Woman with a Small Bird - Sculpture by Sarah Myers

Woman with a Small Bird, Sarah Myers
Sculpture in terracotta

She looks at the small bird held lightly, carefully, in the palm of her hand. The bird gazes back, its head slightly turned to catch her in its view.

   The woman sits with one knee drawn up, the other leg bent as she sits on the ground; her long skirts fall in heavy folds around her. Many elements are meant to convey a connection, over the millennia, with the bright, gentle spirit of the Tanagra figures from ancient Greece. But though she is of the same lively orange-red earth – terracotta clay, full of iron, that can be found across the globe – and though she sits so still - motionless, with her tiny finch that never flies away - she is from a much younger world, the one that belongs to you and me...

  

Woman with a Small Bird, Sarah Myers
Detail

Woman with Small Bird, Sarah Myers
Left side

Woman with Small Bird, Sarah Myers
Right Side

Woman with Small Bird, Sarah Myers
Detail

Woman with a Small Bird, Sarah Myers
Close-up

Woman with a Small Bird
Sculpture by Sarah Myers

Saving Art

Gourd, Vase and Gray Metal, Judie Myers   Still Life, Oil on Canvas

    Six months ago my mother, my sister and I stood in the small studio of our old house. A full-sized dumpster sat outside, already over half full.

   When you must move accumulated belongings, forty years of the life of a family and nearly twenty-five of that in the same house, it is not true there is no room for sentiment. There is almost no room for anything else.

   To standard household goods and beloved mementos you must take with you, you add the studio work of three artists. You resolve you will keep only the best pieces. You have already decided which are the best – long ago. Nothing else is going to accompany you.

Gourd, Vase and Gray Metal, Detail
 Judie Myers

Woman with Vase, S. Myers
Salvaged Piece

    But art has a little life separate from its creator, and an artist is often not the one deciding the fate of their works. In two cases here they were not...

   Out from back of a stack of unfinished canvases – many of them torn or injured in various ways – I drug a painting; it was red and yellow and gray, vibrant even after the dust and stress of an unheated, uncooled studio. I set it up against the wall.