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Show 248 This training in sculpture was not enough, however. The problem with sculpture is that you have to see beneath the surface, all around the figure. I could look at a model a long time without feeling as if I were seeing it. This was terribly important to me and I had an insatiable urgency to know more about anatomy. "You see it as a thing of planes, sides, back, front, middle, " said Mr. Malin when I asked him about the anatomy, the structure beneath the skin. "You don't need to know the muscles and the bones. " The upshot was that I went to the University of Utah and, with an endless amount of difficulty, registered with the medical students in gross anatomy, a four hour class with two hours of lecture followed by two hours of dissection. It took two quarters to completely dissect a human cadaver and the months of enduring the stench which permeated everything, went with us home, hit us with food half-way to our mouths, was only surmounted by by intense desire to learn. "You who have taken this course, " said Dr. Ewart Swinyard, Professor of Anatomy, "join Hippocrates and the ancients: you have a knowledge second to none. " Such words were worth the unrelenting assault on the nostrils - a heavy mixture of formaldehyde, decayed meat that defied description,- the steady drip of fat and fluid into the little buckets at the end of each table. Yet it was a high experience and these were minor details. With so much instruction, with this knowledge, nothing could stop |