I don't have much actual experience with 3D media. When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes make bakeable homemade clay for me and I would make stuff out of that. There was Play-Doh, but that stuff smells horrible so I didn't love it. I made a ceramic bowl while visiting a pottery studio once. And, my personal favorite: sometimes while bored riding back in the car from the bulk food store that was several miles away from our house, (please keep in mind that I was a very small child when this happened! haha) I would unwrap either Starbursts or those fruit-flavored Tootsie Rolls, bite of one end of each to get a moist surface, and mash them together and make them into sculptures. So basically, my "sculpture" experience consisted of the average child's experiences plus some slobbery ingenuity, but nothing artistic or remarkable. (I suppose you could count LEGOs as "sculpture" as well, in which case my time spent working on sculptures probably exceeds that of some professionals. But I'm not counting that.) I do react strongly to sculptures at art museums though, and I've always been curious about how I would handle the medium. So I decided to round out my artistic education with a sculpture class. I'll start off by telling you that my conclusion from the class was that sculpture is fun but maybe not my personal thing, which is really no different from what I expected. I would like to get more into stone carving though--that part of the class definitely did stick with me.
Here is my alabaster carving. The clay maquette I started with was inspired by an abstraction of a wave. As I translated it to stone it became more abstraction and less wave, but I don't think it's hard to see where I was coming from. The thing about stone carving, at least at my beginner level, is that the shape of your sculpture is somewhat dictated by the shape of the stone you start out with. This one was stockier than the tall, thin sculpture I had envisioned. I think the design is pretty cool though. I made the general shape with a stone saw, then drilled a hole through the middle, and carved out the rest by hand. Carving by hand was kind of annoying because I definitely have not built up the stone-carving forearm muscles, so it made me really sore. Then there was the sanding process, which just took forever. But I am happy with the results, and I think that the process can be just repetitive enough to get me into the zone without being boring, so I can see myself doing more stone-carving in the future as kind of a meditation activity. I owe a lot of the beauty of this sculpture to the natural beauty of the alabaster I carved it from, and if I do more stone-carving I will probably want to work in alabaster more. You have to keep it inside because it doesn't weather well, but it is really beautiful and malleable. It's like the Walmart brand of marble. But (probably) less evil.
This particular sculpture is the "WTF" part of the title of this post. I'm not sure where I got the idea to make a bronze sculpture of a human holding up its own head. Probably looking at too much surrealism--wait, no, there's no such thing as too much surrealism. After how much I had loved figure drawing, I knew that I wanted to make a sculpture involving the human figure, so I started there, and somehow this came out. I've actually been surprised at how non-disturbing people seem to find this one. I mean, this is a person. With a detached head. Holding that head up high like some kind of trophy. I mean come on, that's messed up. That being said, I absolutely love this and it is certainly not the only or the most disturbing thing that has come out of my brain. I like the sense of emotion it conveys, but I'm not sure what that emotion is. I think it's just impossible to make a piece of artwork out of the human body (or face) without conveying some type of emotion, so you can just kind of go for it, find something that resonates with you, and it will mean something to someone.
The sculpture itself is made of solid bronze; I made a wax maquette, then built up a mold around it out of sand and glue (basically), then heated it up so the wax melted and fell right out, leaving the hollow mold. I then filled it with molten bronze (this was a class-wide team effort), let it cool, and destroyed the mold. To finish it off, I had to saw off the vents used to get an even distribution of hot bronze throughout the sculpture, sand off the sharp edges, sand-blast the extra pieces of plaster out of the crevices, and apply a patina. A patina is basically a color coat for a metal object; my patina consists of several different types of rust. It was a really beautiful combination of vivid and dynamic colors, until I applied a coat of wax and it became this mostly uniform coat of dull, near-black brown. If you look reeeeeally closely and know what you're looking for, you can tell that some areas are lighter, darker, more red, or even a little green... But you really have to know what you're looking for. I'm pretty disappointed in this result; in fact I removed the wax coating and the patina several times to start over when I was working on it. I'm sure there's some easy solution, but I couldn't figure it out working by myself in the sculpture room after hours, so alas, uniformly dark it remains. If ever again I have on-demand access to an acetylene torch and jars of various colors or rust and wax, I just may burn it off and try again. Actually I'm pretty sure I could still just sneak in after hours, even though technically you're supposed to be enrolled in a sculpture class in order to use the equipment, whereas I'm not even a student anymore. Ssssssssh...
I guess I kind of went overboard on the pictures with this one... Oh well, there are a lot of details to see. This is... some sort of vaguely terrifying dragonfly-snake monster. When I first made it I thought it was kind of embarrassingly silly, but this is coming from the guy who made a paper collage of dinosaur bones and violins (see my first post) as a final project for a class, so I should probably just be honest--I love this one. Actually it's buried behind a bunch of boxes under the desk our TV is on... I should probably really embrace how much I like this thing by bringing it out of hiding. This piece was made from a pile of scrap metal from the sculpture lab. I sawed off a piece of pipe and a giant bolt for the base. For the circular part I used a machine to curve a straight rod into a circle. The wings were already sort of wing-shaped when I got them; I just clipped them down to size. The body of the snake-beast started out as some sort of garden accessory I think, and I heated it up in a forge and hammered it into its current shape. There's something unequivocally awesome about being able to say that sentence, by the way. I then used an electric welder (it operates with a heated wire instead of a flame) to attach all the pieces together, sand-blasted it, applied a patina (and the best part is, despite the wax coating, you can actually see the patina on this one), and sealed it all with wax. If you look closely you can see the green coloring on the circular part and the patches of rust on the snake body and the base. I think the bubbly stuff where the wings are attached is really cool-looking and I would love to be able to say I did it on purpose, but really it is a mistake caused by trying to weld two different thicknesses of metal together; the welder completely melted the wings because they are so thin before putting a dent in the circular rod, so by the time they were actually attached it was a complete mess.
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A word about photography: I'm not sure how much I have to say about it actually, except that this is basically my first attempt at photographing 3-dimensional objects with a nice camera. Some of the pictures turned out quite nicely, I think, although I do have some regrets--I wish I had taken some more pictures with the sculptures at eye-level, for example. I may go back and do that again at some point (it's not like it's taking these photos was like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; I just don't have the time to perfect every single thing I do on here), but for a first-time attempt with only a subwoofer, a sheet of newsprint, a cardboard art board, and a bedsheet as my photography studio, I think I did a decent job.