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Mesmerized by Terracotta

Oil clay proved to be a good medium to sculpt, but it is soft and therefore fragile. I bet it gets pretty dusty too.

Oven bake clay added another dimension in that it can be permanently hardened and then carved.

Water based firing clay was up next for testing. I’d not ever used it so I read much, located a supply across the river, and got three hundred pounds of it after seeing two little terracotta figures at the house of a friend.

I worked long hours for a week and enjoyed every bit of the time. Other than a steel pole affixed to a little wooden platform on a tool cart there was no armature. The tool cart was a lucky find that I acquired a couple of days before from a widow friend who was cleaning out her husband’s tools and manly garage stuff.

I built it up from a solid block of cinnamon red very heavy clay.

Larissa and Leah each modeled for it. Larissa took the center of a trampoline and I walked around it with a camera snapping pictures.

Leah helped me resolve the arms and hands which Larissa’s long hair somewhat hid in the pose. Because of her part of the  picture prep, I had a better understanding of neck and shoulders also. Very helpful.

Neither woman holds her elbows in this pose the same way.

I improvised.

With a home made wire cutter I removed the face then the chest and hollowed those regions out but still left the sculpture heavy and thick. The arms are solid because I am convinced I waited too long to hollow them.

There have been cracking and minor problems like the neck settling from the weight of the head. Must remember to make the neck long in the future. In fact, there was so much settling that I had to restore about three inches of hight to the bottom.

I joined a clay sculpture group on social media and that led to me drilling holes. Then the front of the bodice fell off. I think that would have happened in the kiln for sure had it not happened here.

Having failed to devise an effective expression, did closed eyes. Will figure out eyes next time. The dress was inspired by something similar that I had seen and was a joy to render.

Larissa, a model for this, has great hair that played a big part in deciding to create this.

 

Originally, she was to be looking up with her eyes open but I didn’t have the expertise.

Hollowing her torso presented all sorts of problems. The clay stuck to the wood and had to be forceably separated from it which process risked deforming the torso. Then the figure settled so much that her elbows were dragging. I tried putting it on parchment. Then I put it on a water proof barrier paper such as is used in construction.

I built up the figure to the height I preferred and made a flange at the base in case I might want to anchor the bust to a plinth later and might need to drill into the clay.

The interior was all fork poked, though not deeply.

I sprayed it a lot during the first two weeks and kept it covered with a pillow case and plastic by night.

Cracks still developed in certain places. Corrections were made and I’ve been letting it dry slow and even.

 

 

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Potato Birds in Oven Bake Clay

In my minds eye, I saw these fat little birds landing on a line held by two girls. I knew I had a fun idea to create from. I called them Potato Birds because of their shape and imagined all sorts of situations they might put themselves in. I created names for them male and female, old and young.

It led to this, my second sculpture of 2020.

Still pretty light on tools for carving my discovered marble I am sculpting with clay. After the Natarajasana in oil clay, or Plasticine as it says on the wrapper, I tried something with more permanence called Sculpey. After much reading I got three different types of it to try.

I learned some lessons you might benefit from.

Tools: this is good clay but it doesn’t get along with shaping tools made of aluminum. They leave smudges and stains. My alternatives are the wax sculpting tools that are smooth and small enough to allow detail.

Baking: the instructions say keep the clay thickness not very thick but even. 275 degrees F 15 minutes per quarter of an inch. I under cooked it repeatedly. Or maybe I over cooked it. Maybe I had too many mixed thicknesses.  I paid with cracked clay.

I like this clay however and am making another composition with it currently.

When I got the idea I didn’t realize it was for sculpture, having not attempted any since the late 1970’s when I did a lost wax casting of a jaguar cart, a wooden wallet, and a feelie. As soon as I had some clay, I knew how to apply the concept.

In the end, my treatment of cracking was to paint over the clay with verathane.  Then I embedded holographic glitter. My attempt to paint color onto the figures was not satisfying and I had to do one of them over from scratch.

 

I did some repairs with good results. These were facilitated by sculpey oven bake glue. Good stuff.

Highly recommended.

 

T

This is the idea as it came to me. I added the cats early on and then for simplicity left out the one pouncing on a tail and eliminated the alighting bird this time around. With the idea on paper, I  asked Leah and she agreed to pose for the figures. Then I designed them from further, still not realizing they were for sculpture.

 

Before I committed the idea to the clay, I did a fresh photo shoot with Leah where she did the two poses in the street and I photographed her from all around.

 

 

 

Because Leah had posed the figures individually, certain dynamics were not accounted for. Plus, I was having a hard time with face expressions.

Larissa and Kayla stopped by and helped me work those out.

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Thoughts on Style

If art is a conversation, then style is the personality. When I think of style, I only consider authentic style.

N. C. Wyeth and J.C. Leyendecker come to mind. Their illustrations had distinctive touches that really work.

For a brief time I followed an old fashioned commercial art curriculum at a community college before digital tools were available to anyone with the money and means at home. We learned calligraphy with pen and ink, steel pen and ink drawing, soft pastels, oil pastels, paints and all that messy hands on stuff. It’s what I still use to this day, additional to drawing and painting on a Cintiq.

Students in the first year often got tied up by their desire to have a signature style. They ignored instruction that threatened them to  create outside of it because that was their ‘style’ and their selected identifier.

Me, I figured that a person talks as they talk, walks as they walk, and otherwise connects as they do. So I didn’t waste much time trying to make up a style. Instead, I created things and let the final appearance simply reflect my ability, resources, and interest.

Yesterday I began to see a characteristic pattern in the appearance of my larger studio drawings using graphite.

Maybe I have actually begun to develop a style! Not deliberately though. I think when one brings art into the world, it comes with some personality of it’s very own and the rest reflects the circumstance of it’s birth and the ability and temperament of the artist.

Look at these recent drawings. Two of them are only days old. One is months old.

The newest ones are on Murillo paper, a stiffer heavier toothed paper that takes aggressive pencil work well. The other is on  a lighter smoother paper, either Lenox or Stonehenge.

 

Larissa. I love the vibe of this. I wanted to complete this with greater detail but was so happy with it as is that I got it mounted on foam board and behind glass in a frame and got it on the wall.

Larissa again and I have drawn and painted her upside down with that cascading beautiful hair before. The inside tidbit on this one is her shoes which are designed to mimic the above the belt line contours of a Series 2 Lotus Europa car.

 

Kayla E. the dancer who I earlier depicted in the Natarajasana pose. Her beauty against the patterns of tile, wood, and leaf make me smile. I am not so pleased with the way I rendered the skirt, but it’s framed and sealed behind glass.

The things I love to incorporate in the graphite drawings are delicate lines, bold outlines, soft transitions, patterns, and the play of two or more graphite formulations.

The final sketches were photographed again but these tell enough of the story to show my point which is that a style seems to be developing. Not for it’s own sake, but just as a natural course of  experience and circumstance.

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Essential vs Non-Essential Explained

There has been some concern as leaders suppress the reopening of economies. Some times their logic is hard to follow.

Some of the leaders have low regard for what others esteem or maybe they just don’t grasp how things work together.

Here is a secret: you need the whole pencil to get a pencil to do what a pencil does. Hide it in a drawer is a good strategy in some situations but it’s a lousy solution generally.

I do not have a university degree in pandemics or any medicine. I do not belong to any political organization. I’m not a genius.

But I’m smart enough to know that an economy is an ecosystem that benefits from purposeful management. For example a forest may be harvested and replanted or harvested then repurposed for farming. Or it can be neglected and suffer nature, maybe burn to the ground. Or it can be deliberately burned to the ground.

I believe that leaders are smart enough to know that the whole pencil is needed to do the work of a pencil and that the “non essential”  parts just need cleaning from use to use.

But they’re calling the shots and that means the pencil remains barely useable if at all under this scheme of recognizing the value of only parts of it.

The pencil is the economy. Some groups just plain don’t like pencils. They have ‘a better way’. So we have this:

 

 

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The Rock Broke

In my search for rocks to sculpt I found some success with garden stones that are soft enough to carve and may have an interesting appearance. They’re no where near as pretty as the marble I’d like to carve, but they’ll do in a pinch.

Not all of them though. My first one appeared to have fractures. I chased them down and discovered that they went all the way through. So the first of them has broken into chunks and has been abandoned back to the flower bed.

Two left to try and neither have any apparent fracturing. I’m trying to decide what to carve them into.

 

They look like river rock, but might take a shine and be worth it as practice stones if nothing else.

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Fenimore Central

ADDRESS

dennis_fenimore@hotmail.com

 

Washington, USA

 

Phone No.

Upon Inquiry. Otherwise - spammers

 

 

Hours

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