RECOVERY STROKE
MCKOY WORKS IN WOOD, but in 1995 he moved into working with bronze and other metals. By using a vacuum-casting technique he adapted, he can produce a mold with incredible detail, not losing any of the texture and realism of the wood carving. He’s figured out how to connect the birds in his sculptures with unseen steel bands and screws that give the illusion that the feathers are merely touching each other as the birds rise into flight.
In the introduction to James Kilgo’s 1999 book, The Sculpture of Grainger McKoy, Robin Salmon, the sculpture curator at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrels Inlet, compares McKoy’s sculpture to a freeze frame of a flock of birds bursting in flight, “with one important difference: the moment is depicted with three-dimensional clarity, and it is so lifelike that your first impulse is to reach out and touch the beautiful feathers and the warm body that you know must lie beneath those feathers.”
McKoy has carved birds in flight, birds in hand, birds partially buried in the sand. He has done numerous versions of a single wing in the part of flight known as the recovery stroke.
“Now the power stroke,” McKoy says, “that’s how birds fly, but they have to go through a recovery stroke to get another power stroke. That returning wing beat is the weakest wing beat, the weakest wing position. But to me, it is the one with the most grace and beauty.”
There’s a large version of the wing in recovery stroke in the lobby of the Hollings Cancer Center and an even larger one installed at Swan Lake Iris Gardens in Sumter. This was the sculpture that McKoy suggested when the folks from the Hollings Cancer Center approached him to do a sculpture for their lobby. The recovery stroke seemed perfect: “Everybody at Hollings Cancer Center, they have to be treated. They’re in recovery. It’s a pretty weak position to be in, yet it is that very position that sometimes has the most grace and beauty in it.”
While he was sculpting that piece, he came upon the verse in 2 Corinthians 12:9, when Jesus said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” He pauses, “The world just can’t understand that because, you know, nobody wants to be caught in a weak state.”
“We’re all in recovery somewhere,” he says. “Some just disguise it better than others, either financially, spiritually, economically.” He chuckles, “You know, I’m always in recovery with my wife, so I can make up for it during birthdays and anniversaries and all that. But I can’t tell you how many opportunities I have had to share that. Somebody will come out and say, ‘Grainger, I’ve been in recovery for 10 years.’ Or ‘I have a son that’s in recovery.’ All this work becomes an opportunity. That’s the real art occurring. That’s the takeaway.”
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