Professor Butter Beard and the Statue of a Kouros
“Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our minds understand.” - Millard Sheets, American artist, teacher and architectural designer
One of my favorite things to do when I visit any museum is to just sit and draw. It quiets my mind and lets me fully immerse myself into a personal conversation with the work of art. I absolutely don’t pride myself on my drawing abilities, but it is fun to sense the peeking eyes of youngsters as they look over my shoulder and giggle at my sketches. And it does touch my soul when they then pensively walk closer to the actual art and take a more investigative look to see what actually captured my attention.
I try and incorporate this “way of seeing” into my teaching. At the beginning of every semester, one of my first student exercises is to play a game where two students draw a work of art in multi-colored crayon based only on the spoken guidance of another two students who can see the work projected on the large screen. I learn so much about what they see, and what they don’t. I know the exercise is working when other members of the class get excited and chime in adding their own suggestions to the students with the crayons. But, my favorite moment is when the artists turn and views the actual work resulting in “why didn’t you tell me about the…….”
When teaching ancient art, my go-to work for this initial exercise is the “Statue of a Kouros” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I personally must have sketched it nearly a dozen times while visiting the museum. With my pencil I re-discover his broad straight shoulders, his athletic muscular arms hanging straight down at his sides, his bold frontal stare radiating from those huge almond eyes, his perfectly plaited long hair, his oddly oversized feet and ears, and his left leg stepping forward just a bit as if he could step down from the plinth and invite me to silently join him on an afternoon stroll to the temple.
Originally sculpted to mark the grave of a young Athenian aristocrat, this life-size marble Kouros (“youth” or “boy”) is one of the earliest marble statues of a human figure carved in Attica, the ancient Greek region that contained Athens. During the 6th century BCE, when this Kouros was carved, Greece was splintered into many individual city-states but their art was all surprisingly similar.
Culturally, Greece was just emerging out of its Orientalizing period, where Ancient Greece was increasingly influenced by various Eastern Mediterranean civilizations. Historians believe this explains why the statue takes on a more natural look than previous Greek art yet still retains those orientalizing features—particularly an Egyptian influence, with whom they had considerable contact.
Ancient Greek mercenaries, merchants and artisan visitors to Egypt were charmed by the colossal Egyptian statuary. Following the Egyptian technique for executing a stone carving, the Greek sculptor took a large rectangular block of stone, drew the figure’s front, back, left, and right sides onto their respective sides of the block, and went to work, gradually removing stone from all four sides, working his way inward until the sides met, producing a free-standing figure in the round.
The Greek innovation was that the sculpture is cut away from the stone and not embedded in rock as was the case with most Egyptian statues. This introduced open free space between the arms and the chest and a sense of heightened potential movement. In essence, this 2,000 pound marble figure was freed from the rock, literally standing on his own, both self-reliant and self-sufficient.
When drawing the silent aristocrat, I tend to concentrate extraordinary effort in replicating the fastidious plaits of long hair. What my pencil can’t perfectly capture, my work with flour, butter and sugar just might. I must have been hungry when studying the work this week because all I could imagine was a latticed top of a deep-dish berry pie. And luckily, my farmers at the market this morning had set aside for me the last few glistening pints of summer berries – both black and blue. I came home and accented them with lemon, cinnamon and almond and baked them in a plaited butter crust. If I can freely adapt from Professor Sheets, art may not always be what you see, but what your mind understands.
“Last of the Summer Berries” Lattice Pie
One two-crust pie
Crust:
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 Tbsp granulated sugar (plus more for dusting the top before baking)
1 ½ tsp fine sea salt
12 Tbsp unsalted butter, well chilled
4 Tbsp Crisco, as cold as possible
4-5 Tbsp ice water
Filling:
6 pints berries – my favorite combo is 4 pints blackberries and 2 pints blueberries
½ cup granulated sugar
4 Tbsp cornstarch
½ tsp fine sea salt
½ tsp cinnamon
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp almond extract
1 tsp vanilla paste
1) For the crust: Whisk together the flour, sugar and salt. Using a box grater, grate in the butter and the Crisco. Use your fingers to quickly crumble the fat into the dry mix. Add the ice water and use your hands to quickly squeeze the ingredients into a dough ball. Divide the dough in half, flatten into two discs, wrap in plastic wrap and chill for at least one hour.
2) When ready to bake, preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Also preheat a sheet pan on the middle rack.
3) Roll one disk of dough into a circle large enough to fill your pie plate with a 1” overhang. Gently place the circle of dough into your pie plate and roll out your second circle to the same size as the first.
4) In a small bowl, whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, sea salt and cinnamon. In a large bowl, gently fold together the berries, zest and juice of 1 lemon, the almond extract and the vanilla paste. Gently fold in the dry mix and then fill your prepared shell with the fruit mixture.
5) Use a ruler as a straight edge and cut the second circle of dough into strips (as many as you would like to lattice). Lattice the top of the pie and then fold the edges under, sealing the top and bottom crust. Sprinkle the top of the pie with granulated sugar and then place the pie on the preheated sheet pan (add a layer of parchment for easy cleanup). Close the oven door and lower the temperature to 375 degrees. Bake the pie for roughly one hour until the filling is bubbly and the top is deliciously browned.
