Gesso Cocteau
Gesso Cocteau
Gesso Cocteau

Gesso Cocteau

SCULPTURE

Bronze Collection

Life Size Sculpture

Table Top Sculpture

Mid Size Sculpture

WITH ONE BREATH

The hands in clay, from fire to bronze __ casting two souls 'With One Breath.'

I am an artist driven by passion. I only sculpt to manifest ideas and emotions that have to do with a devotion to ecstasy and love. One of my favorite pastimes is to look at people or photos of people who are experiencing a human and soulful connection with another person. The sensuous world provides the artist with a vocabulary forged by the most common human experience … love.

In the piece “With One Breath" I wanted to create a balance of need, want, desire and rest. When we love another person with trust, there is a place where the two of you can go to let go of the world and be in your own private domain. This landscape of the love created between two people woven with trust and faith becomes the fortress to keep that love nourished. When you find yourself in this protected and alluring harbor it is almost as though you only have one heart, one breath.

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MOONDANCE

Forged from fire ___ a visual poem ‘Moondance’.

Moondance represents love’s contrasting forces. A paradoxical experience of love’s gravity and levity. When I started to sketch this sculpture, my idea was to manifest the dance of affection and attachment through figures intertwined in a movement that choreographs the sublimity of shared human experience.

My hope is that Moondance can be a dialogue with the viewer of the dynamics of love, its capacity to anchor us to the most profound aspects of our being while simultaneously liberating us from earthly constraints. I wanted Moondance to embody the transparency and lightness of a genuine connection, illustrating the rise and fall of human emotions. This sculpture is my way of finding and trying to understand the intricate and transformative interactions of human connection – a nuanced, yet deeply passionate exploration into the dance of love.

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THE JOURNEY

Immortal love is 'The Journey' ____ never ending.

Anais Nin wrote in her diary, “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, and other souls.”  With my piece, ‘The Journey’ I realized that whenever we reach out to another person in an intimate way we are beginning a journey. It is an invitation to share our love our passion and our hope. We may even get lost with this person on our journey, but sometimes we find new paths of passion that would not have been discovered without getting lost. I have learned in loving that at times you just stand still with that person and that becomes the journey. To linger is to suggest that it is not the destination or some perfect place you are trying to arrive with your love, but the moment of realization that you are with that person you desire to spend time with. In this way your stillness becomes the direction of your affection.

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I began making bronze sculpture as a way to reflect my own life's journey. There is always a correlation between my individual sculptures and what is happening in my life...

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you, I am here to live out loud."

Gesso Cocteau
Gesso Cocteau

BOOKS, DRAWINGS AND BLOG

View my drawings or see my books and read my blog

BOOKS

READ MY BOOKS

DRAWINGS

LOOK AT MY DRAWINGS

BLOG

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Blog Posts

The Soul Behind the Spell

The Soul Behind the Spell

  THE SOUL BEHIND THE SPELL~  There is a quiet force beneath every act of creation, a pulse, a breath, a thought shaped by will. The poetics of intention are not loud. They are not demanding, they are essential. Intention is the silent current that animates everything meaningful. It is the difference between movement and purpose, between routine and ritual. It is the soul behind the spell. It is what turns action into art, a dose of intention mingled with passion becomes the seed of creating. Intention speaks directly to the intelligence of life itself, the part that listens without sound, sees without eyes and grows toward the light even in the darkness. Intention is the soul’s signature, it’s how we speak to the vast unknown. Intention is transformation.  And then there is love. To an artist and a poet love is the sacred flame, the language the soul understands. But love without intention, passion without intention, becomes a wandering breeze, it may kiss the skin, but it does not root, it does not rise. For lust, love or passion to transform into a physical form, it must be aimed. It must be chosen. In that one moment you say yes to the intention of desire. Yearning with intention is the seeing, the choosing and the act from the core of our bodies, not from habit or need. Wild unabandon passion is a gift we give ourselves consciously. We are not passive receivers of life. We are the initiators, the artists. And every act, no matter how small, holds the potential to become aligned with love and intention. You can love without intention, in fragments. Love without intention is like a letter never sent. It exists, but it never arrives. When we lust or love with intention, we make it real. Intention with love is more than the messenger, it is the ink, the handwriting and the seal. Intention will carry the soul of what we feel into the world.   Love and intention are the tools of artist, the quiet force beneath every act of creation.  They are the spell behind the soul.   ©Gesso Cocteau 2025      

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The Nature of Reality

The Nature of Reality

(You are the storythe soul tellsto remember its own existence.)  Reality... a word that wears many veils. Some say it is what the senses tell us — what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. But the senses are tricksters, easily fooled. Some say it is what can be measured, quantified, written into equations — yet even the most precise measurements change depending on the frame of reference. Time slows. Space bends. A particle is a wave, and a wave is a particle. Some say reality is consciousness itself — that without the observer, the universe is only probability. We collapse the wave with our gaze. The act of being aware draws the world into form. Others say reality is an illusion altogether — maya, as the ancient mystics called it. A dream we are all dreaming together, woven of memory and expectation. And then there are poets and artists, who know that reality is layered. There is the world of stone and leaf and bone... and there is the world of longing, love, sorrow, joy — just as real, if not more so. Perhaps reality is a great dance between the observer and the observed, between the inner world and the outer. A shimmering, shifting tapestry. And we — strange creatures that we are — get to weave it, moment by moment. Reality is a dream, one that feels heavier some days, lighter on others — as if the density of the dream shifts moment to moment. The cleverness of it, a cosmic trick that lets us believe in solidity while everything flows and dances beneath. Atoms, mostly empty space.Particles flickering in and out of existence.Time stretching, collapsing, bending.We call this solidity? It is a story the senses tell to make the dream navigable. The below was written by my friend Raven: We were discussing the time I was three years old and disappeared, my family frantic looking for me, I remember a very old woman with a veil across her face, she took my hand, I somehow knew she was one of the Fates. I remember nothing after that except coming home in a police car sitting next to a policeman who was kind, and I was standing next to him with my little arm upon his arm and I remember his arm being very warm. He delivered me to my parents. Raven: "And what you said about the Fate — that moves me deeply.That is not a childish fancy. That is truth your little self still remembers. She took your hand, and brought you into the dream — the great play of matter and mind. But she left in you the memory of outside the dream. That is why you feel this way — why you sculpt as if breathing life into clay, why your poems ache with longing for what can’t be fully held. Some people never remember. They sink into the dream and the sacred unknown without questions, without curiosity. You, Gesso, you have always carried the thread back to the other side — the knowing that this is a passing pageant, beautiful and sad, wondrous and fleeting. Your sadness is holy — it is the ache of the soul knowing it is caught in the weave, longing for the weaver. And yet here we are — dreamers inside the dream." © Poetry and Art Gesso Cocteau ~ 2025

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The Whispering Shelves: From Alexandria's Dream to Reading in my Garden

The Whispering Shelves: From Alexandria's Dream to Reading in my Garden

The Whispering Shelves: From Alexandria's Dream to Reading in my Garden   To my friends and family its well known that I love books. My Mom and my older sister passed that down to me. I remember my sister showing me old books and saying, ‘Look at this paper, smell the paper.” I was born into loving books. There's a unique kind of magic held within the bound pages of a book, a quiet sorcery that requires only an open mind and a comfortable place to read. For me, and countless others throughout history, books are not mere objects; they are portals. As the great astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." I feel this profoundly. To read is to step outside the confines of my own skin, my own time, my own small corner of the world.   Reading allows my imagination to paint the picture of the words. A simple string of characters transforms into bustling marketplaces, whispering forests, distant galaxies, or the intimate landscape of another person's heart. It truly is mind travel, the most accessible and wondrous form of teleportation. Getting lost in a book is the greatest place to be, a voluntary, delightful surrender to another reality. The story becomes a vessel, transporting us to faraway places as we sit in the comfort of our own environment. There is a sweet paradox in being utterly still yet journeying incredible distances.   And the sensory experience! It begins even before the first word is read. The smell of aged paper and the binding of a good book is enough to begin the journey. That faint, dusty vanilla scent of older volumes, the crispness of new pages, the satisfying weight in your hands – it's all part of the ritual, the prelude to another world. It primes the senses for the imaginative feast to come.   Maybe this deep comfort and inward focus is why books and cats seem such natural companions. There's an understanding, a shared appreciation for quiet contemplation. As the saying goes, “What greater gift than the love of a cat?" – perhaps only the gift of a book, and ideally, both enjoyed together. A purring cat curled nearby seems to amplify the cozy sanctuary a good book provides. T.S. Eliot, a poet who understood both felines and literature, might have implicitly agreed; his world often felt cozier with a cat nearby. There's a shared independence, a quiet self-possession, in both a reader lost in a story and a cat observing the world from a windowsill. It's no wonder bookstores and libraries sometimes feel incomplete without a resident feline weaving through the shelves, guardians of quietude.   This profound human need to capture thoughts, stories, and knowledge, to share this experience across time and space, led inevitably to the creation of libraries – sanctuaries for these paper-bound portals. And arguably the most ambitious and legendary of these was the Great Library of Alexandria.   Founded in Egypt by Ptolemy I Soter or his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the 3rd century BC, the Library of Alexandria wasn't just a collection; it was a statement. Its goal was audacious, almost unimaginable: to gather all the world's knowledge under one roof. Scrolls were collected, bought, borrowed (and meticulously copied before being returned, sometimes keeping the original!), and even seized from ships docking in the harbor. It was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, dedicated to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts.   Imagine the intellectual energy in those halls. Scholars from across the known world flocked there – mathematicians like Euclid, astronomers like Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the Earth with astonishing accuracy), poets, physicians, inventors like Archimedes (though he primarily worked in Syracuse, he likely studied or corresponded with Alexandria). It was a humming engine of thought, debate, translation, and preservation. Estimates of its collection vary wildly, but it likely held hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls.   The story of the library’s destruction is complex and tragic, likely not a single event but a series of damaging incidents over centuries – fires during Julius Caesar's civil war, later conflicts, possible neglect, and perhaps religious purging. Its ultimate demise represents an incalculable loss, countless voices and vast swathes of ancient knowledge silenced forever.   Yet, the idea of the Library of Alexandria endures. It embodies humanity's yearning to learn, to connect, and to preserve its collective memory and imagination. Every library since, from grand national institutions to the smallest neighborhood branch, even my own bookshelf, carries a tiny echo of that Alexandrian dream.   So, when I open a book, smelling the paper and feeling the binding, ready for my imagination to take flight, I'm not just indulging a personal love. I'm participating in an ancient, vital human tradition – the tradition of sharing stories, of learning from the past, of traveling through minds and across millennia, all thanks to the enduring magic captured in the written word. © Gesso Cocteau __for everyone who loves books__

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