New Documentary Explores the Creative Process of Sculptor Sabin Howard

On Friday, March 11, at 6:30 p.m., Gallery 300 located at 300 8^th Ave. (corner of 22nd St.), in New York City will premiere a documentary entitled “Apollo,” which explores the creative process of master sculptor Sabin Howard. Award winning international filmmaker Robert Horvath produced the documentary. If you cannot attend the documentary viewing, you should at least visit  Sabin Howard's website.

For those not familiar with the work of Sabin Howard, when you happened upon his sculpture on display at Gallery 300 in the Chelsea district of New York City, you feel like you happened upon a treasure trove of antiquities excavated from ancient temples of Greece or Rome. Whether depicting statues of Apollo, Hermes, Mars, Aphrodite, or those of pensive and anguished mortal man, Sabin expresses the human form with an old world passion that certainly could have been forged in furnace of the Greek god Hephaestus himself, yet possessed of a modern-day sensibility which seems to confront the viewer and root him in the here-and-now.

One can image these masterworks of bronze and plaster gracing an ancient Delphic temple in Greece or the temple of Bellona in Rome. Each sculpture is a wonder of astute observation of the live human form in motion and contemplation. Apollo, the god of light and patron of the arts, stands with arms outstretched, the right arm raised just higher than the shoulders with the fingers splayed upwards as if grasping the light and transmuting the energy down the gently sloping left arm whose hand faces towards earth. The messenger god Hermes counterbalancing himself in mid-action with a raised snake-ensconced hand defensively thrust in front of his solar plexus working in harmony with the other arm thrust out at his side, as if finding stability. Aphrodite, goddess of love, gracefully shifts her weight from her back left leg to her front right foot and receptively stretches out her arms in a pose mirroring Apollo.

Howard produces art that has weight and volume and an inner and outer tension and movement that finds expression in the carefully crafted musculature of each sculpture. Even the sculpture's hair bristle with medusan vitality. Favoring the medium of bronze and plaster, Howard's work is the product of a sculptor who undoubtedly understands his craft. Those who appreciate expressive art will certainly relate to these resplendent and awe-inspiring sculptures. Sabin Howard is one of our most exciting and dynamic modern-day figurative sculptors, and the documentary into the creative production of his sculture "Apollo" should prove insightful and informative.