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But I would counsel the young sculptor, impatient of success, to consider the Spanish proverb which says, "work as though you would live forever, and act toward others as though you would die tomorrow." Let him not think that to create a significant work he has but to take a hammer and chisel and shape out the haphazard suggestion within a piece of rock. To understand the plastic feeling and the secrets of the stones needs a long apprenticeship and a severe discipline. Nor is direct carving a method of transferring a modelled statue into stone.
It is the most powerful means, among all the methods employed by sculptors, to reveal with vigor the true personality of the artist.
The sculptor carving direct from life has the fierce joy of conquering rebellious matter, shaping it to the essential planes of his living model in working true to the nobility of proportions as expressed in vibrant nature.
In Cornelia Chapin we have one woman who has had the daring, the admirable energy and discipline to practise the technique of direct carving from life in blocks of hard stone and wood of all kind which she presents at the Fifteen Gallery. Her figures have each a distinct personality, the essential quality of each individual type; the wise dignity of the elephant, the patient back and indomitable thrust of the tortoise or the alertness of the guinea pig. Her work has warmth, humor, a classic simplicity and purity of impulse. She has made no false effort to "compose" but rather to choose, in all humility, that natural rhythm which best conveys the quality of life itself.
I have the happiness and honor to present her for your consideration.

MEUDON
January 1938.

Mateo Hernandez

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