Blog

Jessica reminded me that I haven’t done a blog in quite a while and when I asked for her advice on subject matter she said don’t you have a project you want to say something about. And that I do. Soon after shipping 12 sculptures for the 2011 Hostfest I started on my next project. I was contacted through someone I know a couple of months ago and asked if I’d be interested in doing a memorial for a young woman who passed on 2 years ago. After meeting with the client and going over some numbers we began. The project is for a fairly large and old cemetery, dating back to around 1880. It’ll be located at the corner near one of the main entrances. The woman who is commissioning me wants to have snowboarding gear in bronze decorating the recently completed garden. It, being an old and traditional cemetery, will make for a unique memorial. In fact there is only one other memorial that stands out in the 300 acres of traditional headstones and occasional bronze statue and it incorporates water and plants with a bronze cross. This memorial will be just as beautiful without the water and cross. The client and I are both very excited at how things are shaping up. The snowboarding gear is now being molded so I hope to have it installed by Christmas of this year. It will be situated in the center of the rocks as if the young woman was putting her gear there while taking a break. While this is a project which doesn’t require a figure it is actually quite enjoyable and I’ve gotten to listen to many wonderful stories of her life. How quickly life is for some, vanished into the night but not forgotten.

As a sculptor, I have been concerned with my sculpting techniques, adding some tool marks here and there to finalize a sculpture. However, I’ve noticed that most of the time these marks become superfluous and unrelated to the feel of the sculpture, they can sometimes even stand out on their own as interesting. Even though I would add them (or take away to be more accurate) to give the piece spontaneity, if I analyze enough I could tell they were contrived. So on the Twain bust I purposefully decided to focus on making the piece work as a likeness and not being concerned at all with the surface treatment. I had read something about Rodin’s technique and he was describing how the energy of a sculptural form does not end at the surface that you see, but extends or radiates outward. Perhaps by thinking too much about surface technique you can kill that energy that Rodin was talking about. So for this sculpture I used 2 tools that I normally don’t use at all (one of them hardly at all and the other for small details such as the eyes and nose). Mostly this was because I left my good tools at home. I did this piece in approximately 3 hours at my studio and focused entirely on making it a likeness. Most of the work was done with my hands (also Rodin’s technique) and I also borrowed from Rodin gouging out the eyes deeply. While creating this sculpture I told myself I wouldn’t get emotionally connected to it (afterwards is a different story). I steered clear of ‘final touches’ and just stopped when I felt it looked enough like Mark Twain. I may do this technique on a smaller sculpture to see if it has the same spontaneous feel. 

Well, since the next few weeks are preparing for the big sculpture show here in Loveland I thought I’d blog about something unrelated to what I’m currently working on (to keep things fairly interesting). A couple of years ago someone I know lent me a book called “In Praise of Shadows”. I’ve read the book twice and well, I wouldn’t even call it a book, it’s more of a large pamphlet or something. Well, let’s just call it a book for now to make things easier. In this book, the author talks about Japanese aesthetics and the comparison to western ideas of beauty. It has really opened up my eyes to what I consider beautiful art and I’ve been attempting to apply the core of the book into my art. What the author says is beautiful  (in Japan) have an old and imperfect nature. This imperfection is what makes them beautiful. He calls it wabi sabi. If you’d ever hear me talking to myself in my car or in my studio chances are I’d mumble the words wabi sabi in some inaudible sentence, probably even out of context (“oh, my car needs an oil change and tire rotation… wabi sabi” or “tonight I think I’ll cook chicken and rice… wabi sabi”). I think in the book he tries to not use the word imperfection as the definition, it is deeper than that or different, but that is the basis. As a sculptor who appreciates, yes, sculpture I find that the works that I am drawn to have this. Mostly they are really old sculptures that were not well taken care of, sometimes a contemporary sculptor gets it, but it is rare! What really is interesting to me is that 99.9% of the sculptors today don’t want their sculptures to look old. I mean they do to some degree, but they stop at a certain point. I can totally appreciate a Rosetta (photo) with a smooth surface and interesting patina and glossy shine to it, but it does not compare to a Bruno Lucchesi sculpture (photo). Both are contemporaries, but there is a difference. Rosetta wants her sculptures to look new and fresh as if fresh from the oven. Her collectors like that. Bruno, on the other hand, understands wabi sabi. Maybe he doesn’t know about it personally, but he knows what is beautiful. Perhaps this is all just me, but I find it really interesting. Before reading the book, my sculptures had a shine to them. The shine (if you don’t know) is mostly caused by lacquer, wax and polishing. When I look back at those sculptures I can plainly see what needs to be done to them to look better under todays household lighting. When a shiny art object is placed in a home which has artificial lighting it tends to have a cheapening effect. The object looks plasticky. Plastic is not cool when it comes to art. Well, at least in my opinion it is not cool. I was observing some of Rodin’s sculptures and noticed the works that were more interesting to me did not have this glossy surface. They looked weathered and old. Sculpture is supposed to look old and aged. Compared to painting, which seems like the newer it looks the better it is. Cracks in the paint are not considered cool in a painting, dust is not considered cool, paint brush bristles stuck in the canvas are not considered cool. Why is it that the Venus de Milo sculpture all crumbled and almost broken up into dust is still so appealing? Wabi Sabi… I think an old painting has less value than an old sculpture, but again this is just me. Sculptures age like a fine bottle of wine. Paintings age like milk. It is big difference! Paintings require personal assistants for the remainder of their lives because of the fact that it is a thin layer of color on a flat surface. If that paint is gone than there is no art. Sculptures are round, voluminous and take up space usually in a very hard and durable medium. And therefore, being without any need of a caretaker, are very independent creations who usually let nature assist them in the aging process. If they were people they’d be the old Italian farmer who has lived his whole life in the village with little money and just a few friends. Paintings are like the Brittany Spears or Paris Hilton’s, always needing attention (“I have a flaw, can someone please tend to it already!”) Notice how it’s not even a question but a statement! Sculptures are happy and content with the little they have. Well, I’m probably going waaaay off on a tangent here and I make the comparison between paintings and sculptures because it is a rivalry that goes back to at least Michelangelo’s time (between Michelangelo and da Vinci), but it’s a difference that I’ve noticed (old vs. new in the different mediums). Anyways, enough of the comparisons. I think I’ve expressed enough on wabi sabi. Tonight I’ll probably have dreams of wabi sabi (not to be confused with wasabi) if I keep going on.

As the days approach the big Loveland show I am working hard to prepare new sculptures and old ones for display. I’ve decided to repatina my old pieces as I’ve found that brown (ferric nitrate) works the best for my style of work. I also went out and bought some good strobe lights and reshot these 4 sculptures.

In between coats of rubber on two of my newest sculptures I decided to weld together this table top nude sculpture I made. A couple of months ago my studio mate and myself decided to purchase a welder. We both are bronze sculptors and it seemed like a smart decision as opposed to paying someone to do what we both know how to do. Fortunately I was taught tig welding by a well known sculptor here in town and can assemble table top pieces as well as life size bronzes, although I’m not very good at it and half the time I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing, lol. So far I haven’t had any close calls with weld drips running into my arm or leg (knock on wood) so that is good. This sculpture is about 12″ high and there were 3 sections to join together as well as 2 core holes to fill in which were about 1″ diameter. After I welded it all together I chased (grinded and blended) the welds, sandblasted, and patinaed. This is why bronze sculptures are so dang expensive; TIME CONSUMING! I spent about 2 1/2 hrs from the welding to the patina stages. Well, It is 1am and figure I should get to sleep now.

I’ve been working on a sculpture for the Norsk Hostfest in Minot, ND for about 2 months or so. The sculpture is about 12″ high and bronze castings will be used as an award to volunteers at the annual festival. At this point it is just about approved of in clay, there are a couple of minor changes as the client has specified them over the phone. Hopefully next week I can start the mold making of it. I am working with one other person on this (in addition to the director of the Norsk Hostfest) and normally this can be a royal pain in the patuty (with conflicting opinions, etc etc.), but fortunately in this case it has been great! The gentleman that has been helping a great deal lives in Manhattan and is a good friend of Chester’s so his input is very valuable. All of the suggestions (and there have been plenty of them) have tremendously improved the piece. If I showed a before and after it would be clear.

Gosh, is this getting monotonous already? I haven’t figured out what to say and how much to say and when to post and how much information people read on this. BTW, this is my first post so I’m kinda getting the feel for this. My girlfriend Jessica helped me get my page setup. Luckily, I didn’t use the hammer to unleash my frustrations… yet! I’ve wanted to setup a blog for a couple of years, actually after watching the movie Julie and Julia I was so ready to do it, but I gave up the next day as it seemed difficult to setup and maintain. Well, we’ll see how long I continue, but for now I’m gonna blog about 1 of 2 of my current projects I’m working on.

So… the sculpture is looking fairly good. In my opinion it is finished. I have tried to keep the looseness that all of my fine art sculptures have, but it is something that is hard to do on commissioned work as they generally take much longer than a piece that I whip out of my head.