I find myself heading into summer having worked incredibly hard during the last several months and feeling pretty good about it. Of course every now and then I think about where I stand in the art world and realize just what a maverick I am. I prefer to place content above form and in that respect am really out of step with most of the art of the last eighty years. But that is my impulse and having never been really conscious of the need to seduce the establishment, I have neglected to do so.

Of course the Russian project Warriors is still the most consuming work I have going, though I am enjoying an occasional foray into other things such as the lithograph Eclipse. I am now working on the first of several etchings for the project, and this fall expect to travel again to Russia to research the last chapters, a series of about four or five portraits of a Babushka (grandmother) a mother, sister etc. I will also start a couple of sculptural studies this summer perhaps working in Mexico where my patrons are completing a studio for my use in Cuernavaca, known as the city of eternal spring. It is for me a place that seems to blend the geography of my homeland with the architecture of old Spain. I love it.

While keeping up the pace on the Russians, I have been quietly working away on a Crucifixion in bronze. The figure is about 30 inches high and I am exploring interesting possibilities to form the cross, which might better explore the spiritual implications of what was an incredibly brutal way of putting people to death. As I worked, of course, I could not help but empathize with excruciating immediacy what that would be like, from the impact of the nails to the impact of hanging in such agony until passing out. I was most compelled by the nature of Christ, the life he lead, and his teachings that really so much dictate my thinking and living to this day even though I do not have a very active religious life. Hours of working the clay from manipulating larger gestures to detailing toes with delicate tools over a period of months, lends an intimacy to the whole relationship that I have had with Jesus for decades, through the casual association of my childhood to the powerful but black and white view of my Mormon years, to the more oblique and mysterious association of the present. With the cancer thing of course I have thought of this with the possibility of death. I remain sanguine and at peace with no clear faith of any kind but a trust in eternity, if there is one for we fearful and endlessly egotistic and optimistic humans.

I have had people tell me about the crucifixion, the way it might have been done, the humiliation of the victims being naked, the suffocation that would occur and of course in the case of Christ the scourging and torment and the road to Golgotha. I have thought of the huge volume of art on the subject done throughout history, from the icons of the Eastern Church through the evolution of the Renaissance in the west, through the appalling realism of Grunewald and other Northern Europeans, to the sanitization of abstraction in modern times. And then there is Hollywood. And that is another story. Of course my approach is consistent with my idealistic emphasis on the transcended rather than the gore of the reality.

I am planning two states. One will be the figure I delivered to the foundry, a beardless nude which evolved as I worked, the second will be the same figure, bearded, draped and cast into the more traditional form. Either will be dear to me, tender yet heroic, drawing me into the experience of being a human born into a world of huge complexity and uncertainty with a life span that may be decades long but may so easily be cut short. What is this Jesus to me in that context? Doing this work brought me closer to an honest association than I have ever had before because I was stripped of dogma and delivered into that life as a human, full of folly but yearning for ultimate humanity and godliness. Perhaps that is why I did this work and why it is so very significant for me. Maybe that is part of its significance for others too. We live that life and death as we contemplate this image. The life examined cannot help but be a life that is complex, full of joy and pain. Somehow this image is both a mantel we cannot help but assume because of the fundamental pain of being human, and a suggestion of the ultimate selfless life that brings the word spirit to spiritual, and civil to civilization. Intellect fails me as I try to write. The mystery of art did not.