Original Drawings by Gesso Cocteau
With these series of drawings I am attempting to reveal my personal interpretation of what it means to be human. When I sculpt I dismantled and reduce form, but when I draw I concentrate on the details and the realistic aspects of anatomy. It is the balance of a generalized modern form of sculpture to a detailed realistic drawing in a Michelangelo fashion that becomes my visual language. My two worlds of realism and abstract cannot survive independent of each other: they are co dependent.
With these drawings I become my own muse.
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.” This is the mantra behind the series of drawings called ‘The Prayer Series’ each one numbered, each one carrying with it the temperament of being human, the “beautiful and wild forces within us.”
My drawings often show the hands in prayer mode, a symbol that is an innate consciousness within all of us. No words needed, this visual hallmark is the logo of hope, and a state of grace we find ourselves in by default of being born. The totem of prayer is beyond words, the hands in this posture remind us of what the ancients called the greatest force in the universe, a wisdom that comes from our bones, a knowing that no matter what religion or what doctrine we adhere to, prayer is hopeful poetry and it gives us strength, faith and grace.
————————————————————————————————————–
Endless Celebration
- 51 feet tall
- 3000 pounds of cast bronze
- 2000 pounds of structural steel
Installed at Bellevue Place in Washington State and commissioned by Kemper Freeman Jr. Endless Celebration is the tallest standing cast br
onze sculpture in the US. Please browse the photos from the Endless Celebration installation.
Cocteau Essay » Media Kit » Artist’s Statement » Photo Gallery » Faq’s »
The roots of civic sculpture are long and deep. The felt need for memorial stones, carved marble and cast bronze sculpture has strewn these kinds of objects across time and space. In sites as distinct as the Jordan River, Pearl Harbor and downtown Manhattan they collectively constitute a huge lake poured from the human need to give formal expression to the memories and aspirations of the communities that they have served. Gesso Cocteau’s contribution to this lake, Endless Celebration, located in downtown Bellevue WA., is audacious in scale and, fronting a smartly designed office complex at Bellevue Place, refreshing in conception. In many respects, Endless Celebration is simply Gesso large. Her works participate in the deep streams of the Modernist philosophical and aesthetic tradition, as articulated by Henri Bergson and given form by Constantine Brancusi and Henri Matisse, in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.
– Duncan Simcoe M.F.A.
Associate Professor of Visual Arts
