the scientific view of a rectilinear, ordered world – which began to dominate consciousness during the Renaissance – and the more naturalistic world it longed to conquer. This movement reached fruition in the writings of Descartes and physical expression in the Classical gardens of 17th century France, with long, straight vistas meant to quell humanity’s fear of the natural world by controlling it.
Cartesian Gambit
For the first time this year, I’ve joined as an exhibiting artist for Silicon Valley Open Studios! during the second weekend in September followed by a larger Santa Cruz Open Studio at my home studio during the second week of October. It is exciting to finally get back to a place where people can see my works in person again. The works I’ve chosen to feature for these two, back-to-back, Open Studios events both come from my trip to Paris – one sketched at the beginning of the journey, and this one at the end.
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