Can you guess?

The opening image is not the face of the moon.  What you are seeing is the finished clay figure below after I've thrown wet plaster at it. In other words, the first stage of taking a waste mold. 

 

The process of making a waste mold is described in detail in a series of posts that date from March 2017, and in my video that follows work in progress on sculptures in my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun.

If it were any easier...

Work in progress on a 1/3rd life-size clay sketch of a bathing figure. 

If it were any easier, everyone would be doing it...If it were any more difficult, no one would.

The above maxim I've found to be true for feats as diverse as sailing small boats across oceans and modelling a 1/3rd life-size clay sketch of a bathing figure. My present task being made all the more difficult as I am minus the live model. I don't need a model for detail, but for capturing life. To suggest rather than to define; to resist finish, so as to leave room for you to enter the creative process.

The sculpture is based on this pastel sketch of islanders bathing in the rivers of Grenada forty years ago. Those scenes are now a thing of the past. They are however permanently etched in my memory and hence, model or no, my attempt to recreate the vision of those halcyon days.

Bathing Figure

The French have a word for it.

The Crouching Woman. A painting by the Belgian artist Adrien de Witte (1850-1935)  

Déshabillé: The state of being carelessly or partially clothed.

In figurative art, one could extend the meaning by adding: A glimpse of the body unintentionally revealed.

For the artist, this is easier said than done. The unintended glimpse is not one that can be staged in the studio. It invariably happens when the sketch book isn't at hand. Attempts to recreate that illusive moment, from memory or the posed model, are rarely successful. However, the opening painting by Adrien de Witte of a kneeling woman is a masterly exception. 

My own contribution to the genre is of a model at her first sitting. The sarong was meant to be tied above her breasts, but as she turned it slipped, and the unintentional won preference over what was meant to be.

The unintended glimpse is easier to achieve in the moving image, as in this 1968 live recording of Eartha Kitt singing, If you go away.

The permanence of a fleeting glance

I doubt that you'll be able to make head nor tail of today's image, but I can. It is one of my sketches of villagers bathing in the rivers of the Caribbean. 

Those fleeting glances are permanently etched in my mind, and the information they contain is worth more than scores of studies from a statically posed model. As years go by these sketches have become all the more precious to me because bathing alfresco is a thing of the past. Bathing is now done unseen within the seclusion of the shower curtain. What was once seen as innocence is now deemed as improper.

Those sketches, and my memories of villagers bathing in the Caribbean rivers, resulted in my life-size sculpture, Bathing Figure.