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| Crisis II |
| This
has been a very successful carving; I have made five of them, each
with a slightly different slant, a different 'feeling'. The thought
behind them is the same yet each seems to take on a personality of
its own; where one may seem delicate, hesitant even, another may have
a more robust attitude. This one with its dark brown colour is small
but has a strength which belies its size. The compact root, lifting
the seed from the ground , gathers itself before reaching downwards
. There is a latent power in this 'Crisis' that I have not seen before, maybe because the colour is uniform and rich, lightening upon the top and underneath . The granulation of the fossilized Walrus tooth gives the colour a strange depth as if the surface is slightly transparent and the material has several small holes in it which I elected not to fill as they lent the piece a strange authenticity. I have never been happy carving fossil Walrus tooth; I found out why whilst making this. The granular nature is in fact composed of two different hardnesses; the more one works the surface, the worse it gets. The best results are from working it dry, not wet as is my practice. I also find the granulations rather unsightly and distracting, perhaps because they are only faintly visible. If the patterns were stronger I would find them more acceptable. As they are, they only seem to 'camouflage' the outline by breaking it up slightly. When a dark colour is applied the outline is easily seen, the camouflaging effect only showing in the rubbed areas as the translucency I mentioned earlier. |
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