Piterson: Wooden Sculptures and Andres San Millan

Athletic and fit, Piterson is studying personal training.  He aspires to enroll in a college with such a program and to earn his certification at the end of this school year.  He has wisely commenced this process by examining the skeletal make-up of the leg.  From here, he plans to "flesh it out," or to understand its layers of muscle and tissue, before branching out to other body parts.  He retains information, in part, by using three-dimensional and manipulative representations of ideas,  so might there be a way for him to concretize his ongoing explorations?

The answer, of course, is yes.  Piterson has begun to collect sticks in the hopes of constructing a wooden sculpture of the human body.  As he commences this work, he is examining the pieces created by Andres San Millan.  A resident and artist of Rhinebeck, NY, San Millan is perhaps best known for his work with Cocoon Theatre - a youth theater organization based out of Rhinebeck until only this past fall - and for his provocative MAN sculpture (formerly installed at Taste Budds in Red Hook, NY).

Lynn Woods of the Hudson Valley Almanac Weekly interviewed San Millan in January, 2013 and had this to say of MAN:

Based loosely on a small clay sculpture, MAN reflects San Millan’s classical training with the figure as much as his feeling for nature. Unlike most colossi, which tend to be monumental, MAN is sprightly, inherently active. Knit out of driftwood sticks that resemble lines, loose strokes that describe forceful movements through space, he is energy anthropomorphized. The body is carefully articulated, the tension of the muscles palpable. Balanced on the toes of his flexed right foot and his left forefinger, he seems to spring from the earth, even as his left foot is planted firmly on the ground. The left arm thrusts downward, muscles tensed and the hand spread, with forceful, pointing fingers, expressive as a Broadway dancer’s. The aquiline nose and full lips, formed from carved pieces of driftwood, resemble the features of an ancient Greek warrior, jutting from an armature of sticks that suggests an Attic helmet.

From seemingly mundane objects "springs" life.  What will Piterson create with his own sticks? How will he choose to render the human body?

For Andres San Millan's figureartscape, please click on the following link:  http://www.figureartscape.com.  For Lynn Wood's article concerning MAN, please follow this next URL:  http:/​/​www.hudsonvalleyalmanacweekly.com/​2013/​01/​04/​andressan-millans-man-on-the-move/​.

(MAN, pictured above, with San Millan leading the procession at bottom right.  This photo was located at San Millan's figureartscape.  Kildonan and its IP program claim no ownership over the above image.)