Fear Dispelling Sculpture and some collage

 I 've been busy working on this sculpture for the past 2 months, this behemoth has bled me and tested my patience and I am still not finished! almost.... Now that i've taken it outdoors hung it up in the light, I see some more work to be done to it.... I want to add two carved trees to the wooden appendages instead of the aluminum cone.....paint something on the metal disk and add some more details to the top of this monster!  

 I estimated the beast to be about 3 feet tall but I measured it this morning with a tape measure and it's actually 4 feet tall and some inches. Lots of nooks and crannies for my paintings, collage and assemblage. This sculpture is about trying to overcome the fears we hold onto in this life, spiritually and physically. I was outside gazing at the full moon one evening and maybe it was the night air, the mood I was in or the fact that ive been on this earth for five decades....  I realized that i'm standing on this planet that's earth, cyclically traveling through space...orbiting the sun... im part of a pattern that's been repeated millions of times and through countless generations  we still are no closer to knowing what happens to us when we die...no scientific proof.. nothing...with almost all the religions of the world we are supposed to have faith... an intangible human emotion to rely on to send us on our way into the supposed existence after this life.  I'm weirded out by it all... its like a episode of the Twilight Zone.. 

I'm going to title it Earthbound Trancendentalist II... part of a series of sculptures related to that theme.

                                                     This is a view of the whole sculpture.
 I painted a lotus flower and an ouroboros, which is a snake eating its tail. Often used in art to symbolize introspection and cyclicality, the eternal. The lotus represents purity and spiritual awakening, a rebirth in Buddhism.  The flower emerges from the muddy waters and blossoms into a beautiful flower. The two drummers on each side of the small skull usher in a connection to the spirit realm.

A detail of the middle section, embossed in the wood are the words OM Mani Padme Om, a Buddhist chant for compassion. The background of the eye and horse is a translucent paper that I layered gold leaf on the surface and on the back of the paper as well as marks with various grades of graphite pencils and colored pencils.  The small glass vials contain old embossed newspaper with words in the center of each circle, of which there are 7, in numerology the 7 symbolizes that nothing is as it seems and reality is often hidden behind illusions. The white horse is a representative of the spirit and also is used symbolically in a few cultures as a symbol of death.

A detail of a small collage incorporating a tintype of a man surrounded by water, water has a long history of symbolism. A tintype is an old process of of photography using a thin piece of tin to support a direct positive for the photographic emulsion.

Here is a crow used as a messenger between the living and the dead, often used in art and literature negatively, too bad, because crows are really smart...they can remember your face, they have a good memory and they are problem solvers.. too bad they get a bad rap.. I like the darker image they have been given by history! The hand I use here because it represents the Abhayamudra, the fear dispelling hand pose of the Buddha used in sculptures and paintings throughout Buddhist art history.

Detail of words and a variety of people representing humanity with our shared challenges of being.

Detail of a painted skull I did with acrylic paint. there is one on each side of this sculpture.. a his and hers!

closeup

Closeup

hghghhggh

close up of a small collage I made incorporated into this sculpture which I have to add some more detail to this area of the sculpture.

Collage

These collages I made while creating the sculpture above, kind of like a sketchbook of ideas on the theme of death and do we have a soul and if we do where does it/we go!

 average sizes are 8x10"