Word: ovoid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Oneness had a moral value for Brancusi, as both the origin and the aim of consciousness. It is marvelously expressed in sculptures like Sleeping Muse [III], 1917-18: the ovoid head inflected only by the ghost of a mouth, the delicate V of a nose and the incisions of hair, one of which follows an existing flaw in the veined marble. Part of the magic of his work is its sensitivity to material. Substance and metaphor fuse...
Shelter is a favorite image of Puryear's. For Beckwourth, 1980, presents a kind of solid wooden hogan with an ovoid top plastered in cracked mud, recalling both the primitive hut and the origins of the pendentive dome. (Jim Beckwourth is a figure often invoked by Puryear's sculpture. The freed son of a white man and a black slave woman, he served as a guide for various Western expeditions in the early 19th century, fought in the Mexican War and was at one point made a chief of the Crow Indians -- a symbol of multicultural America if ever there...