Do you remember looking up at the sky when you were a kid?  Did you ever spin around and around to make yourself dizzy until you fell down?  It is only for a moment and perhaps the next moment will not be so joyful…..

I began working on Turn Around in January of this year.  Ten months later she is finished in bronze and ready to ship to Broomfield Colorado.

Turn Around was cast at the Artworks Foundry in Berkeley CA.,  and is now headed for the First Bank Performing Arts Center in Broomfield Co. ( updates coming soon)  where she will be displayed for about a year.   If you are in the area take a look, and let me know what you think.

Because she will be displayed outdoors, I needed a simple patina that will last in the elements. This is a simple ferric and liver of sulphur patina.

Turn Around is part of my Time and Space series. It is about the dizzy connection between today, tomorrow and yesterday. There is giddy joy and a spirit of hope and the sadness of change and loss along the way.

They say all endings are really beginnings too.  Its always a little sad when I finish the modeling stage of a sculpture.   Its exciting too to think of how the finished work will be realized in a permanent material.

My sculpture-in-progress Turn Around is ready to be cast in bronze. In fact the mold making has already begun.  She is also ready to find a home.

This intimately scaled work is suited to a small park, pocket park, garden, courtyard or atrium.  Turn Around is 50 inches tall and aproximately 30 inches in diameter.

Light will appear in the show’s catalogue available through Whelan Galleries.

Rendered from a living model, Light is a very special piece in my Time and Space series.  From start to finish it was two years in the making.  Creating Light involved making a temporary kiln and many months of patient cold glass working after the risky process casting.  I won’t get into all the technical details, but here are a few pictures of the process:

At last I have a name for the work:  Turn Around.

This is the final stage of clay work.  I’m adding a low relief along the base and finishing surface details.  The relief  gives the viewer some things to think about: a cast off sock, crayons, a mobile phone…items from her past and future fall away into the weeds around her.

This little girl is looking for a home.  I hope to find her outdoors where she belongs someday.

Detail from "Turn Around"

Hair is impossible to sculpt. It’s not just difficult but also completely impossible. Anyone who tells you otherwise has simply never attempted it.

That said, here are the few things I have learned while attempting the impossible:

1. Hair is both chaotic and logical. It must follow the laws of physics without appearing to to ever follow any rules of any kind. Just ask a hair dresser.
2. Let random things happen. Too much order and it will not resemble hair.
3. Look up chaos theory. It will not help you to render hair from clay but it will help you to understand why you are failing so miserably.
4. Think about spaghetti and cupcakes. Think about words like “undulate”. Think about super string theory or the series of events that brought you to this place in your life but whatever you do, do not think about hair.
5. Listen to Thelonious Monk. Mozart is another option but do not even think about Bach, for he is not your friend in this madness.
6. Approach the rendering of hair from a place of deep meditative humility. Know that you are walking in the footsteps of some of the greatest artists in history and they struggled too. Look the work of Bernini for extra humility.
7. If you want to see your work through the eyes of others, take a picture and look at that. I apologize in advance for the shock of it.

So, that’s all I know. That, and these words of my mentor Walter Erlebacher : “take courage, art is big”.

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.” – Martha Graham

“Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words.” —Deborah Bull

“Life is about moving, it’s about change. And when things stop doing that they’re dead.”— Twyla Tharp

“Gestures are a language. Every moment of your existence you are a living poem of movement…….if only there is someone there to read you.”  —Georgianna Krieger

Here is where things get interesting , for me at least.  With the initial figure blocked out its time to trace the motion of the figure through time/space.

I think about the mechanics of the joints of the skeleton as well as the contraction of muscles to plot out the movement.  The human body is a beautiful combination of structural form and it follows certain laws of physics.  These can be learned through the study of structural anatomy.  Some years ago, when I worked in stop motion animation, I also studied movement by taking photographs in quick succession of the movement in question.

With the armature secure and sealed from moisture it’s time to sculpt!   I begin by adding fistfuls of clay and pounding them onto the armature with wooden block tools.   These tools are home made in various sizes but the basic shape is a rectangular block with a 35 degree angle at one end. Why 35 degrees?  Because there are no 45 degree angles in the human form, 35 is much more useful.

I’m using a water based clay formulated to dry more slowly than most, called WED clay.  This is the first time I have used this particular clay which I am told was developed by Disney.  So far so good.

I block out the volumes of the central figure first.  I will then create the moving volumes by plotting out the progression of the basic volumes through space/time.

It’s important not to add details at this time and work around the whole form.  This stage flies by.  Finally the piece takes shape and turns from being just a thought in my head, to something tangible.

I’m still working with a proportion system and thinking all the time about composition.   This is when the gesture of the piece comes alive and is always my favorite stage.

Many artists like this rough stage so much they just stop here.  Why go on?  I go on to deepen the connection between the viewer and the subject.  I go on because it is in the details that the sublime is revealed.  I go on because I have more to say.

Here is my definition: Art is communication of profound thoughts. Thus, visual art is a communication of profound thought through visual media.

Sculpture has the ability to endure for centuries, even millennia. In our instant gratification world, not too many artists seem to be thinking about their work in the long term. Not in terms of it’s content and not in terms of it’s physical structure either. (I recently went to a gallery showing sculptures made of masking tape, selling for tens of thousands of dollars.)

So while it may not be very “of the moment” to make a sculpture in bronze or glass or stone, it is a way to speak to the future. It is a way to communicate profound ideas today and to a distant future. That is a somewhat different idea than making art to explore feelings or to rebel against something. It’s a big idea and deserves deep contemplation.

Someday this blog will no longer exist and my work as an artist will have to speak for itself. I will not be standing there to explain it and my artists statement will have long since been lost and forgotten. What will my work say? How will anyone understand it? To speak a language that I believe has the best chance of being understood, I use the human figure. People get it. Not just some people, but pretty much everybody, everywhere at every time. It’s the least elitist language I can think of.

The ideas I try to convey in my sculpture are the most profound ideas possible. They are ideas that I believe are common to most people, they have a certain universality that gives them enough weight to justify my efforts. So when I tackle a subject like the giddy moment of dizziness in a spinning child, encompassing both memories of the past and contemplation of an uncertain future, I believe it speaks to humanity. I believe it says something about the time in which it was conceived (a dizzy time) as well as something timeless. It speaks about a tangible moment but also about human consciousness and perception. It has layers of meaning both simple and complex. And perhaps if I am able to cast it in bronze, someone in the future will know something, perhaps in an intimate way, about our time here at the dawn of the 21st century. That’s art.

The armature serves two purposes: to control the effects of gravity on the hundreds of pounds of clay, and to plot out, in three dimensions, the correct proportions of the figure.

To calculate the correct proportion I use a system of measurement taught to me by sculptor Walter Erlebacher. It is based on classical Greek sculpture proportions as well as Walter’s experience dissecting cadavers and observing the live form. Because the system takes months to learn and years to master I will just outline my basic steps here.

I began with a drawing on paper in which I calculate all the large masses of the figure. I have adjusted the head-to-body ratios for a child’s proportions which are different than an adult’s. This drawing serves as a template for the armature wire. I’m using 3/8ths inch aluminum wire for the main structure.

To support the wire armature I am building a wood structure. Normally I would use steel pipe, but because of the relatively small size and vertical pose of this piece, I can use wood, provided it is very stable and sealed from the moisture of the clay.

Are you getting bored with all the practical business of sculpting? Well, to a large degree sculpture is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.

Perhaps then, this is a good time to tell you about my inspiration: do you remember looking up at the sky when you were a kid? Did you ever spin around and around to make yourself dizzy until you fell down? This pieces about that moment. An instant of freedom and abandon in the joy of being part of the world. It is only for a moment. Perhaps the next will not be so joyful. So why make a sculpture about a moment? Because the nature of human experience is linear, which is to say it is a series of moments all strung together. Our experience of conscious thought relies on memories and an ability to link together moments. All of the pieces in my Time and Space series are about the human experience of memories and consciousness and the ability to contemplate the future.