The Story Behind My IRIS Sculptures
Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds the human eye (iris, really) both beautiful and mysterious. For thousands of years, it’s inspired countless artists. Around 950 B.C., for example, a poet-king wrote this stunning line about his bride’s love for him: “His eyes are like doves beside streams of water, bathed in milk, and reposed in their setting” (Song of Solomon 5:15).
Fast forward to 1984 and the American photojournalist Steve McCurry’s iconic photo of Afghan girl Sharbat Gula. Sharbat’s piercing eyes donned the cover of National Geographic in June, 1985. The photo eventually became known as “The First World’s Third World Mona Lisa.”
And who can forget the classic scene from Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film “Say Anything” featuring trenchcoated Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) serenading a sleepless Diane Corte (Ione Skye) with a boom box playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes?”
“In your eyes - the light, the heat… In your eyes - I am complete… In your eyes - I see the doorway… In your eyes - to a thousand churches, In your eyes - the resolution… In your eyes - of all the fruitless searches”
I’m particularly inspired by the iris/eye-beauty in the friends and strangers all around me. To me, there’s a mesmerizing beauty in the overall design, the variety of translucent hues, and the deeper mystery bound up in the human iris. These beauty-pleasures have been stoked by some unexpected artworks, too. The 2014 movie, I Origins, invited deeper spiritual and philosophical considerations of this subject.
It was the iris’ appearance in the opening title sequence to the 2015 James Bond movie Spectre (start at minute 3:22) that brought my creative desire to a peak.
The opportunity to vent this happy “creative pressure” came as a surprise when I visited my eye doctor and threw out the idea of a sculpture-for-services-rendered trade. By providence, it just so happened that he was looking for some custom beauty to punctuate his newly-remodeled clinic-showroom. So, my first iris was born as part of an actual eye for an eye doctor’s office. How appropriate!
From there, I continued to create various iris sculptures, exploring both color and dimension. My most current set was inspired by the gorgeous hues found in tropical and Gulf coast waters. It’s appropriately named “Watercolor Irises.” Perhaps the best news is that there’s a limitless variety of beauty that can be expressed in keeping with this design… as limitless as the beauty endowed to billions of human irises.
