Marlyn Cheshes

Marlyn Cheshes

"...an artist must first of all respond to his subject, he must be filled with emotion toward that subject and then he must make his technique so sincere, so translucent that it may be forgotten, the value of the subject shining through it."

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit , 1923

Marlyn Cheshes is lost in sculpting the human figure. There is fluid motion and life in the heads and torsos she molds out of earth and fire. At the American University in Washington, D.C., she studied with Marc Oxman, who taught the traditional approach to figurative sculpture with the nude model. Building on that experience, she studied ceramic figurative sculpture at Washington’s Corcoran School of Art. An American artist, who has traveled widely in the third world, Cheshes chooses subjects that are at once horrid and sublime. “The Last Butterfly,” a life size bronze commemorating the youngest victims of the Holocaust, highlights this duality. There are other allegories of death and survival in her work – rugged terra cotta pieces capture scenes of township repression in apartheid South Africa as well as the deeply lined faces of East African women and children and the Jewish legend of the long-suffering Golem. In l994, Cheshes traveled to Umbria, Italy where she studied at the International School of Art. Between l994 and l996 she created a large body of work in her studio in the East African country of Djibouti. September l996 to September l997 Cheshes sculpted and studied photography at the University of California, Irvine. After three years in Brussels, Belgium, where she studied lithography at Rhok Academie, Marlyn worked in her studio in Tampa, Florida. She is now living and working in Nederland, Colorado. 

Marlyn can be reached at marlyncfl@aol.com.