Paper and Steel Exhibition at the Orangeburg County FIne Arts Center: Big Man Dances

 The exhibition Paper and Steel has been hung and the show will be open to the public on May 5.  As usual, I had been working up to the last minute.  This last minute work involved a late night addition to the Big Man Dances portion in my series of calligraphic drawings of dancers in ink and charcoals.  These were painted just over a year ago but based upon sketches made at a live dance performance some decades before that.  Because the dancers were obviously not standing still to pose, my sketches were impressions of their movements.  I recall fondly that the dance director who was sitting next to me at the performance was so taken by these scribbles that she took me backstage after the show so I could, not without embarrassment on my part, show off my renderings to the dancers.  To my surprise, they were actually able to identify specific performers by just a few lines.  So that was fun.

In 2019, as I added charcoal and inks to these line drawings, I felt a certain familiar pathos about Big Man.  When I wrote about these drawings previously,  I left the identity of Big Man an unanswered question.  Then I had to put Big Man in a box with all the rest of the drawings, as the pandemic lock down began and everything was put on hold.  So I had a lot of time to reflect on what he might represent and why his image seemed to tug at my heart.

Yesterday, as I took the dancers out of their box and affixed them to the white backing paper, it suddenly occurred to me that Big Man looked like he was overly confined by the very picture plane he inhabited, almost coming alive to kick and prance his way out of his rectangular home. Ah!  That’s it!  He reminded me of a Chinese character.  There is a character that is a logical aggregate of parts, with a big man in a box and a heart underneath him.  I suppose this etiology means that we have feelings for those whose souls are simply too large for the constraints of their lives.  The word for this is empathy. 

 

So I carved some prints with the ancient Chinese character form for empathy and affixed them in red ink on the white backing paper.  Now Big Man was finally identified.   Unfortunately we ran out of room at the exhibition for the entire Big Man Dances series, but attendees can get a glimpse of him kneeling and kicking.