Günther Bach - The Horn Of The Hare

A hard-cover binder held a series of typewritten poems. There must have been a good two dozen pages, mostly without titles, but each with a date at the upper right, in the same place as on a letter. The first and last pages covered a time span of eight months, but that was two years ago.

I found it unimaginable that he had bothered with poetry – at least we had never spoken of it. But he had surprised me just as much last year when he suddenly became interested in small sculptures, small terra-cotta figures which he formed on the beach from the blue-gray clumps of clay at the foot of the sea cliff and then baked in the retort furnace in the cellar. There were two shelves on the living room wall full of these hand-sized figurines.

I shoved the binder back on the shelf. Behind the next curtain lay two rolls of drawings wrapped in brown tubes. When I held up the first vertically, a roll of drawings on transparent tracing paper slid down into my hand. I laid the roll on the drawing table and shoved the books to one side. When I unrolled the brittle paper, I saw that the drawings were full-size curves of bow limbs. Two of them carried the names of well-known high-performance models made by an American and a Japanese company. Evidently, he had drawn them for comparison with his own designs. The others were drawings of his own models, which he had designated by the name “Arco” along with the model number.

There were four drawings, and I had been there when he drew one of them.

In different colors, the sheet showed the step-by-step deformation of the bow limb when gradually drawn back. Besides the direct technical value of the data represented, I found that the drawing had considerable aesthetic attraction. The deformation of the bow limb, which normally took place in a fraction of a second, was shown here in separate stages presenting a visual representation of the dynamics of the gradually straightening recurved bow limb.

At the time, we had taken the drawing board out to the yard and clamped the bow to the edge of the drawing board. At the midpoint of the bow, we had placed a thin board which had been provided with short pegs driven in at 5 cm intervals. Then with a spring scale, we pulled the bowstring back in steps, stopping at each peg.

After entering the strength of the pull at that point in a table, we traced along the inner curves of the limbs with a felt pen, until the sheet was covered with sweeping curves.

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