Sculpture Studio: June 2021

Friday, June 25, 2021

Technical problems

Over the last twenty five years these blog posts have worked their way through two desktops and two laptops. The posts began before blogs were invented and they may lay claim to being one of the first day to day online diaries of work in progress. Yesterday a defective fan put me out of action and until my son can find and fit a replacement, I'm limping along with a hand held tablet. At least this time around it's not a crashed hard drive.

Sunday, June 20, 2021

I give credit to God

God Creating the Earth.

A relief on the door of the church of St. James the Greater, Porto, Azzurro, Elba, Italy.

If "the things that you're liable to read in the bible" are true, I give credit to God. He had an idea and singlehandedly created the world. No committees were involved and he finished the job in six days.

In contrast I've received the following from a building preservation society.

Join our Slack Workplace!

This is the workplace for member communication.

Please click on the link below and select the KAI (Committee) you would like to be a part of.

The platform is divided into channels or rooms - think of them as virtual meeting places.

There are 4 main channels: General, Announcements, Inspiration, Live Events and Meetings.

Then there are the 7 Kai's - join as many as you would like, but please make sure you can and will contribute to its success. This cannot happen without you! We will do training once everyone is in. See you there!

Once in my younger days (I stress the word "once") I attended similar in person table-to-table brain-dulling event. Within five minutes I'd lost the plot. Now that I'm older and wiser I realise that committees and group attempts at creative solutions are a colossal waste of time. If God had used the Slack/Kai approach we'd still be floating around the universe as a wisp of gas.

I feel sure that the sculptor that created the relief in the opening picture did so unaided. There are numerous "stock" photos of the relief on the internet. Not one gives credit to the sculptor but they all expect credit to be given to themselves. All I have to go on is the signature in the bottom righthand corner. Can any of my followers in Italy help?

In the meantime, my credit to the unknown sculptor is: I wish I'd have created that.

Thursday, June 17, 2021

Resisting a temptation to erase the past

An unfinished sketch of a model that I can't recall.

On completing a painting or sculpture I am rarely sure of the worth of what I have created. The same is true when it comes to choice of subject matter. When I look back at a lifetime's work there are periods that I am tempted to erase, forgetting the passions that brought it about. The more daring the work, the more disconcerting it can seem when the passion is exhausted. This is particularly true when it comes to my thirty year's fixation of depicting the female nude.

But as with love, the heart has its reasons.

Pudemdum

Latin root of the word pudēre meaning “to be ashamed”

Sunday, June 13, 2021

Cry, the Beloved Country

An artist's impression of the entrance to Dominica's forthcoming International Airport.

The title for this post is taken from Alan Paton's novel which was publised about South Africa on the eve of apartheid. It is apt for my feelings, not about racial tensions, but about the future of my beloved Dominica, a small island that lies between Guadalope and Martineque.

Not for the first time I quote the words of my dear friend, the Virgin Island poet Sheila Hyndman (1958-1991). She wrote her prohetic poem "To Virgin Gorda" during her high school years.

They will come with tools and machines.

They will bring to light your secret places,

They will demand your mysteries.

They will destroy,

Build up.

They will dilute your treasures,

And rob you of your chastity,

They will adorn you like ancient Jezebel.

Sunday, June 6, 2021

Having the sands to myself

I am told that on family trips to the seaside, I'd drag my parents for miles until we found a place where I could have the sands to myself. In almost eighty years I haven't changed. I could write a book about the deserted beaches I've known, all of them being in the tropics rather than the North of England.

My first studio in the Caribbean was a shack on the sandy shore of an idyllic cove and the opening painting is from a series I made of deserted beaches in the Virgin Islands. In comparison, the beaches I knew as a child are now more crowded then ever and I'd have an even longer walk to have the sands to myself.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

July 22nd 2000

With my family I arrived in England five years ago. The first two years were spent working on the building and applying for Arts Council lottery funding. Alas, the Council considered figurative sculpture elitist and of no interest to the general public.

After three years our savings were spent and in desperation I began doing what I came to England to do: to work as a sculptor. In our impoverished state the odds were against us. A year passed with not a single commission and not a penny of income. Then the tide turned. If two years ago it had been predicted that my studio would today be bursting at the seams with work, I would have dismissed the notion as a complete fallacy.

Sculpture for the City of Leeds

The end result for those of us working in the visual arts is something that is capable of being seen. In the long term the success of a piece of work is, to a large degree, measured by how many people look at it. But in the beginning the work cannot be seen by anyone on the outside. It exists only in the mind's eye of the artist. That is where the figures for Leeds have been for the last three months. During that period there hasn't been a day - or night - when I haven't worked upon them. I've moved them through every position imaginable: standing, sitting, leaning, squatting, huddled together, set apart. I've added figures and switched males for females. My couple - for that's what I finished up with - then gave birth to a child. The toddler peeps at the Frenchman playing boules from behind his/her mother's skirt. The work has been created and torn apart a hundred times. But as yet I haven't set down anything on paper or built up anything in clay. My successes and failures have gone unseen. And as much as I want to open up the creative process through these diary pages, the first stage is too elusive be put into words.

Trina's Portrait

"Have you nearly finished, my neck aches". After five minutes Trina, my youngest daughter, has had enough of modelling. Actually her impatience works to my advantage. I know I have to work fast, and working without a second to spare usually produces my best work. I started today's session started by wiping out half a day's work. I had previously added her hair but the result didn't please me. I had invented a head of hair and not paid close enough attention to the real head of hair. The first attempt looked like something out of a hairdresser's window. Maybe that is why Trina liked it the best!

So much to learn

In this day and age there is little in the way of guidance for aspiring sculptors. There are no schools that teach the disciplines as fully as they were taught a hundred years ago, there are few books and precious few masters alive to train the next generation. One must learn as best one can. Ton after ton of clay must pass through the sculptor's hands and hour upon hour must be spent working from the live model. It isn't easy and a lifetime isn't long enough to learn all that must be learnt. There is nothing more difficult to model convincingly than the human hand. If the hand is done well the observer doesn't stop to count the fingers.

Church Window Layout

In between modelling sessions I have been drawing the millennium church window full size. This will help me to come to terms with the daunting scale of depicting Christ Triumphant. My Christ Triumphant unleashing a flock of doves has been rejected. The church has requested that I keep to the more familiar vision of Christ with arms beckoning. At least my model will be pleased that he hasn't to contort himself into that pose anymore. Michelangelo had his fair share of rejections from Church Councils. Once, in an attempt to please, he went so far as to devise a statue that incorporated a barber's shop within the figure’s lower extremities and - as a master-stroke - put a chimney coming out of its head!

Mould Divisions

Three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles are nothing new: sculptors have been doing them for hundreds of years. But this is no game. The problem is mind boggling. Somehow, the three standing figures have to be divided into sections of a mould. The seams are made with lengths of brass shim that are pressed into the clay of the figures. Eventually the clay will be covered with plaster to form what is called a waste mould. At the moment this may sound very confusing but over the next couple of months you will learn a lot about the process. This is the most complex mould that I have ever made and one to test my ingenuity. I was awake thinking about it at three o'clock this morning. If I get it wrong the figures will be entombed like a mummy. As I work I imagine the skilled moulders of earlier times critically looking down on me and laying bets on the outcome of my work.

30th June 2000

I've managed to dodge colds all winter. Just my luck that I get one now! This I could have done without. Maybe if I worked in advertising or accountancy I'd have taken the day off and stayed in bed, but in this line of work you don't even think of it. The molds have to be at the foundry in two weeks and at the foundry they will be. The picture shows Denise - on her one day off from college - chipping away at the waste mould of Samantha. In the background Richard, my assistant, is working on the mold for the Bond Court figures.

4th July 2000

So much depends on the model, and with models I have always been fortunate. Elizabeth has dedicated herself to the task and that dedication shines through in the finished work. The pose has been painfully difficult but she's never complained. Furthermore, she's fitted the modelling in between moving house, looking after her family and driving the truck for her husband’s business. She always shown up on time and has never missed a session. Thanks Elizabeth. In turn I've given my best. It's all I can do.

Portrait Demonstration - Megan

For the Allen Gallery I did two demonstration portrait sessions before a live audience and television. Two models on consecutive days, starting at ten in the morning and finishing at four in the afternoon with an hour for lunch. The models, Megan and Jag, were the winners of a primary school art competition. Their prize was a portrait session. A portrait from start to finish in no more than five hours, before an inquisitive audience and the press, is a tall order. I doubt if there are many sculptors that would dare to take it on. I did and here are the results. Thanks Megan and Jag, for making it possible.

Patina

It seems that a successful patina, like a good watercolour, is the result of a happy accident. On my fourth attempt Xander's bust turned out to perfection. It in fact put Trina's in the shade and gave me a hard act to follow on the torso. I can well imagine that, if I keep at it, in twenty years I'll be experienced enough to understand every subtle shade of the business. Just like the episode of Pooter painting the bath in "The Diary of a Nobody" I got quite carried away with applying patinas. Switching from bronze to the plaster I gave Elizabeth’s figure a coat of burnt umber.

Henry Moor Institute

I got quite a shock today on visiting the current exhibition at the Henry Moor Institute in Leeds. The gallery was actually thronged with real people. By real people, I mean those you'd expect to see in everyday life. Usually the only sign of human life is the ever present black shirt attendants. The exhibition of portrait busts is aptly titled "Return to Life". I hope that the attendance figures don't scare off the institute from ever doing such a show again. Being popular to the masses is not exactly in their remit. It would have been nice to have included a photograph so as to encourage even more of the public at large to visit this excellent presentation. I asked a black-shirt but was told that photography is strictly forbidden.

A Ray of West Indian Sunshine

On Saturday I attended a Postgraduate Seminar on Portraiture at the Henry Moore Institute. Even at its most informal, events at the Institute are lodged at the higher end of the scholastic scale. As such its presentations are totally at odds with my premise that: with sculpture, as with sex, intellectual thought only screws things up. For this particular seminar it was even doubtful if I would be allowed in. As with many working sculptors, my academic education amounts to no more than secondary modern school. But Saturday turned out to be a rare and rewarding day. To find a West Indian in the audience is a rarity, even rarer to find that - my God - she's one of the presenters! Charmaine Nelson brought a wonderful ray of Jamaican sunshine into a lecture room that normally has the feel of an Icelandic family mausoleum. Her paper "White Marble, Black Bodies and the Fear of the Invisible Negro: Signifying Blackness in mid-Nineteenth-Century Neoclassical Sculpture" wonderfully linked with all that I have been working for over the years in my adopted Caribbean. Charmaine, for the first time in five years of lectures, you made me miss my train home. Thanks!

At a fleeting glance

Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for the Sunday Times, wrote recently about painting quickly. Both as painter and sculptor, the faster I work the better. What is seen at a glance has to be captured in a moment. A climax cannot be sustained forever. But as Januszczat says: "Painting quickly is still seen in academic circles as a threat to civilization. Those artists who appear to breeze in and do it without a proper amount of effort still seem to us to be breaking all the rules. With other art forms the ability to work quickly is recognised as a sign of genius but a quick painter remains (alas) a slap happy painter." Alas, a slap-happy painter and sculptor I remain. This little sketch was completed on the run in Grenada's market place.