"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."

~Richard Bach

For the third semester of the Sculpture class I'm taking at the local community college, the instructor gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted, so long as I set my own schedule and met my goals. The kicker is that the projects had to revolve around a centralized theme. I struggle with themes. Mostly, I just make whatever I think is pretty, and don't really care too much whether some other person would classify it as ART. So rather than worry about it too much, I just decided one four projects that I wanted to do and used the shoe horn to smash my evil step sister foot into the glass slipper.

I decided my theme would be hope. Being able to see the miracle in the mundane--separate the wheat from the chaff, that sort of thing. While I was content with how my butterfly sculpture from the Spring semester turned out, I wanted to readdress it and make it larger. And more colourful. And somehow cram it into having a HOPEful message. So I made more paper butterflies, using the same techniques as I did in the Spring, but not limiting my colour palette to blues. I reused the blue butterflies from the old sculpture, and added about 25 more. Again, I used high def colour photos of real butterflies and moth as my reference material.

I used a much larger sheet of galvanized steel and beat it with a hammer against the concrete of my driveway--I'm sure the neighbour's LOVED that. I wanted the piece to be a wall hanging, so I drilled two holes in the backside and strung wire through it. Then I glued the butterflies on as randomly as I could.

This is the finished product.

And a close up of one of the moths.

I know I need to go back and add more/better photos. So check this flickr set later for better pics.

Now that I've done the butterfly thing twice, I know why I haven't really been enthusiastically happy with it. When I have the time, I'm going to do a third run at it. This time, I'm going to make the butterflies substantially smaller--like total circumference being around 1.5-2" and all with the same wing pattern and I'm going to make a BUNCH of them, all in rainbow colours. Like (10) per ROYGBIV. And I'm going to arrange them in a swirling pattern up a more cone-shaped piece of galvanized steel.

I think it would be a nice companion piece to this one. One being order and the other being chaos.

But sheesh, making the butterflies took a long time, so I'll tackle the companion piece later. I'll add it to my list.