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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Recognition of the Wood



It's down to finishing work, further sanding where the wood has torn, filling some of the checks with beeswax, and deciding what to do with the 1/2 inch wide check all the way down his back. I couldn't wait any longer and put on a wash of oil paint and sealer.
It's a little harder to work the surface but so much easier to see the forms without the distraction of the light and dark rings and the knots.

He's shown with the initial cardboard cutout and the clay model I used to determine size and gesture. You can get a sense of how a sculpture evolves from the initial drawing on flat cardboard to fully dimensional. His robe changed a lot when I realized how perfectly the concentric rings could become the draping of his robe. Working in wood is a structured improvisation between what I envision and what I acknowledge in the material, a recognition of the living wood.

1 comment:

Bpaul said...

wow did that change in its last few days, beautiful