I hope this is one of the strangest things you will ever see. 
If you allow its strangeness you may begin to see how beautiful it is.

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        Out of everything I have done, this is the sculpture that achieves everything I have tried to do as an artist. This is the sculpture that I most want you to see.

          It took about twenty years of making sculpture before I was able to do this, and, looking back, I don't know how I made this in only four years, from the maquette to the finished plaster, ready to cast.

          There are four things that it's useful to know about this Dying King.

          > Every sculpture has its correct scale. Because this sculpture refers to the human body it needs to be about our own size. It is not an object that we can pick up and handle and it is not a monument that looms over us. When we are with the actual sculpture it is just a little bigger than we are and we can sense our physical equality with it.

          > I have had some concern about the title “King” because of some of its terrible political and historical associations, but I mean this only to remind us of something dignified in being human.

          > The Dying King draws from the shapes of our bodies and of the world around us: shoulders, rib-cage, pelvis, hills, valleys, eroded rocks.

          > It is best seen outside, away from everything else. In this picture, on a mountain in Japan, a cloud has just blown in hiding the sky, other mountains, and a distant valley. The sculpture appears as it should, isolated, in a wild place.