Hollow Men

The genesis of this series harks back to my late undergraduate days, when I obsessively produced a series of charcoal and pastel drawings of portraits of men with empty eye sockets. The image soon translated into busts sculpted in clay and cast in plaster. Not much later, I discovered in T.S. Eliot the name for the images, as well as the voice which describes the sentiments that produced them.

In a less somber mood, I began to abstract the busts, until, eventually, other preoccupations took complete hold of my attention.

The image, however, had not totally been put to rest, and was re-awakened a few years ago by a piece of driftwood that floated out on our beach. It was in the form of a head-sized ovoid with a hollowed-out segment, suggestive of a face, on one side. The judicious addition of a few standard hardware pieces reinforced the image of a face. (This driftwood burl may have also planted the seed for the Flying Concrete spheres, from which a portion of a virtual sphere is subtracted.)

With the driftwood burl as springboard, and driven more by the broader implications of a face presented as the interplay of positive/negative, additive/subtractive form, rather than by existential angst, I returned to the abstracted imagery.