Robert E. Bricker

‘Wood Nymph’ is a square wall relief of a repeating figure among wooden objects. Nymphs are mythological spirits that live in rivers, forests, and other places in nature. This particular spirit is captured at five different moments in time through fragmented figure improvisation. 

The figure of the Nymph is composed of many different moments of of the same model. It is a collective expression of the myriad figure drawing sessions I have conducted in my studio for decades. While I created this artwork, during any given figure modeling session, I could work on the composition regardless of the pose the model assumed. 

Wooden props are repeated with the five iterations of the Nymph. This — along with horizontal planes organizing the figure’s heads, breasts, hips, knees — gives the composition its structure. The abstraction of the figures, and the way that they are conjoined, animates the Nymph, and gives her a chaotic energy. The rules of figurative realism don’t necessarily apply to the mythological realm.