Ugly statues

Legal Insurrection has a post up by Katya Rapoport Sedgwick saying that so long as we're removing statues, she'd like to have an ugly statue removed from Oakland. The statue is named "Sigame," follow me in Spanish, and it's dedicated to the strong women of Oakland. It's a bit unusual but not actually offensively ugly. Have a look.

Denver has its share of offensively ugly statues that deserve being removed.

If you search [ugly statue denver] or odd statue or strange statue, these two statues will always show up. Both installed at Denver International Airport no doubt with the intention of dissuading visitors from staying.

Boys love them. But boys know jack about art.

Blue Mustang, Blucifer, the statue is based on an eight foot sculpture El Mesteño (wild, untamed, mustang) at the University of Oklahoma. But the one in Denver is much larger, its veins are painted garishly only to mention it's blue all over, it has red eyes that light up, it's butt hole and testicles are highlighted obnoxiously and unnecessarily and it killed Luis Jiménez, the artist who made it.

It looks great in a storm.

But its eyes are cheesy. And that's why boys like it. Its highlighted veins make it look starved.

It looks okay out there in the field when you enter or exit the airport. But imagine this field with living buffalo. That would have been a lot better.

And this bit is unacceptable. This horse needs to be given some underwear. 

GAWL!

The second statue at DIA has no relevance whatsoever to Denver, to Colorado, to the airport, or to flying. I'm inclined to love a thing so random as this, and it is my cup of tea, but its dimensions are offensively wrong. It's Anubis. Come on!

Its legs are too short. Way too short. It's so obvious that I'm amazed the artist didn't notice when it was constructed. Its unseen neck is too long. The whole thing is way WAY WAY out of whack.  

See, Egyptians had all this codified. And re-codified. And re-re-codified. Their artistic canon changed over dynasties, and returned to classic era and deviated again, but it was always codified, and these dimensions do not fit any of the artistic canon. It's so weirdly wrong that the mummies of Akhenaton's artists, the weirdest of all the Egyptian phases, all rose from the dead to ask, WTF? 

Double GAWL!

It would be so easy to avoid by approaching the dimensions as the Egyptians did by beginning with a grid. Choose your dynasty. Use their grid, and you cannot go wrong. 

The head goes here, it's this many grid spaces tall and this many wide, the elbow goes here, the hand goes in this spot on the grid, the knees are here, the butt goes right here, and it's one and a half grid spaces, then connect all the pieces. Literally. It's all extremely literal. We learned this in one of my three 5th grade schools. It's how you copy a tiny picture to a large one, or vise-versa. You know the exact spot to put the tip of the nose. The technique is used for paintings and for statues. Technicians do this. I do this for all of my Egyptian paintings. Then a master comes by and makes corrections and smoothes it all out. 

Duckduckgo [grid egyptian figures]

It's how the artists kept on track. 

The artist that made the Anubis statue for DIA did not use a grid as Egyptians did. That is obvious on sight. 

Here, let me show you what must be done to correct it. 

Because there is nothing worse than a short-legged Egyptian god. Except for Bes. And dwarfs were honored. But all the other gods and pharaohs were depicted as tall. The artist doesn't understand leg musculature. The artist has Anubis with dwarf-like legs and wearing a mini skirt. Any random statue on eBay is better than the statue at DIA.  Even the ones that also get it wildly wrong but for other reasons. Proof. 

Pull it all up. Stretch down the kilt. Pull down the neck. Give the feet their due detail to equal the hands. 

Or, just make this dimensionally messed up monstrosity go away. And START OVER!

I don't know why people don't ask me before beginning. Instead we're presented with fait accompli.