Italian Artist Sebastiano Ricci

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Howdy! On a visit to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, last month, I “rediscovered” an Italian artist named Sebastiano Ricci. Inspiring and intimidating other artists can be and I know that I must learn how to work faster. I cannot keep up with my brain! I have so many ideas in my head about art and mathematics in composition that I seem to be finding more and more examples of thoughtfully designed shapes, especially with the figure. Seek and ye shall find . . . an idea as old as mankind.



“Flora”
Sebastiano Ricci
125.3 cm x 153.7 cm (49 5/16 in. x 60 1/2 in.)
Oil on canvas, circa 1712-1716
Part of the Suida-Manning Collection

In Ricci's “Flora” (shown here) I noticed that the angelic figures in the painting surrounded the main figure of the woman in a circular pattern, the positions of their bodies and limbs leading the eye around her and thereby emphasizing her as the subject of the painting. The sign at the Blanton explained what is going on:

"In Ovid's Fasti, the nymph Chloris is seduced by the West Wind, Zephirus, and renamed Flora, goddess of flowers and spring. An important Roman deity, she was associated with voluptuousness. This painting renders the moment before her seduction: as Flora flirts with one putto and suggestively grasps the stem of an iris, Zephirus approaches from behind, indicating his quarry and cautioning silence to another putto. At the right, a vessel spills over with blossoms that portend the result of their union and celebrate their namesake. The design is so equilibrated, the rhythm so elegant, and the handling so rich that a quotation from antique statuary -- the Kneeling Venus -- appears seamless. The painting recalls the great mythological works of sixteenth-century Venice."

Another oil painting that I really enjoy on a much simpler arrangement of shapes is “Venus and Cupid” painted by Ricci in 1700. I like the giant sweeping “S” curve of the gesture of Venus, especially that long and slow-curving leg. It makes me want to ride a sled over snow! And I like the lighting with just enough shadow shapes to keep me interested. But one of my favorite parts is how seemingly natural the “modesty device” comes across -- that lovely white bird whose wing tones are light enough to do the job while the interaction between the two doves hardly makes you notice the function of the one.



If you would like to see more of Sebastiano Ricci’s paintings and read more about attributing art to dead artists, please read my my latest art newsletter

For a while now, I have been working almost every morning and again in the evenings for as many hours as I can stand to be outdoors on my marble sculpture “Gymnast.”. While I have written about various parts of my progress, I have been working here and there on other parts as well, such as her hair, her hands, and refining that difficult-to-reach inner area between her piked torso and legs. My students and colleagues have often heard me say that we tend to draw, paint, or sculpt ourselves. This is not a bad thing, in my view, it is simply part of our individuality. We see the faces and shapes of our family members more than anyone else’s. I suspect these shapes are imprinted into our memories before we even become aware of such things.

I have been fighting this a bit in my marble carving. She keeps having a short torso and she’s got some pretty ambitious hips for the size of the rest of her figure. So, while I work the rest of the composition, I am still trying to carve away the abdomen area and shape the forms there.

Unfortunately, I now have cat-sitting duty away from my studio and while I will take some art with me, I will be using this other home to withdraw a bit and focus on finishing the book I am writing on my life as a streetpainter in Florence, Italy.

So, I am taking a holiday from this blog for the next two weeks or so. I hope you get to swim in an ocean, sea, or river and enjoy this summer heat. I am looking forward to doing that next summer, but for now, I have too much work to do!

Take care and do not give up on me -- I will finish this stone carving in 2011 before I go back to Italy!
Ciao, ciao,
Kelly Borsheim

Stone Carving Tortoise Shell

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Hello again. I have been carving the basic shape for the base of my stone carving “Gymnast” a little bit each day and at some point, it was time to get into a bit of detail. So, out with the crayons and get to drawing.

Before that, I would like to explain that I was inspired to create a kind of turtle to hold up the female figure by a visit to the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy several years ago. That mountainous country has known many different cultures over the centuries and one can still see signs of some of them. The Pitti features a large Egyptian obelisk in the main garden. Each corner is supported by a bronze turtle. What a load those four turtles carry!

Of course, I designed my sculpture a little differently. Instead of four turtles, I will create a four-headed tortoise of sorts. So, in these first two images, I drew the shapes in the shell. Only the next morning, I realized my mistake and redrew the shapes at the bottom of the shell, making them line up in a way more consistent with the real animal. I think the lines were better then -- not so obviously mathematical in the way they lead the eye.





I was afraid that I would find this task tedious, having to repeat so many similar shapes. However, once I got into it, I found myself almost laughing out loud because I was enjoying the process so much. The exposed marble crystals were a delight. I rarely get to carve a lot of texture in my compositions and I may have to rethink that for future stone carving designs.

Oh, and it did occur to me that I should have used a more turtle-shell colored crayon! Hopefully, all of the blue wax will be chiseled off, but one never knows.

Stay cool and thank you for reading!
Kelly Borsheim

Georgetown Texas Summer of Sculpture

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

You are invited to see over 120 sculptures in a variety of materials and styles by over 45 sculptors, including three of my own sculptures (shown here are “The Little Mermaid” in bronze and the marble carving “The Offering”). Organized as the summer exhibition of The Texas Society of Sculptors (TSOS), the Georgetown City Library in central Texas is a wonderful space for viewing 3-d art. There is even a HUGE charging bronze rhinoceros to great you as you enter the library.

Award ceremony and reception: THIS Sunday, July 17
1:00 - 3:00 p.m. on the second floor of the library
Awards will be announced at 1:30 p.m. Live music starts at 2 p.m.

Georgetown City Library
402 W. 8th St. (just west of the courthouse)
Georgetown, Texas 78626

See you there! [Exhibit continues through 23 September 2011.]

Touching Stone

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

One of the most difficult things to do in stone carving is to have two objects touch without making one too long or too short. While I have plenty of carving left to do on the base of my “Gymnast” marble sculpture, it is time to address how the hips of the figure will rest upon the turtle shell that holds her up.

Also, I have been working on many different parts of the figure - from hair to toes to her chest and neck and her hands. It is time to refine the shape of her hips as I figure out the connection to what is below. Categorically, my work falls somewhere between reality and abstraction. So, while I will not be creating an exact replica of the soft flesh of even the strongly developed gluts of an athlete as it is pressed over a hard form, I do want a great line for many viewpoints. I want the eye to move along, and I want the viewer’s hand to pass over the marble figure and feel a soft sensuality in the cool stone.


While I had planned last night to go into town for a late night concert of Indian music, I decided to stay home instead and photograph my crotch. That sounds like a lot more fun than it was. But after I got cleaned up and lost all of the day’s stone dust, I donned a pair of tights and tried to emulate the pose. This is part of the problem: I do not want this sculpture to look like me. However, when I am carving, it is actually my body that is the most available. I am happy that I have no neighbors nearby since I often tend to feel the shape of my own muscles and then draw what I felt onto the stone, adapting the anatomy to fit the work.

But my fingers are too thick to really “see” how the shape feels as the soft flesh folds over a bit of the hard tortoise shell. So, I needed either an interesting set of mirrors or some self-portraits. Hmmm. Scary. But this connection is very important. I asked John Borsheim, the mechanical engineer, to talk to me a bit about how much I could cut into the stone before it became so much like an hourglass that the sculpture would snap in two at that point if there is any stress while moving the stone carving. Better to err on the side of caution. This is also part of the reason for creating the turtles heads UP off of the bottom surface, while the legs will help create a circular base. More on that later . . .


I have not been happy with the hips, feeling that they are a bit large and malformed for a figure that size. I began to feel that the hips were getting too much vertical length and thus went back to my original measurement and cut off much stone. Measuring has always been a challenge to me. I am not sure what these images may tell you, but the hips will start to pull in more to give the pike position that noticeable “V” shape. In the last image (taken at dusk, hence the bluish cast), I can clearly see that I still must cut off some of that thigh as it gets closer to the torso. Anyway, I marked it in the near dark and will continue to shape the stone.


I am at the “dangerous” stage of my stone carving process with this marble sculpture. I say “dangerous” because I am almost to the point in which my mind can fully imagine the finished work. The problem is, the “Gymnast” is physically far from completed. At this stage, my mind becomes restless and my thoughts shift to thinking of the challenges I will have with the next stone. You can see the possible destructive nature of this situation, right?

The good news is that with all of my years of carving stone, I know full well that I will move beyond this step in due time and fall in love again with my current marble. I just hope there is enough time because she is the largest and most difficult carving I have yet attempted and I want to finish her desperately.

Working Stone Carver

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

And the work by the stone carver progresses . . .

Welcome Home from Afghanistan, my brother Alex!

Happy Birthday, America.

No Neck Stone Carving

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

This may sound really stupid, but while I knew that I was struggling with the proportions for the chest on my marble sculpture “Gymnast”, I failed to see the obvious. The girl had no neck! This is not acceptable on a female figure, and rarely even on a male.

Part of the problem is that if you tilt your head forward as if to touch your chin to your chest and then extend your upper arm until it is horizontal with the ground, your chin will be lower than the top edge of your arm (as seen in profile). Go ahead. Try it. I will wait . . .

So, I had been trying to dig down inside my figure, between her arms, and make her chest more slender so as to give some shape to her breasts. A gymnast is not usually well endowed there, but I do want a shapely figure somewhere between abstraction and realism. And regardless of whether you see any part of the human anatomy from certain viewpoints, they still are there and must be accounted for -- at least in the style of figurative art that I am carving.

What triggered the ‘Eureka!’ moment was indeed my frustration in wondering why it seemed that her boobs were so far down from her chin, like an older woman’s might be. I knew the breasts had to be seen under the horizontal arm, and yet, the space inside just felt too long! Well, I also know from my experiences in figure drawing that my emotions or intuition need to be heeded. One of my art teachers once told me after I complained that my drawing felt wrong, “We cannot draw feelings; we can only draw lines, shapes, and tones.” I responded that while I understood what he was saying, my ‘feeling’ was my first clue that something was wrong with the lines, shapes, or tones, even when my spatially analytical thoughts were not catching up with my emotion.

Another teacher came up behind me while I was drawing once and said, “Your legs are too long.” I should have given him my Grandpa Mike’s retort about how everyone’s legs are perfectly long enough to start on the ground and go up until they make an ass out of themselves, but I refrained. I was trying to learn, afterall . . . However, and this was another very important lesson I learned: when you notice one problem, step back to analyze the entire situation before you make a correction to make sure that you have discovered the REAL problem. In the case of my long legs, yes, the instructor was correct in that compared to the reclining torso that I had drawn, the legs were too long. However, upon evaluation, I realized that my task had been to draw this reclining figure to a long dimension of 25 cm. Had I shortened the legs, my figure might have been in proportion, but much too short for the assignment! In this case, my solution turned out to be to leave the legs alone and instead widen the torso and head.

Note: the reason that this particular fix was important is because I needed to learn how to create the figure in the size that I wanted, not just something that looked good by itself. For example, if I had been drawing a model in a specific pose to fit into a multi-figure design for a painting, I would have needed her to be exactly the size she needed to be to work with the rest of my larger composition. Sure, if I get a drawing I like, but it is not the right size, I can enlarge or reduce it during a copying process to get what I need, but why not do it right the first time?


Allora, upon examination, I realized that the “Gymnast” needed to have smaller deltoids, not only to fit her frame, but also to help me position the neck. These first two images show the green crayon marks that I made for the new size. I was a bit nervous about this, since I had thought the shoulders were looking good, especially from the back view. When I make significant changes like this, I tend to let it sit awhile, at least overnight. I like to approach the sculpture with a fresh eye to see if my marks FEEL wrong after having been away for a while. It is an interesting mind game sometimes because we have a tendency to get used to what we see before us to the point that it becomes the norm and change begins to feel wrong.


Once I feel confident that my changes will be good, I tend to get out the diamond blade and be quick with it. I have discovered that if I do not make the correction quickly after a lot of thinking and seeing, I tend to repeat my error on a smaller scale. I mean that if I creep up on the correction, removing stone slowly until I work my way down to the line, that part of my brain that does not like change has time to convince me that my correction is too extreme. And I find myself backing out of what I know needs to be done. Sometimes caution simply prolongs the agony.


As I said before, in 3-dimensional art, the sculptor must make all views work. Lowering the collar bones helps dramatically with the chest. Even if the viewer will not see this part so much, it needs to work. And I must be careful to carve the slope over the trapezius at the top of the shoulder down to the protruding collarbone because of the hunching posture, while still keeping a rib cage that is believable for a young girl’s figure.


In this semi-back view, you may see that she is starting to have a neck. And in the last image, I have that lovely feeling of not being able to remember how the shoulders looked before the cuts. I still have work to do, but it is nice to be back on track.



P.S. For those hoping that I will soon get back to my life and writings about Italy, please bear with me. I had to cancel my trip there this May and June to finish up projects and attend to personal things going on in my life right now. But I will be back in bella Italia in December and cannot wait to bring you new stories and images.

Poetry - really?

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

The Wood Floors

Cold nights. Warm afternoons.
Inside this old house it remains
Cold in the daylight, warmer in the evenings --
Echoing the weather
Like a lingering memory.

Candles and incense always burning --
As though anticipating a séance.
The room looks old, but not ancient.
Sometimes familiar and cozy,
Occasionally haunting.

The sound of pots clashing come from
The nearby kitchen -- followed by
A white and black skinny cat
Emerging from the cupboard under the sink.
He doesn’t live here.
There’s a hole in the back wall
Leading to underneath the house.
The house sits above the ground --
About two and a half feet.
A place where animals come to die
I was told when I moved in.

He told me once my house smelled old --
That I even smelled like my house.
As I sit here alone in my candlelit room,
I think about his comment;
Then blow out the flames
And listen to the sounds of
My footsteps creaking
On the wood floors.

~ Kelly Seiler
Persona magazine, 1987

I had not ever written poetry until I met Darryl Smyers in 1986, my senior year in college. He had past-the-shoulders dark hair and even darker eyes. He wore a long black trenchcoat and red high-top tennis shoes. It was hard not to notice him around a campus in Texas and I was aware of who he was before I met him. He was also the editor of Persona, the annual creative literary magazine of Southwest Texas State University (they have since lost the misnomer “Southwest”).

Darryl introduced himself and asked me to be on the committee, with a stipulation that I write at least one poem for the issue. I almost balked, but he had collected an interesting group of people for the committee and I was intrigued. (And we all had such a blast!) He also later traveled to Seguin, Texas, with me while I photographed a farm family that I knew from a college friend back my first year when I had been a math major. Some of those photographs were chosen by Darryl to be included in the publication, including on the cover.

Poetry did not come easy for me (as things rarely do) and Darryl was without a doubt a patient, but straight-to-the-point instructor. His basic advice was to get more specific. The hand-written notes in the margins of my first feeble attempts at poetry include his words, “Far too ambiguous; try being weirder.” and “not too many will get this. Use images to express your pain, not just simple sentences. It ain’t easy, not nothing is.”

I had been focusing on some personal sap based on a failed romance that I was still recovering from and after that particular critique, I switched topics. I hope you enjoy my perhaps-final attempt at poetry, the description of the house I rented during this time, and Darryl’s perception of me in it. And Darryl’s advice is good for the visual arts as well. Try being weirder… ha. Do not gloss over with sentiment. Get into the meat of what you feel. Be specific. Describe your own path in your own terms.

P.S. Incidentally, I wrote the first four lines of “The Wood Floors” after that critique. Darryl scrawled in response, “This kicks ass. Concrete imagery, more of this -- less of I, me, my, mine.” Later, another friend Jamshid said that that explained how the first part did not really feel the same as the rest.

It was this poem that taught me how to spell ‘occasion’ -- Darryl told me after publication that my error of the double Ss made it almost to the end, when one of the professors caught it. Funny how these things stick in one’s memory while other stuff fades.