SFX: Music gong – ethereal
ROBERTS:
There’s something ecstatic about this shape and the color of it.
SFX: Music gong – ethereal
NARRATOR:
Curator Sarah Roberts.
ROBERTS:
It has this joy in its own lusciousness.
SFX: Gong turns out to be a distant church bell, fading into music track that sounds like a film, a lovely afternoon on a bike exploring the countryside, but as if its coming through the haze of memory. Kelly’s voice is that of a man remembering something from a long time ago. The sentences burble up through the music.
ROBERTS:
The shape stuck with him after he saw it on a church in France when he was bicycling through the countryside.
KELLY:
Those first months in Paris, I would take my bike on the train, and go to all the places I knew.
ROBERTS:
I think every shape is tied to a place, an image in his mind, some particular moment when something caught his eye.
KELLY:
It was on the top of the church.
ROBERTS:
And he remembers very clearly exactly what it was.
KELLY:
The big Mandorla is the one that fascinated me, the shape of the mandorla. It was on the top of the church.
NICK WALTERS:
Ellsworth returns to lots of different shapes like that over and over again…
NARRATOR:
That’s Nick Walters, Ellsworth Kelly’s studio manager.
WALTERS:
You’ll see little ideas floating around on little bits of paper, and then you’ll see little bits of paper cut out and folded. Like, for the Mandorla. It might start out as a little piece of paper that he cut and folded just maybe 3 inches tall. And he’ll sit and hold it at arm’s length. And then by moving the model back and forward, he can visualize the piece on the wall. And then he gets a sense of how that will work.
I don’t know, I was just reading something that talked about Western art being very storytelling. And if you’re looking through his work they’re not about telling stories. They’re about enjoying the shape and the form.
He likes to just sit in the room and look at them. They’re his babies. He loves them. (laughs)
SFX: Music fades
