This exhibition in The Project Room features twenty beautiful and creative stone carvings from the Bishop-based artist Dick Cheeseman. Meditations in Stone presents a wonderful overview of the range of Dick Cheeseman’s sculptural work from recent years.
Dick Cheeseman taught himself to carve stone over a decade ago. To this day, he has continued to enjoy working on new sculptures in his outdoor studio space, open to the changing light and sounds of nature. Within this short amount of time he has proven his natural talent for creating a wide range of sensual and evocative works from the raw material he collects. His sculptural works range from contemplative explorations of the human form, to works evoking the presence of animals and even objects as mundane as a pair of sweat pants or a pillow. Solid and heavy with condensed matter, these often abstracted and conceptualized sculptures are all the more intriguing when one considers that they have all been deftly carved from solid rock. Dick creates his sculpture from a wide range of local and exotic stone sources. Several of his works have been carved from local Volcanic Tuff and Inyo Marble, while others have taken form from blocks of exotic imported stone, such as lavishly-colored Italian Ice Blue Alabaster, Portuguese Ravina Azul Marble, and Persian Onyx. Dick Cheeseman's sculptural works range in size and dimension - from a life-sized ebony-colored crow, to an exquisite 3 foot tall marble Egret, to a life-sized sea otter floating in a ocean of Inyo Marble. This variety attests to the adventurous spirit of his mind and his chisel! |