LEONARDO DA VINCI AND THE MERMAID - THE TWO DAY INVITATIONAL COUNTRY CRAFT FAIR

When I travel, which is more often that I would like, I take something with me to work on. Sometimes it is drawings to work on or a study but most times I take a piece with me to work on. On my last trip to China I took two pieces  with me that were barely started. One piece was the one that I have come to call The Mermaid. I consider her to be the sister or at least a close cousin to The Siren. The other piece that I took with me was just a piece of wood at the time. I will leave that one for later. The reason that I took these two pieces with me is that I wanted to keep my momentum going on finishing pieces that I am preparing for the two day invitational Country Craft Fair and Old-Fashioned Market Mercantile. 


The interesting thing about the development of The Mermaid was that it became intertwined with the book that I was reading on Leonardo Da Vinci. I have written about Leonardo before when I published a post about the trip that I made with my wife, my son and his girlfriend to the Buffalo Science Museum to view the exhibit call Leonardo Da Vinci : Machines in Motion. the book on Leonardo that I was reading in China was called LEONARDO, by Martin Kemp. Martin Kemp is one of the greatest authorities on Leonardo Da Vinci  I was interested to read his insightful point of view on Leonardo's work.

I was not disappointed. Martin wrote about aspects of Leonardo's life that are usually not covered. He spent entire chapters discussing aspects of Leonardo's life and art that I have never read about before. At any rate, I will cover this book more fully in another post. It deserves a post of its own.

the point is that my imagination became so infused with art of Leonardo that I could see nothing else in my mind except the beautiful Madonnas that he painted. When I looked at the piece of wood that was going to become The Mermaid I saw the faces and the elegant poses of these Madonnas. As I developed the three studies I would eventually work from it became evident that I was using the painting of Lucrezia Crevelli, "La Belle Ferroniere", as my model.

Here are the studies that I did for The Mermaid.

At this point, The Mermaid was roughly carved. Only the major shapes were done. There was no detail.

Pretty neat wallpaper, isn't it?

I thought that the wallpaper in my hotel room went well with The Mermaid so I took a few pictures of her posing with the boats. It looks like she might capsize a few of them!

Here, she is almost finished. I still need to apply her final coat and them mount her onto base that I shaped to make her look like she is rising out of a wave. I will show that in another post.

I think The Mermaid will be an interesting piece at the Country Craft and Fair, that is unless someone snaps her up first!

SIRENS AND MERMAIDS

I have been thinking about selling some of my carvings. In fact, I have one piece, The Master, has been on sale on Etsy for the passed month of so. It is time to get another piece on Etsy for sale. In many ways, this other piece as completely different from The Master yet there are similarities.

I call this new piece, Siren. For the longest time I thought of it as a mermaid but the more I looked at it and when I took the pictures for this post and for Etsy, the word siren kept coming to mind. So who care? Siren or mermaid, what's the big deal? To me, at least, there is an ethos about the piece that says,"I am a siren...beware!". In Greek mythology the sirens were birdlike women who lured sailors with their songs and caused them to crash on the rocky shore of their island.

 sirens

On the other hand, mermaids,

have been portrayed as sinister in the past, today they have taken on a more benign presentation in popular culture. When I conjure up an image of a mermaid I think of the little mermaid of Hans Christian Andersen who caused misfortune more by ignorance than by malice.

When I took the pictures of my latest piece I began to see it more as a siren than a mermaid. Especially in the setting that I placed it in for the pictures. I could see a man being drawn in by her alluring gesture. If she could sing and I imagined her singing, she would captivate the way  Melody Gardot can captivate with her singing.

What is interesting is that the carving is very small. It is less than six inches wide at the widest. It is only three inches deep and it is not more than six inches in height. Yet it seems to occupy a much larger space. It definitely has presence.


What I find interesting is that it all started as a piece of wood that I found bobbing on the shore during one of our walks along our beach. I guess my little siren captivated me one that day. I had no real plan for the wood when I found it. There was just something about it that I liked, the curve of the wood, the color, I really don't know. I just knew that I had to make something out of it. What it turned into was a siren.