Dante's Third Circle is reserved for Gluttons, and while I still firmly hold that carvers inhabit his Seventh Circle, I decided to punish/challenge myself and take another stab at carving. The parameters of this project were simple: create a sculpture of the human form and focus on the play of light/darkness.
Realizing how freaking hard it is to carve, I decided to create a mold that would better lend itself to what I envisioned the final product to be. I used an old realtor sign that I bought with the house; it was made of corrugated plastic. I wanted the final sculpture to be able to stand upright, and have smooth top, bottom, and sides, so the corrugated plastic was perfect. I also wanted the bottom of the piece to be thicker than the top of the piece, I built an angle into the bottom of the mold. This is what the mold looks like.
For the sculpture itself, one of my favourite sketches I did when I took figure drawing back in college was of a knee. It's a bit strange, I agree, but I really liked the sketch. And I've always loved that the human form, when truncated and broken up into segments (NOT like the Ice Truck Killer!!!) becomes abstract and almost like a landscape. I did a water colour painting in for my Senior Art Show that demonstrated that (sadly, the painting was destroyed when I "accidentally" left it outside in the elements for a few months. However, before I painted it, I did a colour pastel drawing of it. Here:
Now imagine it's monochromatic black and white watercolour, and you can imagine how it might be mistaken as a landscape).
So I decided to base my sculpture on that figure drawing sketch from so many years ago.
The problem with the sketch was that it wasn't the exact angle I wanted to use. So I needed more reference material. Unfortunately, Googling "kneeling woman profile" made me feel very very pervy. A classmate, who is a Physical Therapist, took pity on me and gave me some nice colour copies of the knee from several of her anatomy/physiology texts, and those helped a lot.
Carving is something that's really difficult to me, because my brain doesn't "see" what needs to be removed in order to get the shape out of the piece. I'm too paranoid that I'll take off more than I mean to, and because plaster is a once-it's-gone-there's-nothing-you-can-do-to-get-it-back medium, I was very very scared of taking too much off. I spent around 15-20 hours working on this piece, and I was quite pleased with the result.
Since I'm not a camera whiz, I had a hard time capturing shadow.
Unfortunately, most people outside of my class thought it was either a tongue or a butt crack (could be a reflection of the type of people I was asking and not necessarily the piece itself), but everyone in the class knew what it was (though I couldn't really tell if they were sincere or if they were humouring me).
When I showed it in class, I brought my own spotlight, and hard them turn off the overhead, so I think the subject matter might've been clearer.
Anyway, I was happy with the piece, and would--if I'm bored/insane enough--like to create several companion pieces. Like of a neck, of a shoulder, of a collar bone.
More can be viewed here.
No comments:
Post a Comment