Sculptures: Dark Interior, 1973

"My drawings are done mainly as a help towards making sculpture…as a way of sorting out ideas and developing them"
Henry Moore

Henry Moore used drawing to work out how to transform the shapes of objects that inspired him into the strange and beautiful shapes for his sculptures. The sculptures are quite complicated, but by using drawing he could work out his ideas and how he could make the sculptures work, before actually creating them. Creating impressions of movement and radiance and carving human forms from a sheet of paper in a similar fashion to the way in which he carved expressive forms from slabs of stone. With these works on paper, Moore was not drawing simply as an exercise. Instead, the artist was drawing for ‘the pleasure of looking more intently and intensely’, emphasising that these works on paper are not simply sketches, but instead illustrate important stages in Moore’s development as a draughtsman and sculptor.