The Arrow Dance 1907

Louis McClellan Potter cast this bronze sculpture, *The Arrow Dance*, sometime between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's all about surfaces, the way the light glances off this or that plane as our eye moves across the figure, and it asks you to move around it too. Look at the way the artist has manipulated the wax, giving it that rough, aged texture. You can almost feel the artist's fingerprints in the metal. It's as though he’s building up the form from nothing, slowly, intuitively. Notice the dancer’s downcast gaze and languid posture. This sense of melancholic weariness in the figure reminds me of some of Rodin’s sculptures. There's a real sense of weight and presence to this figure, that has something to do with the artist's careful attention to the material qualities of the bronze. It seems he’s thinking about the human form in a very direct, physical way, making the work feel surprisingly alive and present. I think it's a moving sculpture, not just for its subject matter, but for the way it embodies the artist's own creative process.