The Past Updated: A Sculpture from 1962 Finished in 2016

Now she has a name:  Sweet Georgia Brown, after the record she's mounted on.

This is her final incarnation.  I liked her better plain but once I added the golden embellishment there was no going back.  So I scumbled the gold paint, removed the bead I had put on her forehead, and added the candle and the record.   

You can see her gradual journey from the following entry a few months ago.  What's a few months, when she started in 1962?

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It's all an experiment.  Is it better with the golden vine growing up the curves of my sculpture's torso?  Does it detract?  Or is it just a different concept?  

I liked the effect of painting the fired red terra cotta clay with acrylic, especially since the piece was originally done when I was a teenager, around 1962-ish, and then dug out of storage to paint in 2016.  I remember the model well. She was with us for several weeks, and was kind to me, a kid earning my scholarship to an adult class by being the class monitor.

The contours of her back were a natural for a plant running along her spine and branching out, caressing her curves, the bones of her shoulder blade.

Now I wish I had thought to photograph it before I started painting her.

When I first painted the clay I felt like my color choice reflected the model's personality, which remains very real to me. The brown side of her face is close to her natural skin tone.  She was a woman of color, perhaps African-American and Puerto Rican.  Adding the gold embellishments and the third-eye emblem makes her iconic, archetypal.   I think of the figures on Hindu temples:

Looking back on it, I think I kept this sculpture for so many years because of what the model meant to me, when most everything else I made in that era was destroyed or lost.  Only now can I see that as an awkward teenager it was a gift to experience a middle-aged woman so at home with her body, with nakedness, with sensuality.  I am older now than she was then.  I still remember her.  Unearthing this sculpture from the past and updating it feels like my hommage to her and my thanks.