In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, when the monster stirs to life for the first time, the book says there is a “convulsive motion” in the limbs. Invoking something like a newborn animal scrambling clumsily and desperately to stand, or arms reaching after long sleep with tingling fingers too weak to pull ones weight forward.
The limbs hang and dangle. Lines describe what is there and what is not there. The carved dark shapes, the backs of a hands and elbows are solidly described against a field of smoky neutral pale light. The lines arc toward the lurching bodies to lift or impede the weight. Figures are composed of mismatched proportions, hewn at the joints with fragile red lines. Identity is obscured in thickets of opaque dark masses. In the vague expressive dust of soot and pigment rests forms uneasy in their shape, ungainly and uncomfortable. They are dark and emotional, sentimental even and sometimes wretched in their form. They pay homage to the truth but only fleetingly and uneven. In the spaces between truth and visual chaos, they are beautiful and grotesque.
