Going global: there’s a lot riding on the shoulders of this new sculpture by Cinthia Joyce
Cinthia Joyce and Atlas. Photo
Not long ago, Cinthia Joyce rolled up her garage door and a couple of dozen people peered in and then surged closer for a better look. Minding his own business, Atlas shrugged, and continued to hold up the universe.
In the middle of last year – like the gods, I lose track of time – we published a story in these pages about Joyce and the commissioned statue she had undertaken for a client in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was quite a page-turner, as my stories usually are, but it ended in true cliffhanger fashion: “To be continued…” Well, now the wait is over.
Back then, Atlas was a maquette, a clay model not much bigger than a squirrel. Now he’s a rugged, handsome, lean, muscular man, bronze through and through, and approaching life-size. The model, Arthur Davis, was an acrobatic gymnast for Cirque du Soleil. Not surprisingly, then, it’s an athletic pose, closer to a dancer’s than a weightlifter’s.
[scrollGallery id=275]Hold it right there
Credit for the unique pose, Joyce says, goes to Andrew Glenn, the man who commissioned the statue. When she asked him what he had in mind, he himself assumed the stance he’d been envisioning.
“It was a really difficult pose but I loved it,” Joyce says. We’re sitting in her garage in Manhattan Beach, the statue right in front of us in case it, too, wants to throw in a few words. “I loved it, because I love Baroque, and it was this twist so that his torso was in one direction, his hips were in another, his legs were engaged and his arms were engaged and his back muscles were engaged and his head was twisted to one side. If it wasn’t for his concept,” she says of Glenn, “it would not have turned out the same way. If it was someone else’s concept it could have just been standing straight up and holding the world in his hands. This way it’s a lot more dramatic. It was worth the extra effort, but it was a lot of extra effort to make it this way.”
Everyone has their own notion of what an Atlas should look like. Mine, I tell Joyce, would resemble an aging pugilist, or a former wrestler, who had undergone a lot of fights, and not necessarily come out on top each time.
“I’d looked at a bunch of pictures of Atlas in body building magazines,” Joyce says, “and it’s so gross, all those veins popping out. I can’t even stand to look at them; I don’t want to make one like that.”
Thankfully, Andrew Glenn didn’t want her to make one like that either.
She met her model in a drawing class she was taking. Andrew Davis was tall and thin, but because of his workout regimen as a performer his muscles were well developed. Better yet, Joyce points out, they stood out – not popped out – when he flexed because there was no fat on them.
After he’d accepted her offer to pose as Atlas, Davis asked Joyce how many sessions they’d need.
“And I’m like, oh, it won’t be very long, maybe one or two,” Joyce says with a laugh, “and it ended up being 24 times, four hours each.” That’s not to say the pose was held that long, but rather “in short increments of 30 seconds to one minute; that’s as long as it could be held,” because a longer pose would begin to see a contracting of the muscles.
A person who’s both a model and an athlete is more attuned to the limits of their body, and Davis proved to be particularly adept at remembering and then resuming the required pose at each session. As for the weight of the universe that’s been hefted onto his shoulders, Davis wanted to get into character, so to speak.
“He’s a very meditative person,” Joyce says, “a very soulful person, and so he put a lot of thinking into how it would feel if he was Atlas, and how he wanted Atlas to feel.” He sought to convey some effort, she continues, but on the other hand Atlas is a god and thus he can bear the weight. “So there was a lightness and a heaviness about it at the same time; everything was in the balance.”
That balance also extends to the distribution not so much of the actual universe as to the bronze rings that symbolize it. More on how this was achieved in just a second.
What’s he standing on?
“A lot of times you see an Atlas and they’re holding up a globe, or holding up a series of just plain rings. When I was looking into Greek mythology it isn’t Atlas holding up the world, it’s Atlas holding up the universe. So I wanted it to look nebulous and light, [where] it’s representing a nebulous mass [and] not a certain round thing that’s the world. It’s not the world; it’s everything.
“But then all these issues presented themselves to me,” Joyce continues, “like, if he’s holding up the universe what is he standing on? And even if he’s flying, isn’t he flying in the universe?”
Where’s Stephen Hawking when you really need him?
The rings themselves are like hula hoop-sized neutrons and protons spinning around a nucleus. Well, that’s one way to describe it. Creating them, though, was quite a challenge. These rings have holes in them, individually cut, so that seen from a distance they will change according to the light and to the movement of the person looking at them.
Nebulous in appearance notwithstanding, the bronze rings still weigh in at 180 pounds. It was imperative that they be perfectly situated – or there might only be stumps remaining on the pedestal with Atlas himself lying ingloriously and face-down in the grass.
Davis accompanied Joyce to the foundry before the rings were permanently attached. A lot of trial and error ensued, with the two of them holding the rings in place while they were being welded. “It was kind of scary,” Joyce recounts,” with all these sparks flying.”
When the statue is installed in Lincoln, Nebraska, it will be on a five-foot pedestal.
“It’s a beautiful ultra-modern home with big plate glass windows. It looks like they’re a couple of stories high, at least. It’ll be on the driveway in front, so it’ll be a nice contrast.”
And when people gaze up into the face of Atlas, will it resemble anyone they know?
Andrew Glenn had of course expressed his thoughts on how the face should look, a face that would reveal “a slight effort,” says Joyce, “but not an extreme effort.” It was exactly what the model himself had concluded was most effective.
“The face on the Atlas is not a portrait of the man who ordered it,” Joyce points out, “but it is very similar to his face. He didn’t really want a portrait, but I felt as kind of an honor to him I wanted to make it look something like him.” Perhaps just enough to scare away any trickster on Halloween?
Smooth or rough?
The surface appearance, which is to say the texture, plays an important role here, as it presumably does for all sculptors worth their salt. Cinthia Joyce employs a careful, calculated approach.
What she prefers is a more rugged look, she says, especially when sculpting men, because of the way light flickers across the surface and how the patina darkens in all the cracks, gracing the work with added visual depth. And, it occurs to me, some aesthetic sensuality.
“But oftentimes as I’m sculpting I smooth it all out and then I look at it and make sure that all the anatomy is really correct and the way I like it. Then I put the texture back on again.” What she’s doing, Joyce explains, is fact-checking herself, making absolutely sure she’s not fooling herself with regards to anatomical accuracy.
Joyce adds that it’s easy for an artist to fall in love with texture at the expense of the truth of the body.
“But then you don’t want to be so anatomically correct that it turns into a specimen. It’s not an anatomical specimen, it’s a work of art.”
I love that line so much, I want to repeat it: It’s not an anatomical specimen, it’s a work of art.
This is perhaps where sculpture approximates figure painting, where the latter – let’s say it’s a John Singer Sargent or an Édouard Manet – will not be photographically accurate, and yet it may convey a more authentic idea of the person it depicts.
For example, Joyce says that in a sculpture an accurate-looking eye won’t read as believable, whereas a slit where the eye is, textured just so, “picks up the light in a certain way and all of a sudden it looks alive.”
What eventually engages the viewer is the result of a tactile dialogue or interplay that takes place between the sculptor and her material. Something emerges, and it’s the most perceptive of individuals who can both coax it out and then not let it slip away.
“I think that artists,” Joyce says, “really have this calling to make people look at things they would never have noticed otherwise.”
Offspring, and variations
“This is a one of a kind, but it’s really the first of a series,” Joyce says of her Atlas. Next, she’s thinking of casting her figure as an athlete without the rings: “Just the implied space looks really good with his arms up like that with nothing on top” – because, after all, sculpture is both physical, or occupied, space, and implied space as well.
“Then I’ll probably do one (an Atlas) with less clothes on the back because it has such beautiful flank muscles.” Although her current Atlas is hardly overdressed, he’s not completely unclothed, either, which is due largely to where he’ll be standing – out in the open, scrutinized closely by little schoolgirls, who knows. Clothing of any sort does tend to interrupt the flow of the lines, of the graceful continuity that we find in work from Michelangelo and Bernini to Maillol and beyond.
Which also brings up another question. Ideally, what size should Atlas be? How large would you have made it, if you could have made your sculpture any size at all?
“That’s a good question,” Joyce replies with a laugh.
I place my hand, palm down, alongside Atlas’s calf. Would you have made it so that a normal person stands this high?
She laughs again. “That would be fun to make it really, really tall. I love that idea.”
So do I, but that’s an avenue best explored by the imagination, a road down which money and materials are unlikely to follow, unless one is suddenly chosen to create the next Statue of Liberty.
Today, Atlas is ready for his first big adventure – a ride in the back of a truck all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska, and to the home of Andrew Glenn.
“It ended up being the most fulfilling experience,” Joyce says, “and I’m just so grateful he commissioned me to do this piece. To have something be funded that you really want to do, and it’s right where your own heart lies, was amazingly good luck… I’ve lived in it for two years, and I’m going to miss having it here.”
These things, in mysterious ways, are mutual. Atlas carries the world, yes, but he’ll always carry memories of Cinthia Joyce as well.