Some Far Western Artists worth Knowing Better

Abstract

Of the ten thousand young artists along the Pacific Coast, how many are important? Ten thousand of them are important. No great artist in the past has leapt full fledged from the brain of Zeus. They have all grown out of the endless striving of countless seekers after beauty. And we may expect a few young artists of today along the Pacific to achieve greatness precisely because nine thousand nine hundred and ninety young men and women are staking their all in search of some ultimate perfection.Here and there a sculptured form or painted picture re-creates us as we gaze, and our own refeshment and renewal are proof that we have eaten of the god—the art is authentic. The work of Donal Hord, San Diego sculptor, has this rare greatness. His granite figure of the Aztec, just nearing completion, is already timeless. Here is not the face of a mere American Indian; here is the face of the cosmos. We enter a world beyond good and evil, beyond striving and regretting. Here is equilibrium of spirit and form. The figure is hewn from a two and a half ton block of black diorite, the same hard species of stone in which the sculpture of the Egyptians has come down to us through some six thousand years. The subject of the Aztec was chosen because of its symbolic meaning for the San Diego State College, whose students have commissioned this work as an art heritage for future generations, even down to the class of 6937. (While the inspiration for the work and the purchase of the materials came from the students, the cost of the years of labor that have gone into the sculpture has been carried by the Federal Art Project.) Hord tells us that the nature of the material always determines for him, in a large measure, the form. Agitated lines in this impervious granite would have tortured the sculptor no less than the stone. Moreover, the expressive modelling of the head is the more powerful above the severe planes of the serape drawn about the massive, crouching figure. The pose is not suggested by some ancient sculptor, but by a characteristic of the contemporary Mexican which he may well have inherited from his Aztec forebears. He likes to sit for hours in this position, observing the passing scene, or meditating on the meaning of life.