Henry Moore, “Sheep”, Drawings, Lithographs and Sculptures
The sculptor Henry Moore saw a stark link between the rock that was both his material and inspiration, and the grazing calmness of sheep. The animals stand out in the landscape in the same, oblique way, providing an aesthetic of both fitting in and being anomalous; they litter the vista in a way that is puzzling and warmly mysterious.
Roger Deakin, the English cinematographer, saw this relationship himself when walking the Rhinogs where he writes of seeing that same relationship that sparked Moore’s fascination with sheep: “I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goat’s cheeses. They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape.”
This permeable position between the maker and the made is perhaps what attracted the sculptor to the animal, leading him to produce a range of sketches in pen and ink (largely a ball-point pen in fact) that would make up his eventual 1980 publication, Henry Moore’s “Sheep Sketchbook”.