Some days are darker than others.
Even when Father Sun’s gaze is at full glare, when the air is warm and the shadows short, the world can seem a dark and unfriendly place, cold and forbidding. On such days, existence is exile: far worse than the stormiest of weather, able to see the light, yet cut off from its touch.
On such days, messengers of light are hard to see, their message still harder to hear.
On such days, the best messengers are the ones who show us the light within.
For our peoples, art functions, in part, as a similar messenger, one that puts us in touch with our world, whole: from the oldest of ancestors to the grandchildren of grandchildren not yet born, all in a single unbroken hoop of history and tradition and identity, a path lit by the sun and the moon and the stars and the spirits who dwell within and among them.
And sometimes, the most effective works are the ones that remain true to their original form and substance, those whose images are evoked only with the lightest of human touch.
So it is with the works of art created by our friend Randy Roughface, a sculptor who works solely in vintage style, summoning the spirit within the stone with only minimalist shaping, allowing it to shine its own light upon the world unfiltered by too much human intervention.
We are highlighting Randy’s works this month: small, subtle sculptures imbued with spirit and light. Today’s featured piece, an eagle with its beak parted in full cry, fits well within the themes we’ve been exploring this week — the great raptors who serve as Spirit’s own emissaries, bringing with them messages, dreams and visions, at this time of year, the shifting beauty of the light itself. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site:
This vintage-style Eagle rises out of a chunk of Pilar slate to call to the spirits. Carved by Randy Roughface (Ponca), the finish is smooth like soapstone, an an unusually soft red color smudged with the more typical gray. Stands 4.5″ high by 3″ wide at base (dimensions approximate).
Pilar slate
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Pilar slate is an unusual stone. Seen from a slight distance, or in artificial light, it appears to be the dullest of rock: dark, drab, a plain and wholly ordinary gray.
Seen up close, under the touch of Father Sun, and it is a stone transformed — something seemingly ordinary shown to be something extraordinary, something that carries the light within itself. I wrote about it here last year:
It’s slate, as geologists and mineralogists define it: a type of foliated metamorphic rock, evolved over eons as natural forces applies heat and pressure to sedimentary clay minerals such as shale, siltstone, or mudstone, transforming them into a new substance. The slate that forms from the metamorphic process often contains iron, as well as a variety of other minerals, including calcite, hematite, pyrite, quartzite, and even the mica for which Taos Pueblo’s native clay is famous.
Pilar slate most often occurs on a spectrum of dark grays, mostly a lightened charcoal color. Pick up any given piece of it (or any given carving made with it), though, and hold it to the light, and you’ll see something much more dazzling. Pilar slate often contains flowing matrices of deep red, ranging from reddish-brown to brick red to maroon in hue, traces of the siltstone or mudstone that formed its original layers. It’s also flecked with tiny bits of brilliant metallic color — shades of silver, gold, bronze, copper, even a metallic ivory — from the co-occurring minerals. Around here, it’s probably mostly the local mica and the quartzite for which the river just south of here takes its own name, but others may be present, as well.
Given a large enough block, however, the actual colors of the stone itself shift. Sometimes it’s possible to find an entire piece that appears more red than gray, manifesting in the deep purple-maroon or brick red shades of the sediment within. The piece above and the one below are good examples. Once in a while, you’ll find a piece in which the red and gray have so thoroughly merged into one another that the stone itself appears a rich, dark chocolate brown, giving it an ironwood-like appearance[.]
Today’s featured work, Eagle, manifests in the shades of red that form a part of the host rock’s matrix. It is not a brilliant color; subtle and subdued, it allows Eagle’s form to draw the eye unencumbered by a palette of distractions. And yet, held to the light, its own inner light surfaces, shimmering throughout the stone and the spirit emerging from it.
When I settled on this piece for today’s feature some days ago, I had not looked at the calendar. The date had not entered my mind, much less its significance; I was simply choosing a piece from a particular subset of work for this week’s entry in this series. But we have friends for whom this day holds a great darkness, friends whose spirits carry their own beautiful light. Our thoughts are with them today, and perhaps that was the reason that this particular messenger spoke to me: a reminder always to look within, because even among the shadows in the dark, it’s possible to carry the light.
~ Aji
;All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
