Terrence Coventry

Description

Avian Form: this sculpture clearly relates to birds, but the species is not defined. The stance of this creature appears to be that of a bird of prey, resting but ever-watchful, shoulders hunched, wings closed. Like many sculptors before him, including Brancusi, Epstein, Picasso and Moore, Coventry has used the bird form as an expressive sculptural device. In reducing form to simple line and masses, he is able to elicit with absolute clarity the most telling avian characteristics.

In working the land - Terence Coventry has a farm in Cornwall - his daily round gives him ample opportunity to observe birds and animals, both domestic and wild. These quite naturally form his sculptural repertoire, whether carved, or modelled and cast in bronze like Avian Form. This sculpture is one of a series of bird pieces. Number two stands and waits, number three is a crouching, pecking creature, whilst number four tilts forward, the head cocked enquiringly. This, the first in the series, also exists on a monumental scale.

Terence Coventry says of his work: 'I think because I have to spend a lot of hours not making sculpture but farming, that I have time - as a result of a lot of it being fairly routine work - say driving a tractor down a field - to simply refine an idea in the mind so that when one gets down to the stage of making it, that imagery is largely distilled. I am not saying there are not still problems to solve in the making of it because when one starts working in three-dimensional forms clearly one is creating problems. But it is there, the image is set in my mind of what I am trying to make - that is why I do very few drawings, because it is drawn in my head before I actually start. So those hours are not actually wasted.'