Sculpture and Color

Marble or Fimo?

It's an ugly fact of life for a sculptor. Color can overwhelm form.

After an early disastrous painting class, I thought my life would be so much simpler just oiling wood carvings and giving all bronze a classic patina..... Of course all my sculpture is colored now.

Alan at Surface Fragments has a post, The Origin Of Painted Ornament, that could just as easily be called Painted Sculpture.

Reborn in living color: Caligula goes from pale to pink-cheeked in a reconstruction that smashes monochromatic perceptions of ancient sculpture. (Washington Post Photo Illustration With Images From Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Left) And Stiftung Archaeologie)

Washington Post article Correcting a Colorblind View of the Treasures of Antiquity by Blake Gopnik.The Alexander Sarcophagus as it originally appeared.

 

The Alexander Sarcophagus as it originally appeared Marble or Fimo

Classical sculpture "Centuries of burial or neglect had bleached the marbles, and greened the bronzes, beyond their makers' recognition. But it was those altered colors that became the model for how the ancient world had looked, and for what all new sculpture ought to look like." source

Gurewitsch writes: "Though we seldom think about it, such fragments are overwhelmingly abstract, thus, quintessentially "modern." And for most of us, that's not a problem. We're modern too. We like our antiquities that way."