Saturday, February 2, 2013

I just finished a large, 48" tall, piece for a show in March. Actually it is a piece I made years ago and put in a show in 2008 as part of a suite of work for a show here in Rochester titled "Big". The surface of  the piece was very simply painted when I made it for that show, so now, after may work has gotten decidedly painterly the past five years, I decided to repaint it. It's actually the largest of the yoni shapes that I have been working with for the past 25 years. Here is how it progressed:

Left is 2008. Center is Fall 2012. Right is Jan. 2013


I first got interested in this shape when I saw a picture of a Coco-de-mer, a coconut found in the Indian Ocean, in a book about Tantric Art by Ajit Mookerjee:
After Grad school when I started a ceramic jewelry business in West Almond, NY, I made a line of erotic pins including these:

I decided to title the new piece "Locus Amoenus" which is latin for "pleasant place" (thank you, Wikepedia). It is associated with a garden and connotes a physical or mental space of safety and protection. It was a literary device developed by the ancient greeks, although when Ovid used it it was something of the reverse I understand from my limited search. As I was looking at my finished work, I kept being reminded of the patterns on the "oriental" carpets of Turkey and the middle east. Researching this lead me to this term, locus amoenus. Here is a parting detail view of the piece:

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