Paul Carr is a middle-aged sculptor residing in rural Colorado. He lives in a house without right angles he designed himself, and is working on a house design for a wealthy businessman instead of pursuing sculpture. Jane-Ann Ardmoore is his apprentice.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ She’d worked in stone and clay and bronze before, as well as plaster and acrylic and combinations, but those were Jane-Ann’s first halfway serious bronze pieces. Halfway. More or less halfway.
The first was an ape man, about fourteen inches tall, resting on a knee and absently scratching his bony, lightly furred butt. The cleaner figure was an ape girl of about twelve, seventeen or eighteen inches tall. Visible ribs. No hips yet, but sharp bones where they’d presently start forming. Nubbin breasts. Finer fur than the male’s. Squinting and smiling, raising her left arm to point at something in the distance. Her brows were heavy, but lighter, finer than the male’s. Broad, short feet with prominent great toes, the right foot turned in slightly. You could see at half a glance she was a gracelessly graceful girl, the kind of girl who moves quickly, surely, without ever stopping to wonder how she moves or how she might look to others. She’ll wonder in another year—and her coltish, unself-conscious grace will be gone forever in a trice.
The anatomy was perfect in both figures.
I mean the anatomy was truer than casts that might have been made from living ape people, truer than photographs an anthropologist might have taken and measured 88 ways from Sunday. No muddled tendons. No wrist bones out of place or overlooked.
You could see the grain of the original wood. It looked obtrusive to my eye, wise to the ways of clay—but so what? I wanted both figures to be much, much larger. If not life-size, then at least large enough to make the most of the eyes’ roundness, the horny toe nails’ striations, the perfectly posed hands.
Jane-Ann picked up the ape girl and ran her doll-like fingers down the girl’s spine, over the blades of her shoulders, around her waist. “There’s still more,” she said, and showed me fine white specks of silica under the arms, along the insole of the left foot. She picked up the slender wooden pick she’d been working with yesterday, then set it back down on the edge of the table. She set down the figure. Her eyes asked, “What?”
I picked up the ape man, whose fur was still heavily whited with silica here and there. His feet and ankles and hands were still clogged with the stuff. I crossed the room and took down an old wooden revolving stand, set him on it, turned him slowly.
Jane-Ann waited.
She wasn’t supposed to wait. She was supposed to see. She was supposed to look at the figure and see it as if for the first time. She was supposed to half-close her eyes and see it on a pedestal in a gallery, knowing nothing about it or the sculptor—and see it.