ECLIPSE is five and a half feet tall and employs nearly every skill I've learned in over thirty years of making sculpture. The Great Blue Heron is life-size, was originally modeled in clay, then cast in bronze. The stainless steel base was fabricated from sheet stainless by cutting the panels with a plasma torch, curving them in a rolling mill, the welding them together with a heli-arc. The marble was cut from raw stone using my three horsepower radial arm saw with a twelve inch, water-cooled diamond blade. The marble was shaped, fitted together, and cemented to a textured fin welded to the side of the base. The image of the reflection was created from my drawings of the original sculpture, which were transferred to stencil material, and glued to the steel. I dramatically simplified these drawings to leave just the essence of a heron.

Reflections are one of my favorite themes, and the innovations I’ve created in the last six months have enabled me to utilize them to maximum advantage. Formerly I depended on actual reflections in a polished surface, or three-dimensional forms imitating an actual reflection. These drawings are not of reflections, but of the sculpture, reversed and turned upside down to provide the illusion of a mirror image from most views. The drawings are different for each side.

These images convert the placid surface of water to the depth it really possesses. Furthermore depth is emphasized by the rock strata that form the boundaries of the sculpture, just as they are boundaries of time. The dark of the moon is visible only in the reflection, surrounded by a thin corona of yellow light, and accented by the dark marble beside it.