Quarantine Love

New Project by Fernando

I think that it was at the end of March that, moved by the COVID 19 tragedy unfolding in China, Europe, and NYC, I made a very quick sketch representing one human being embracing another. That sketch became a formal piece in which the embrace occurs between two stylized figures cut out of painted paper. The title of this piece was "Quarantine Love".

I shared a pic of that piece with Rennie Castelino of Bay Area Faceting in San Mateo who liked it enough to suggest Mark Oros (of Hashnu Stones in T-Burg) and I worked together in the creation of a new piece in which the same design would be transposed to stone using some extraordinarily beautiful Polish flint of his. After a couple of meetings with Mark, I made a new drawing and, on that basis, cut the paper templates needed to transfer the design to slabs of the Polish flint. Since the three rectangles central to the original design could not be carved out of the stone outright, following Mark's instructions I broke the design into eighteen different pieces. Mark then spent many hours cutting and polishing what would be the components of the final stone piece. Phenomenal work, his.

The last stage was the careful assembly and installation of the two figures in a cherry wood shadow box lined with linen. Rennie was very much involved in this last stage helping determine the scale and style of the final set of the piece which was renamed "Reciprocity" to amplify its significance and emotional reach.