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| Al Held from 1965 |
To say as I did earlier that I learned most drawing
techniques on my own is true only in part. In some cases what teachers conveyed
often in passing only made sense years later. Or there was something in the
professor’s own work that was unclear to me at the time. This was particularly
the case with Al Held, whose mid career work was for the most part unknown to me when I studied
with him at Yale. It generated its energy by reversing figure and ground
thereby upsetting our normal relationship to the world, where we are interested
in the objects in front of us not the negative space behind it. Someone who
gave me the facts like Sergeant Joe Friday in the TV show ”Dragnet” ("Nothing but the facts Ma'm")was Erwin
Hauer sculptor professor at Yale, whose architectural screens from the 60’s
are being rediscovered. He conveyed to me how in sculpture to express the
pneumatic aspect of living beings. It all started in his figure sculpture class
where my initial efforts to sculpt showed no respect for the surface tension of
the human form in the clay model. He kept repeating that representing what is seen on the
surface is how you understand what is underneath. He told me to abandon the
figure sculpture I was working on to sculpt a rhinoceros thighbone , a relic
from the zoology department. Continuity of surface became the mantra as he had
me physically touch the contours of the bone to feel the movement of the surface
in space.
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| Erwin Hauer Screens from the 60's |
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| Surface tension is conveyed in drawing with directional parallels as shown in this drawing of Durer |
