Scupture...

[fajrdrako]

Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop. - Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1474 - 1564

Comments

[kikibug13.livejournal.com]

Oh nice! So evocative...

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I have always admired Michelangelo, both his art and his writing. Not that he is one of my favourite artists aesthetically, but I like the way he thought, the way he saw things in his own powerful style - his own kind of unique insight.

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

makes me think of carving out myself. From what? I am not completely sure, what is the raw material we are dealed with. But it is finding yourself and knowing when you are there.

eh sorry for taking it completely out of context

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

But that's a beautiful philosophical image. A kind of self-actualization. Michelangelo was concerned with the physical limits of the body and its visual effect in stone, but we are all concerned with our social, spiritual, and psychic limits - figuring out how much of what we are is us and how much is other people, and where the limits should be, and where our choice comes into the matter.

So while we aren't literally chiseling ourselves out of stone until we are satisfied with what we are, we're doing it figuratively.

[rosiespark.livejournal.com]

Hmph. In the same way that writing's easy, you just think of the right words and write them down. Yeah, right.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a Neil Simon quote (I think it was Neil Simon). When asked if he'd written his next play yet, he said, "I've found all the words in dictionary, now it's just a matter of putting them in order."

I can't help thinking that Michelangelo found the matter of chipping away till he got to the skin possible in a way no one else who has ever lived has found possible. And I would suspect he felt compelled to do it, because that's what genius is like. And the world is better off for it.

But it doesn't seem entirely fair, does it?

[rosiespark.livejournal.com]

In other words, it really is easy, as long as you're a genius.

Totally not fair. But still A Good Thing, in the greater scheme of things. :)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

it really is easy, as long as you're a genius.

I don't know if Shakespeare or Michelangelo would agree - I think they might well say "Oh, no, it isn't easy," but really, for them, it is easy compared to what it is for all the rest of us. They gave their whole lives to it, and it was worth it, and we've been appreciating them ever since.

I'm glad they existed. I just wish I could do what they did. Shakespeare, anyway - I don't really have ambitions to paint the Sistine Chapel. But it would be exciting to have that kind of creative talent, regardless of the field.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

"Beauty is difficult," Aubrey told W B Yeats.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

There you have it!

Aubrey and Yeats - what an interesting pair. What an interesting time.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yes, they were friends. Yeats later wrote his sequence On a Dying Lady, about Aubrey's sister Mabel, who died of cancer in 1916.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I love it when interesting people had a connection like that.