Sculpture and Duncan McRoberts

A home by the architect, Duncan McRoberts, is featured in the Dec/Jan issue of Oregon Home Magazine.

A few years ago, I worked with McRoberts on a very different residence. The project was a 4x 5 foot elaborate ceiling, sort of a decorated cake of ornament. The rest of the house gave new meaning to excess. Elaborate faux finishes, High French, low french, and lots of

What I enjoyed most about the work was that I had to develop new tools and techniques. For me this was technical sculpture, lots of measuring and using every trick I could devise to keep it as symmetrical and exact as possible.

I enlarged McRoberts drawings to full scale.

 I placed clear acrylic over the blueprint and traced out each component. Then I cut all the parts out and had matching right and left templates to begin modeling. This photo shows two symmetrical ornaments being checked for accuracy.

Out of context I think this looks like some sort of 19th C medal.

This center medallion took the most time. I worked from the center outwards. I established the maximum clay height of the relief for one quarter of it, then carefully modeled each section to match. Each line and division of form is exactly the width of a tool specially made for this project.

More in the next post.