Daphne is the piece that gets most of my studio time right now. I really want her to be part of my Kore Gallery show next June. I have been making progress, but this week she moved in a larger way. I spent a lot of my time tying the concept together.
The branch beside her ear is the clearest step. The bark texture is in now, and it runs along the length of the branch instead of sitting in one spot. That matters on this piece, because Daphne is a woman becoming a tree, and the change has to read as something happening to her, not something stuck onto her.
Around the back, the leaf cluster is starting to come apart into individual leaves. It read too much like a ball before. It's looser now, and you can pick out leaves instead of one lumped shape. That is the whole point of walking around her. From the front you see wind-strewn hair from her flight from Apollo. The leaves are not up front. You find them when you walk around to the back, and that walk has to pay you off.
The hair strands themselves are reading well, and the notch where the neck meets the collar has quieted down. Those are smaller things, but on a piece like this the small things are what keep the face calm while the rest of her changes.
There is still plenty left. The broad sweeps across her back are still stepped bands — the channels between them are not deep enough yet, and that is the biggest structural job still ahead of me. The branch tops still end in flat cuts, and the lowest sweep is still heavy where it meets the base. The front of the chest and base still carries coarse file marks from earlier passes. Those will get their own pass later. I am not rushing the finish to get there.
I have been working on another grave marker as well. I finished it this past weekend, so the large marble gearhead takes over the timed slot in the studio rotation, and Daphne keeps the rest of the time. That is the way I work best. Having that rotation helps me solve problems better.
More next week.
