The Minotaur is ready for his close-up. This piece is four or more years old. I was working with a model, though he wasn't genuinely horn-headed. The impulse to make the piece more mine, as it were, moved mythically.
I've always been fond of Mary Renault's Theseus novels: The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. And, worth searching for, Michael Ayrton's The Testament of Daedalus and The Maze Maker. (And, I still recall from my very, very early years the Mickey Mouse comics version of the myth, still recall the intrepid mouse's ball of yarn unwinding as he moved inward through the maze; that's a memory that had nothing to do with the sculpting, that surfaced only as I typed out this blog.) Here we have the creature out of the labyrinth, if only for an afternoon.
Sculpture mix; overglazed. I hadn't meant for the glazing to be quite so thick; there are faint features beneath all that blue and gray glossing, but I like the unintended effect, the blurring and enlarging of the head as well as the downward flow, matching the jut of the chin, the slightly slumping shoulders, and the melancholy mood of the beast-man.
(The top photo: Ferdinand-the-Bull-meets-Robert-Graves.)
