An Alchemist in the Eternal Fields of Basalt
Author: Haim Maor
Remarks on the sculptures of David Fine
An Inspection of David Fine's sculpture from its beginnings to
present reveals a conspicuous characteristic: a movement from a small format to
a large one, and from that back to the small format; from the particular to the
colossal-environmental, and from there to a miniaturization and reduction of the
world into a tine gray stone, a stone hidden in the palm of the hand, caressing,
caressed, cool, pleasant to the touch, as though it were a children's game or an
expensive piece of jewelry.
Basalt Arch, a sculpture by David Fine from 1983, symbolizes the connections and the bridges
that unify the extremes of his total oeuvre: monumental environmental
sculpture, and miniature, intimate sculpture; sculpture which is made by
carving, by subtracting and polishing, and sculpture without human intervention
in the exterior or the interior of
the stone; sculpture with archeological context and associations, and sculpture
which draws its sources from various ethnic and tribal elements in Africa,
Japan, and the Middle East.
The height of Basalt Arch is close to five meters, and it
is composed of basalt rocks weighing ten tons each, which join together into an
arched spine of fossilized dinosaur. Through and around the arch rise undulating
mountains which surround Kiryat- Shemonah and Tel- Hai Yard, or look out towards
Lebanon, and converse with them in an organic flow.
In a broader perspective, this arch joins the group of dolmens
that stand in the region, and an arched building in Tel Dan, and becomes part of
them.
The nine stones of the arch were selected and marked by David
Fine, were brought to the site, and then, in an ancient architectural-
engineering method, were placed beside one another, on a mound of earth, with
small wedges inserted into spaces between them and 'binding' them. In the end,
the arch was sealed by the center stone, 'the headstone', which remained arched,
standing by its own power, after the removal of the earth from under it. A
delicate balance, based on forces of thrusting and halting, a connection between
the stones which before this had
been foreign to one another.
It is difficult to ignore the verbal and the real/ material
symbolism implicit in the act, as evoked by the meanings of the various Hebrew
words derived from the root chalaq:particle |chaluq|, plot (of
land) |chelqah|, dispute |machloqet|, division, or distribution
|chaluqah|, to smooth |lehachliq|, and to share
|lehitchaleq|…
With such simplicity and naturalness, David Fine makes
perceptible the divisive and the bestowing; the dismantling and the
constructing; the participant and the resistant; the partial fragment and the
complete plot (of land).
Like a fractal structure, the tiny wedge – which like an
anonymous laborer in a factory takes upon its shoulder the weight of the great
arch – is a solitary particle which contains within itself the complexity and
the pattern of the monumental whole.
A Field of Stones
Kibbutz Ma'ayan Baruch is situated on the borderline between the
basalt deposits of the Upper Galilee and the limestones of the Hills of Naftali.
The basalt stones, black and gray, large and bulbous, lie scattered in the
fields around the kibbutz, like a large field of stones. These basalt stones
seem to silently hold the stories of the Creation which took place here
thousands or millions years ago. For David Fine, they are traces and remnants of
a battle of giants, which have remained there in order to stimulate his
imagination.
As in Pompeii and Herculaneum, the bulbous basalt stones of the
Galilee appeared to David Fine like cocoons which conceal a secret that will be
revealed when their shell is burst. Michelangelo Buonarotti's saying. "In every
stone a sculpture is imprisoned, and it is the sculptor's task to expose it, to
remove what is superfluous", is always in his mind. In this spirit, David Fine
devotes much time to selecting the right stone and examining it with his X ray
eyes, which strip away the outer shell and reveal what is within.
Indeed, for David Fine, in each stone there is a story, which is
hinted at in the marks engraved in it, like lines of fate in the palm of a hand,
and the secrets of this story are to be explored and investigated. Deep
contemplation of the forms of the stones enables him to reconstruct in his
mind's eye the movement of the boiling lava which erupted, flowed, and emerged
from the depth of the earth, like fire from the bowels of terrifying dragon,
streamed forth and covered plains and cities, fixating and embalming people,
flora and fauna, and coagulating over them like hard shells, wrappings of gray
ash, imprisoning bubbles of life and terrors of death inside them.
But David Fine's wandering through the eternal fields of basalt
also led him to those stones that has shells which actually contained their
secrets and their stories, etched in the grooves of time like an old record, and
bruised by the touches of people and their implements: scratches made by the
plows of the anonymous tillers of the soil who worked in this place and raised
crops and children; eroded millstones milestones; cornerstones and foundation
stones which have remained bereft of owners and of walls; sling stones,
ballistastones; signs of army legions that passed through the area and left traces of
dagger, an ax, or a track from an armored personnel carrier on the corner of a
stone; enigmatic symbols which condensed and perpetuated the beliefs of
previous resident, who used the large stones as an available and reliable
surface on which to leave mark of their presence, a message to the future.
David Fine, like a skilled detective or scout, takes a stone from the earth.
Looks at traces, reads the signs, and connects them to what will emerge from
them when he activates the electric saw or knocks on them with sculptor's chisel.
Fine: "Everything is connected to the earth and to nature and
everything is also connected to man. Once' in thought, I saw myself as a man of
the world. Today, I have limited myself to the earth of the area and the basalt
stones in the field". *
Masks of Eros and Death
The hollow-eyed masks of marble and basalt that David Fine
sculpted in 1982 resemble the masks of women in the Greek theater, with a
distinct allusion to classical, Stoic, portraits, and with a trace of
resemblance to the artist's own facial features. They contain something of the
special magic projected by a perfect female persona, an anima. The masks, more
than the conceal, reveal Fine's Duchampian "Rose Sélavy", a rose that contains
within it life as Eros |Marcel Duchamp: "Eros c'est la vie" ("Eros is
life")|.
Indeed, Eros, lusting for and desiring to be fruitful and
multiply, connects, in these masks– as also in the sculptures of horses, of
oxen, of men with erect organs and of fertile women – with the frozenness of
death, with embalming and memorializing, with the sweet womanly smile which has
been fixated into the future, quite like the death mask of an anonymous French
girl who drowned in the Seine and whose portrait was memorialized by an unknown
sculptor.
The head of this girl, cast in plaster, served as a model for
the 15-year-old David Fine, in the first sculpture exercise he was given in his
youth in Johannesburg, South Africa, in his studies with Miss Benson, This
sculpture, and the heads of Voltaire and Victor Hugo, the mouth and nose of
Michelangelo Buonarottie's David, and the torso of Auguste Rodin's
Lady Fairfax, were his first loves' his entrance gate into the world of
sculpture.
Concurrently, David Fine was exposed to the traditional
sculpture of the black servants who worked in his parents' home. To this day he
feels that the masks, the horses, and the oxen that he sculpts draw upon the
small wood and clay sculptures that he saw
there.
Fine's parents, Zionist Jews, imbued with the dream Fine joined
the "Machal" (Volunteers from Abroad") corps, immigrated to Israel, was posted
to Ma'ayan Baruch' met Ruti (who was in the Palmach company at Kfar Giladi)'
married her, and remained in the kibbutz.
For many years David Fine worked in the fishponds and the dairy,
and served as Coordinator of the kibbutz's economy, and as it Secretary.
"This satisfied my creativity", he says. "We built a kibbutz."
While he was Coordinator of the economy, when the Art School at Tel- Hai was in
its early stages, David Fine studied ceramics with Dalia Vissik. Very soon he
too became one of the teaching staff at Tel- Hai, and taught in the Sculpture
Department there for thirty years. David Fine continued his studies in various
frameworks: sculpture in stone in Pietra Santa in Italy; he was invited to
Japan by Isamu Noguchi, and there, through the gardens, he learned the special
Japanese approach to stone. Step by step he paved his way to the basalt stones.
Scenes and Groups
Like the stones of the Basalt Arch' Fine's sculptures
"feel" better when they are part of a group, presenting a scene from a group of
masks; a group of men in a circle around two women; a pile of stones heads,
resembling a mound of skulls in some catacomb or in the monastery at Santa
Katerina; horses grooved with fine
line in plates of basalt, and thick oxen bearing men with erect penises on their
backs; ample-bodied women, standing in remonstrative postures or kissing the men
opposite them. Head to head, in a kind if tribute to Constantin Brancusi's
The Kiss.The sculptures are present in space even when they are small and
stand on the floor or on basalt base. Their presence bursts through their
dimensions in a lust for life and Eros, in a movement which split out of their
actual static character into a primordial, harmonious nature, in which man and
animal become a single entity.
Fine: "For many years, as a cattle- man and as a dairy-
worker, I spent time on horseback. I was a real cowboy, armed with rifle,
leading the herd to pasture, floating, free and quick. This combination of horse
and man, which became a single entity, conquered the world. At times this has
something beautiful and connected to nature about it, and at times – something
monstrous. The connection between man and the ox or the calf is different: the
ox is more earthy, basic, slow and dependent, like a mass of
basalt…"
The Power of Imagination
David Fine is a sculptor, and thus he thinks and works in the
three- dimensional, with masses of matter, with volumes and confrontations of
textures, but the surfaces of his sculptures resemble a rich painter's canvas.
Fine exploits the oxidation of the outer shell of the basalt (which creates
various brown and orange hues) and extricates from it colorful painterly
qualities which respond to the grays and the blacks that have been exposed from
the depths of the stone. A painting of sculpture. The lines of the flow of the
lava, too, serve David Fine as a kind of sensitive 'brushstrokes', which refine
the coarseness of the basalt and leave it to the viewer's imagination to
complete what is hinted at or apparently
missing.
The power of imagination, the magic that is behind any art
creation, is what has enabled Fine to liberate the spirit of his fossilized
creations so that they may run or gallop in the eternal fields of basalt.
*All quotations of the artist's words are from a conversation
with the author.
Remarks on the sculptures of David Fine
An Inspection of David Fine's sculpture from its beginnings to
present reveals a conspicuous characteristic: a movement from a small format to
a large one, and from that back to the small format; from the particular to the
colossal-environmental, and from there to a miniaturization and reduction of the
world into a tine gray stone, a stone hidden in the palm of the hand, caressing,
caressed, cool, pleasant to the touch, as though it were a children's game or an
expensive piece of jewelry.
Basalt Arch, a sculpture by David Fine from 1983, symbolizes the connections and the bridges
that unify the extremes of his total oeuvre: monumental environmental
sculpture, and miniature, intimate sculpture; sculpture which is made by
carving, by subtracting and polishing, and sculpture without human intervention
in the exterior or the interior of
the stone; sculpture with archeological context and associations, and sculpture
which draws its sources from various ethnic and tribal elements in Africa,
Japan, and the Middle East.
The height of Basalt Arch is close to five meters, and it
is composed of basalt rocks weighing ten tons each, which join together into an
arched spine of fossilized dinosaur. Through and around the arch rise undulating
mountains which surround Kiryat- Shemonah and Tel- Hai Yard, or look out towards
Lebanon, and converse with them in an organic flow.
In a broader perspective, this arch joins the group of dolmens
that stand in the region, and an arched building in Tel Dan, and becomes part of
them.
The nine stones of the arch were selected and marked by David
Fine, were brought to the site, and then, in an ancient architectural-
engineering method, were placed beside one another, on a mound of earth, with
small wedges inserted into spaces between them and 'binding' them. In the end,
the arch was sealed by the center stone, 'the headstone', which remained arched,
standing by its own power, after the removal of the earth from under it. A
delicate balance, based on forces of thrusting and halting, a connection between
the stones which before this had
been foreign to one another.
It is difficult to ignore the verbal and the real/ material
symbolism implicit in the act, as evoked by the meanings of the various Hebrew
words derived from the root chalaq:particle |chaluq|, plot (of
land) |chelqah|, dispute |machloqet|, division, or distribution
|chaluqah|, to smooth |lehachliq|, and to share
|lehitchaleq|…
With such simplicity and naturalness, David Fine makes
perceptible the divisive and the bestowing; the dismantling and the
constructing; the participant and the resistant; the partial fragment and the
complete plot (of land).
Like a fractal structure, the tiny wedge – which like an
anonymous laborer in a factory takes upon its shoulder the weight of the great
arch – is a solitary particle which contains within itself the complexity and
the pattern of the monumental whole.
A Field of Stones
Kibbutz Ma'ayan Baruch is situated on the borderline between the
basalt deposits of the Upper Galilee and the limestones of the Hills of Naftali.
The basalt stones, black and gray, large and bulbous, lie scattered in the
fields around the kibbutz, like a large field of stones. These basalt stones
seem to silently hold the stories of the Creation which took place here
thousands or millions years ago. For David Fine, they are traces and remnants of
a battle of giants, which have remained there in order to stimulate his
imagination.
As in Pompeii and Herculaneum, the bulbous basalt stones of the
Galilee appeared to David Fine like cocoons which conceal a secret that will be
revealed when their shell is burst. Michelangelo Buonarotti's saying. "In every
stone a sculpture is imprisoned, and it is the sculptor's task to expose it, to
remove what is superfluous", is always in his mind. In this spirit, David Fine
devotes much time to selecting the right stone and examining it with his X ray
eyes, which strip away the outer shell and reveal what is within.
Indeed, for David Fine, in each stone there is a story, which is
hinted at in the marks engraved in it, like lines of fate in the palm of a hand,
and the secrets of this story are to be explored and investigated. Deep
contemplation of the forms of the stones enables him to reconstruct in his
mind's eye the movement of the boiling lava which erupted, flowed, and emerged
from the depth of the earth, like fire from the bowels of terrifying dragon,
streamed forth and covered plains and cities, fixating and embalming people,
flora and fauna, and coagulating over them like hard shells, wrappings of gray
ash, imprisoning bubbles of life and terrors of death inside them.
But David Fine's wandering through the eternal fields of basalt
also led him to those stones that has shells which actually contained their
secrets and their stories, etched in the grooves of time like an old record, and
bruised by the touches of people and their implements: scratches made by the
plows of the anonymous tillers of the soil who worked in this place and raised
crops and children; eroded millstones milestones; cornerstones and foundation
stones which have remained bereft of owners and of walls; sling stones,
ballistastones; signs of army legions that passed through the area and left traces of
dagger, an ax, or a track from an armored personnel carrier on the corner of a
stone; enigmatic symbols which condensed and perpetuated the beliefs of
previous resident, who used the large stones as an available and reliable
surface on which to leave mark of their presence, a message to the future.
David Fine, like a skilled detective or scout, takes a stone from the earth.
Looks at traces, reads the signs, and connects them to what will emerge from
them when he activates the electric saw or knocks on them with sculptor's chisel.
Fine: "Everything is connected to the earth and to nature and
everything is also connected to man. Once' in thought, I saw myself as a man of
the world. Today, I have limited myself to the earth of the area and the basalt
stones in the field". *
Masks of Eros and Death
The hollow-eyed masks of marble and basalt that David Fine
sculpted in 1982 resemble the masks of women in the Greek theater, with a
distinct allusion to classical, Stoic, portraits, and with a trace of
resemblance to the artist's own facial features. They contain something of the
special magic projected by a perfect female persona, an anima. The masks, more
than the conceal, reveal Fine's Duchampian "Rose Sélavy", a rose that contains
within it life as Eros |Marcel Duchamp: "Eros c'est la vie" ("Eros is
life")|.
Indeed, Eros, lusting for and desiring to be fruitful and
multiply, connects, in these masks– as also in the sculptures of horses, of
oxen, of men with erect organs and of fertile women – with the frozenness of
death, with embalming and memorializing, with the sweet womanly smile which has
been fixated into the future, quite like the death mask of an anonymous French
girl who drowned in the Seine and whose portrait was memorialized by an unknown
sculptor.
The head of this girl, cast in plaster, served as a model for
the 15-year-old David Fine, in the first sculpture exercise he was given in his
youth in Johannesburg, South Africa, in his studies with Miss Benson, This
sculpture, and the heads of Voltaire and Victor Hugo, the mouth and nose of
Michelangelo Buonarottie's David, and the torso of Auguste Rodin's
Lady Fairfax, were his first loves' his entrance gate into the world of
sculpture.
Concurrently, David Fine was exposed to the traditional
sculpture of the black servants who worked in his parents' home. To this day he
feels that the masks, the horses, and the oxen that he sculpts draw upon the
small wood and clay sculptures that he saw
there.
Fine's parents, Zionist Jews, imbued with the dream Fine joined
the "Machal" (Volunteers from Abroad") corps, immigrated to Israel, was posted
to Ma'ayan Baruch' met Ruti (who was in the Palmach company at Kfar Giladi)'
married her, and remained in the kibbutz.
For many years David Fine worked in the fishponds and the dairy,
and served as Coordinator of the kibbutz's economy, and as it Secretary.
"This satisfied my creativity", he says. "We built a kibbutz."
While he was Coordinator of the economy, when the Art School at Tel- Hai was in
its early stages, David Fine studied ceramics with Dalia Vissik. Very soon he
too became one of the teaching staff at Tel- Hai, and taught in the Sculpture
Department there for thirty years. David Fine continued his studies in various
frameworks: sculpture in stone in Pietra Santa in Italy; he was invited to
Japan by Isamu Noguchi, and there, through the gardens, he learned the special
Japanese approach to stone. Step by step he paved his way to the basalt stones.
Scenes and Groups
Like the stones of the Basalt Arch' Fine's sculptures
"feel" better when they are part of a group, presenting a scene from a group of
masks; a group of men in a circle around two women; a pile of stones heads,
resembling a mound of skulls in some catacomb or in the monastery at Santa
Katerina; horses grooved with fine
line in plates of basalt, and thick oxen bearing men with erect penises on their
backs; ample-bodied women, standing in remonstrative postures or kissing the men
opposite them. Head to head, in a kind if tribute to Constantin Brancusi's
The Kiss.The sculptures are present in space even when they are small and
stand on the floor or on basalt base. Their presence bursts through their
dimensions in a lust for life and Eros, in a movement which split out of their
actual static character into a primordial, harmonious nature, in which man and
animal become a single entity.
Fine: "For many years, as a cattle- man and as a dairy-
worker, I spent time on horseback. I was a real cowboy, armed with rifle,
leading the herd to pasture, floating, free and quick. This combination of horse
and man, which became a single entity, conquered the world. At times this has
something beautiful and connected to nature about it, and at times – something
monstrous. The connection between man and the ox or the calf is different: the
ox is more earthy, basic, slow and dependent, like a mass of
basalt…"
The Power of Imagination
David Fine is a sculptor, and thus he thinks and works in the
three- dimensional, with masses of matter, with volumes and confrontations of
textures, but the surfaces of his sculptures resemble a rich painter's canvas.
Fine exploits the oxidation of the outer shell of the basalt (which creates
various brown and orange hues) and extricates from it colorful painterly
qualities which respond to the grays and the blacks that have been exposed from
the depths of the stone. A painting of sculpture. The lines of the flow of the
lava, too, serve David Fine as a kind of sensitive 'brushstrokes', which refine
the coarseness of the basalt and leave it to the viewer's imagination to
complete what is hinted at or apparently
missing.
The power of imagination, the magic that is behind any art
creation, is what has enabled Fine to liberate the spirit of his fossilized
creations so that they may run or gallop in the eternal fields of basalt.
*All quotations of the artist's words are from a conversation
with the author.
| david_fine.docx |