Helping Hands

Helping Hands:  Carved from a black marble called Bardiglio from Italy, this couple sculpture depicts a man bending over forward to pull up a seated woman.  Her imploring hands reach up towards his bearded face, but it is the moment before she is close enough to reach him.  Her legs are together and are elongated on the floor between his legs. One of her knees is bent higher than the other.

     The design is abstract, but tending towards realism.  This piece is rather complicated in that there are holes carved in the stone under the arms and spaces between the bodies.  The areas under the heads of both the man and the woman were very difficult to reach and carve.  However, it allows the light in, much like my Gymnast sculpture.  This figurative marble sculpture weighs 21 kilos (roughly 47 pounds).

    The idea started off as two dancers, the girl in a swing movement, sliding under the man's feet and back up again.  The symbol for Infinity was the inspiration, wanting a diagonal figure 8 as the main composition idea.  The figures would have a C curve to their torsos.  The abstraction was too abstract for me and I started to develop the heads and hands.  To create more interesting hands, the dancers no longer grasped each other.  Instead, her hands left his arms and began to reach for his face.  Thus, the idea morphed into something else entirely.  Later, I realized that this marble carving was in fact an expression of the gratitude I felt for receiving so much help from my landlord in my new home.  He in fact was (very loosely) the model for the male figure here.  Most of my works tend to be autobiographical in one way or another, sometimes without even realizing it during the beginning of the creation process.