Word: ayrton
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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About the same time he married, Erpf decided that he had to have a maze on his 500-acre property in the Catskills. And not just a collection of decorative hedging either. He called Michael Ayrton, a maze-mad English sculptor, architect and author of The Maze Maker, a fictional autobiography of Daedalus. "I just read your book," said Erpf. "I want one of those." Today, thanks to Ayrton, Armand Erpf has "one of those...
...largest maze in the world and, according to Ayrton, "the only one of stone since the 4th or 5th century B.C." The Erpf maze contains 1,680 feet of passageway, with brick walls running from six to eight feet in height. Ayrton considers the work "environmental sculpture." Erpf considers it "an esthetic experience, a symbol in a world so caught up with scientific rationalism it doesn't know where it's going. You can't get to the center of a maze by going straight for it. You have to be indirect. The way to attain something...
...backdrop of "melancholy trees"), the structure is now virtually complete. Erpf's three-year-old daughter, Cornelia, wanders about the maze and Erpf has made it to the center in five minutes. For the uninitiate, mastering the maze can take half an hour of trial and error. Ayrton has provided no printed explanation or map to the solution. "If a person could walk in and figure it out," he explains, "I would feel I had failed...
...MICHAEL AYRTON Essex, England For the real male minotaur, see above...
There still are those who adhere to the permanence of cast metal. Michael Ayrton, 44, has painted for 29 years, but Moore got him to sculpt as well. Impassioned by Greek mythology, he wonders "what happens when you are partly animal and want to become wholly human." He makes his misshapen minotaurs, therefore, into symbols for man's stressful present. Bernard Meadows, 50, who assisted Moore from 1936 to 1939, also produces bronzes suggestive of figures withdrawn into abstraction. Tough, crablike carapaces cover highly polished softer forms like defenses for a vulnerable humanity...