freeing the angels

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free"

Michelangelo

  

i love this. 

the idea of identifying potential and then releasing it.  the art of removing the barriers to freedom.  peeling away the unnecessary, the excess, and allowing beauty to break forth.  seeing something with movement and meaning and expression, yet unformed inside of an inanimate object and working to bring it to being.  having vision. paying attention, imagining transformation, wings from a rock, something as delicate as cloth from a stone. subtractive sculpture.  finding the hidden.
excavation, transformation. unveiling the what lies beneath.


i think we start out as pure little clay lumps.  we are fed and held and taught and we grow and people shape us and add things. and good things happen and bad things too and we change with them,  life continues to add to us. we are additive sculptures, the product of our years, the many things we've seen and heard and felt and done.

now, we are like that block of marble.  we are covered in the stuff of life- buried in the years of it- tied and trapped by things done and things left undone, at least parts of us are.  but they are waiting to be carved out, they are waiting to be set free.

i love the image of emerging.  pulling forth, climbing out. 

it's pouring hard cold sheets of rain.  the world is tugging and carving itself.  the rain is pounding the red dirt and creating pools and rivers. it's pulling leaves off trees and making new patterns on the grass and little boats to float down those brown rivers.  the world is alive in a dance of subtractive sculpture, branches have darkened and bent- leaves are shiny, reflecting back that white closed sky and the sounds of earth and movement are everywhere.

what parts of me are tethered?
what is weighted in stone, encased in marble- what is waiting for release?

this year i want to free the angels.
even maybe today.
i can at least look. or stand in the rain and see what's revealed.
i can try to find the hidden beauty.
maybe i can chip toward it, chisel away at something blocking what could be.