Sculpture and Materials

Sculptors love objects and the materials they are made from. So it's disconcerting when you notice that a favorite material no longer is available or even exists

The little winter Clementine citrus used to come in small wooden crates. I hated throwing them out because I loved the bright orange and blue printed wood. One solution to re-use them was to create wings for this angel. Alas, he's now one of a kind, as the crates no longer exist.

This year's Clementines come in a mesh bag. Good-bye little crates. Have you noticed any materials that you love or take for granted suddenly gone?

Sculpture and Restoration

Like medicine, architectural restoration begins with "First, Do no harm." But things get muddy pretty fast after that. We'd like to believe that the work of earlier craftsmen is better than today's craftsmen, but that's not always true. 

This capital is wildly irregular. Its measurements and symmetry are off by inches. It's obvious to replace missing parts, but does one correct other flaws?

The answer is NO! That's not in the budget. 

Instead I clean up all the surfaces and forms. That means adding oil clay to fill in missing sections, and using my carving tools to cut through the paint and plaster to clean up the through lines of the acanthus leaves. The goal is to make everything blend together again.

Original damaged pilaster capital

So the original artwork is modified with oil clay, and carving to reform the surfaces. After each day's work, it's spray painted with a white primer to visually unify all the surfaces. That makes for a very funky working surface, but without that whitewashing even the folks who work on it, (Me) cant  understand what we're looking at. 
It's all about figure/ground relationships.

Corner capital made from two matched and tooled parts ready for molding.

Sculpture and Restoration

Sometimes architectural restoration literally rises out of the ashes. These Corinthian capitals were badly damaged in a fire. I don't know how they managed to remove them from the building in one piece. 

Parts would fall off them while I was just looking at them.

Here's a pilaster capital also fire and time damaged.

What the fire didn't ruin, was drowned by one hundred years of overpainting.
The dilemma is finding what and where is the original surface.


Following posts will show some of the restoration process

Sculpture and Shop Humor

 Design Form is rising out of the ruins of the previous architectural elements business. 

In cleaning out the mountains of trash, the guys, (both had worked for the previous business) found something in the owner's office: the book  Personal Bankruptcy Laws for Dummies. 

Unopened, still with the receipt.

They installed it in the new "library",

with a screw right through it.

You could know more, but that says it all. 

Cracks me up every time I wash my hands.

Sculpture and the New Year

As artist's we can get so focused on Selling our work that that we forget that our work is also a gift. 

Our art is a gift that we can freely share with everyone in our world. 

Give some of your art away and charge a fair price for rest of your art work. It's a good practice. It helps you be very clear about why you are making it and what your expectations are for each piece.

In this new year, where can you give the gift of your creativity? 

Is there a place you can share it with the very young, or the very old? 

Art is about abundance. Share it with the world.

Here's the large bees wax covered pine cone, on top the cake and stuffed to capacity with colorful prayers.

 There is the pine cone in the heart of the fire, prayers long gone up in flames and smoke.

7 year old cub reporter taking photos. I love her stance!

Lost in the warmth and the glow of the fire.....

Still shots of the fire are inspiration for new works....

Sculpture and the Fire of Intention

Susan Gallacher -Turner came to the New Year's Burning. She's got photos and writes about it on Sculpting A Life.

Here's how I made it.

Take two pallets and one old shipping box,  The first pallet was cut down by one third to be the base. The other was cut in half for the pedestal. Here they are with a layer of cardboard between the two. It was quicker to  cover the entire base first instead of trying to work around the upright portion.

I put all the wood scraps back inside the structure for kindling.

My grandfather had an expression, about when they were butchering animals on the farm:"We'd use everything but the squeal." That's what I strive for when I'm creating this sculpture. All the mess gets put back inside and becomes part of the art. When I'm done so is most of the cleanup!

Here's the main structure, ready to be covered in cardboard.

Here's the first coat of paint for the mandala and the frame for scale.
More in the next post.

Sculpture and the New Year.

New Year's sculpture under construction.

Finished artwork on the way out of the studio.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

 -- Robert Frost

This poem was in my thoughts as 

I constructed the New Year sculpture.

More on this in the next post. 

For the back-story on Gracewood Studio's 

New Year sculptures click here 

or here