"OLD SOULS"

There’s a gladness in a day at home, especially when my daughter drops in unexpectedly and has breakfast with me. Besides our native unconditional love for one another, it is fun to be artists in our own mediums. She, a watercolorist and me, a sculptor. Robin has the additional talents of marketing and networking. She and I have a new business arrangement. I have forwarded her a check which she will work off in return with time spent helping me clean house. She will also, that way, be compensated for time spent photographing my sculptures, keeping records, and selling my work. The check helps to remove my guilt for taking time out of her busy life, (which I know she’d gladly do out of love,) and the arrangement fills a present need for each of us. It’s long been a standard in our family that compensation and love go hand in hand.

 About my clay sculpting. Let me explain. I discovered the joy of clay sculpting back in the early 90’s when I signed up at the Laguna Beach School of Art and went to my first class only to find that the class was entirely composed of people who worked with wheels making pots. The teacher persuaded me to stay and set me up in an adjacent room with a table, a set of tools, some books, a block of clay and gave me just a few minutes of her time explaining the rudiments of what I was about to do. I won’t elaborate except to say that as I drove home that night I felt the car was not on wheels but levitating a few feet off the streets. In the years since I’ve taken up my clay sculpting off and on. Whenever I do I marvel at how people, real people, (faces and heads primarily,) come out of the clay all by themselves as if to join me on this Earth they once knew.

Selling? That part has yet to resonate with me in a positive way. When a face, a person, this one young and beautiful, that one old and beautiful, all with a character and identity and, (this is a must), a smile, comes out of the shapeless lump of clay I am awestruck. Heaven must be guiding my hands. I could never do this myself! That’s why I can talk about it with not a bragging bone in my body. 

I don’t care if the jury at the Art-A-Fair didn’t let me in this time. I’m happy to prolong the day when I must part with my faces. They all seem happy too, but I know that in order to keep on producing I cannot let them crowd me out of my home! The time and place for selling them will come and at my own pace in my own way. And I shall keep careful records on where they go. The money? It seems nearly irrelevant since I don’t need it, but neither do I want to insult them by selling them cheap.

The title of this blog tells you what I’m calling my people. Here’s an example of how each piece will be identified:

Certificate of Authenticity

OLD SOULS

ADOPTION CENTER

Out of clay I come to you

with only a hope for one more view

of a life I lived

and a place I knew

on a planet called

EARTH

Joyce Darling* Collections 

original sculpture

#115

“SUNDAY’S GIRL”

Robin will help me set up a web site and then you can see my people. They are not all beautiful by worldly standards, but they are beautiful nevertheless. You will see. I’m anxious to introduce them to my readers, though (and I reluctantly admit) I am not eager to part with them. A few I could never sell but someday when I’m no longer here I may come back to Earth by the fingers of another sculptor. Then I, too, will be in the rich and rare company of “OLD SOULS.”

__________

*Faith Darling was my mother's maiden name. Grandpa Darling had no known relatives and his only son died at the age of 22, so there was no one to carry on the name. My granddaughter, Rosalynd, is doing so by adopting the name in her acting profession, and now I'll do my bit with my sculpting.