Art Blog » May 2004

sculpting at night

Last night I did some more work on my stone sculpture. I took down his right cheek because it was too hight in comparison to the left one, thinned out his jaw a bit, scaled down the nose, and scaled down the chin. Hmmm … seems to be a pattern. There’s been no scaling up! Sigh. Anyway, there are no new pictures, but I’m including a link to The Compleat Sculptor, the store where I’ve been taking this class. This picture is of their advertising postcard for their class.

Now, no more stone man until July. I’m taking June off from the chisel.

journal/notebook designs

Notebooks are now available! I designed two of the covers for Exaclair’s leather notebooks. You can see them on the Exaclair website. The inuksuk (an inuit man-like pile of stones) is printed on the small leather notebook, and the golden ratio spiral is printed on the large leather notebook. You can read more about inuksuk here.

rock update

Last night marks a time of great progress on the rock. Take a look at the development album (focus on the additions from this week) to see. What I did:

• Took down the cheeks about a centimeter. This was to bring them closer to the level of the eyes, which were quite deep
• Took down the nose almost 2 centimeters. You can see the half-way process in this pict.
• Sculpted lips!
• Made the chin smaller
• Started to sculpt the tendon in the neck

I’m discovering that sculpting in rock for me is really proving to be an important part of the process of my artistic development. I always try to be so in control and so safe when I’m doing my artwork and it has been a life-long struggle to take a deep breath and then some risks. Since I can never ever undo any step in the rock-sculpting process, every move I make is an irreversible risk (unlike in clay, or even watercolors).

added older plastilene sculptures

The plastilene gallery is now complete. I had my manservant take photos this past weekend of three of my older sculptures that were brought into existence before I got my digital camera. Featured here today is my favorite, Old Tom. I loved sculpting the folds of his skin, and the way he’s leaning on his own support. You can see the piece page or else skip straight to the slideshow of 180-degrees-worth of photos of him.

rock update

The changes are rather subtle, but I assure you that they are there. Last night produced no progress, due to illness, but you can see in this (and these) picts the results of last week’s work. The face is much skinnier and rounded, and I removed a few pounds of rock from between the bottom of the eyes and the chin. I had to take down the level of the cheeks, there, because I carved the eyes in quite deep. See the development picts here.