I found this beautiful book last week in a second hand bookshop: 'Anatomie voor de kunstenaar', by Jeno Barcsay (1900, Katona - 1988, Budapest). Barcsay was a professor at the academy of Budapest. Very nice drawings - perfect for a figurative sculptor like me!! So last Sunday I spend all afternoon studying the muscles of the back. He made it all look very clear... 

Anatomy for the Artist (Muveszety Anatomia) (Plate XIV)

This is a very nice picture , showing how the muscles work underneath the skin. Perfect drawings for a sculptor working with the human body. 
I'm still working on a huge sculpture 'battle of the Remains III', which I will make in white Covelano marble. The back is very important in this work, so pictures like this are like jewellery for me.

My daughter needed a recent article for school, and found a very interesting one: the mummified droppings of a Hyena were found in the North Sea, some 30000 to 40000years old. So we took out some books about prehistorical life: the world of dinosaurs suddenly appeared in my living room! And so my oldest son suggested to try and find the oldest heart... 


I found it, I think. It belonges to a mummified dinosaur. There are only a few of them, and a fascinating world comes to life.  One of those mummies, 'Willo', actually exposes his heart, which has four chambers and therefore scientists believe that dinosaurs were warm-blooded creatures, close to the birds..

http://naturalsciences.org/microsites/dinoheart/insideout/index.html


The 7th heart will be the oldest one! Work to do now...

'Het werk vordert traag, maar gestaag. Het lichaam wordt steeds jonger, fragieler. Ik graaf diep, probeer me mijn eigen jonge lijf te herinneren, hoe alles veranderde... Het verandert nog steeds, alleen in een vreemde, ongewenste versnelling. A battle is going on in my studio with my stone, my memories and time.' (notities bij  het maken van 'battle of the Remains II)

Dit graven in mijn herinneringen was er ook bij het werk: 'Marie'. Het is het tweede beeld in een reeks van drie koppen. De koppen rusten op arduinen sokkels, de restanten van oude graven die ik haalde op een kerkhof. 'Marie' is gemaakt naar de herinnering aan mijn grootmoeder op haar doodsbed. Ik was toen tien jaar oud en haar dood heeft grote indruk op me gemaakt. 

Over het geheugen en het vergeten...
Morgen ga ik naar een lezing van Dauwe Draaisma, over zijn nieuwe werk: 'Het vergeetboek'.
Ik las reeds  'Waarom het leven sneller gaat als je ouder wordt'. Hieronder enkele uittreksels.

"We must forgive our memory for yet another reason. It finds it easier to determine what has changed than to tell what has stayed the same. The people we have around us every day change as quickly or slowly as everyone else, but thanks to our daily contacts with them their changes are played out on a scale that makes them seem to stand still. It is unfair to blame our memory for throwing away editions when, on the face of it, the latest imprint differs in no way from the preceding one.
Photography has altered our relationship to our memories of past appearances. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the problem of trying to remember somebody and being unable to tell whether you recall his face or his photograph did not exist. This uncertainty follows on from the certainty a photograph profers, the knowledge that once, then, on that particular occasion, he had looked like that: that glance, that hairstyle, those features. These days we have something like a photographic biography of nearly everyone, from their birth to the present day or their death — a visual record that may not document every phase of life with equal intensity, but nevertheless comprises the entire life and records the changes that pass too slowly for our memory to notice."
Uit: 'Waarom het leven sneller gaat als je ouder wordt', Douwe Draaisma

Mijn dochter. Ze was misschien nét een jaar oud.

last week I saw the dissection of a squid. The hearts are really small, more like a bit of snot, then a pumping organ... strange experience, fascinating. there are indeed three of them, one has  some sort of  a square-like shape. the other two are like fat cookies... The veins are very hard to see, the blood is invisible, you can see right through it. This is a problem for me, since I make the veins in wax. Still trying to figure out how to show this snot-like structures in stone! I think I'll use Belgian Royal Marble. It has lots of veins and is very difficult to carve in. But beautiful!
The yellow parts on the photo below show the gill heart (with the gills in black ink colored in the back) and the systemic heart in light yellow in the middle.

The very thin white kind of structure running down is a vein..

I was able to film the dissection  at the university of Ghent. Sophie gave me a very comprehensive explanation about the circulatory system of the animal. This is only a small part of the dissection. With many thanks!!!

An octopus has three hearts. Interesting, yes. I want to carve them, but it seems almost impossible to find good representations of those hearts. 
Avery nice maritieme biologist from the Ghent university will dissect a seacat and show me how the hearts look and how they are connected. Next week is the big day! I'll make a video and some photos. Hopefully it is possible to carve the hearts, I want to represent them in some sort of triangle...
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijz/2009/301284.fig4.html
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AnimalHearts.html#The_Squid_Hearts




Another thing I'm working on, is the Battle of the Remains III. I'm into this competition to put a sculpture outside a new build home for elderly people. Let you know how it goes... I'm quite excited about it, because I strongly believe that this is exactly the kind of place that my sculpture need! 

 

Working on a spiders heart now... I think I will eventually overcome my strange anxiety for spiders. Beautiful creatures. Their heartbeat is the same as with us, humans. (30 to 70 beats per minute) and when they'reexcited, their heart beats as fast as 200 times per minute... 
They carry their heart on their back. The blood is called hemolymph, it's color is bluish because of the copper-containing respiratory pigment hemocyanin. It has the same function of hemoglobin, but instead of iron, it contains two atoms of copper in the center of the molecule, which bind to oxygen. ('Biology of spiders', by Rainer F.  Foelix) You can find the book online... very very interesting stuff! On the sketch you can see the heart and vessels. It is an open circulatory. 
I'll make the heart not in wax, as I first thought, but in sculpey. It will probably give me the opportunity to work faster and smaller...