Thursday, September 4, 2014

Marble Sculptures

Beauty in white or Elegance defined- call them whatever you want but these masterpieces from marble sculpture artists in India never fail to catch the admiration of onlookers from time immemorial. 


Saturday, July 19, 2014

Bozzetti helped sculptor artists to make huge marble sculptures in the times of Michelangelo

Marble sculptures have a unique place inthe history of India, and if researched carefully it can be seen that Mughal period was the peak for marble as a material for art. Many important monuments used marble as a building material with intricate art work at various places including Taj Mahal. Seen commonly are frames of doors and windows with delicate inlay work in marble and sometimes floral patterns in different colours which look extremely pleasing to the eye.


It is not only India, but other countries especially Italy has seen rampant use of marble as material for sculptures. There are number of famous artists from Italy- Michelangelo being one of them. He was known for his art with Marble and there are number of sculptures to his credit. He worked primarily with marble and like any other material; it had its own challenges to deal with. Artists had to first of all deal with the logistics of huge chunks of stone used for sculpture which had a cost attached to it. Then to create a  huge sculpture, one had to have some help like assistants who could start draft work like cutting bigger stone into chunks as per design of the master sculptor. In the times of Michelangelo i.e. around early fifteen century, his assistants would transfer points from small sample model made by him to the huge block roughly which was then carved and detailed by the master himself. To make sure his assistants made the right blocks, master sculptor artists used to make small models of clay or wax which were referred to as Bozzetti. These three dimensional models was a great way for the artists to see how the bigger sculpture of marble will look like once finished as before this- it is in their imagination only that they saw those. Drawings were a way to depict their thoughts on how the model should look but three dimensional models went a step further and made the carving of marble sculptures relatively easier process.

Many times these bozzetti were created by the sculpture artists but were never eventually transferred to real marble sculptures due to some reason or the other but they itself attracted fascination of people later. They were not pieces of marble sculptures, but at least depicted thought process and creativity of the sculpture artists.

Thus we see that artists founded bozzetti as a process so that creating marble sculptures became a bit easy for them but it itself became an object of art and received appreciation till years later.


Monday, May 5, 2014

To sum up, one could say this



That men  usually yearn to transcend the merely finite and the passing, and to participate in something mysterious and  shared, called culture ; that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to re produce the species. 

Through our many local or regional or individual voices we artists work to create art that will speak to our fellows, who know nothing of us . And despite our apparent foreignness to one another an unexpected intimacy is born. This is how not withstanding  the individual   and regional voices , universal cities do come into being .

Delhi was once such a city and surely it could be once more, provided


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Friday, April 25, 2014

What holds Cities Together

There is an old proverb namely that where There is no vision, the people perish. Over here, ours are very concrete, practical, quite rational concerns about our city . They   on the face of it, don’t require old world wisdom. True, and yet on another plane, even as we observe humanity on the streets and pavements going about impersonally, we also know that each he or she is in some sense a person not merely made of practical concerns but also unique, as well as socially distinct . In  moments of the crises that beset the great cities, it is these elements that come out openly in public spaces whether in sheer outrage or overt intense joy or lamentation.

Given this , how important then it is that the city be rich with those signs and symbols that rise above divisions partisan passions or in abject materialism to some higher vision.

Works of art in public places, then are those very peaks in human living. They are the magnets that may hold the public space together . Resurgence is that upstanding sculpture which represents the relentless spiral of the energies of the people.

A good city is a secular space, on one plane, on another it can also breed mankind’s detached longing. And  in such public spaces great sculpture or murals may do that provided these be fired by the deepest perception, steeped in fresh, animating forms. Thus the secular space is not merely mundane, but could be tinged with the boundless feelings and no narrow dogmas. Such and similar expressive yearnings give moments of liberation.

The Public space with which a passer by will identify has to be tinged with some true beauty, which is another name of divinity. Our cities like those in old Rajasthan or those of Tuscany in Italy were once such.