Travel Tips

It has always been a lifelong ambition to create a 3-dimensional sculpture.

Very early in life one finds a calling.
Mine was the need to draw.
The inability of my family to financially support an artist, and the lack of popularity of Art in my working-class neighborhood, made me a closet-artist.

Each time I considered the calling an unattainable pursuit, a series of 'self-created coincidences' kept the dream alive. My love for drawing and painting was allowed to prosper in the design industry of a country not of my birth. However, the last need, the one to sculpture, is yet to be fulfilled.

Returning to the country which spurned any attempt to establish my credentials, the story continues. The last need, the one to sculpture is yet to be fulfilled and therefore, a new phase begins.

It begins with a drawing and much research; The finding of a Mentor who has the audacity to be different and the thirst to find out whether the fingers can fashion the recently impossible!

A few encouraging attempts at creating simple things led quickly to taking a deep breath and pressing the first imprint of a figure in the soft clay.

Follow me to the end and we shall both discover whether the dream has an outcome.

The vision I had was of a ‘sitting nude’.
Nudes are a favorite subject.
Much is said about a nude but rarely anything accurate.

A nude decides whether it wants to live in your hands.
Only part of it is art from your talent, the rest grows with the tenderness and soul you massage out of it.

Nudes are sometimes dismissed as titillating pieces of art made to sell to a conservative patron with little imagination.
In reality they are complex pieces born out of a familiar shape and unforgiving if treated carelessly.
The curves pick up light and imperfections are exaggerated to destroy the sculpture if constructed without respect.

The media obsession with nudity and our own observations of friends and lovers make an unrealistic depiction of a nude so obviously wrong that one needs to be sure of every scratch or shave of the tool.

And so we start the solid torso.
As no model was available, a painting I had made of a past Lady-friend sufficed.
Appropriately modified and enhanced, it serves as a reference for the 10 inch sculpture.

Clay has a soft resistance that pleases.
Kneading it is very therapeutic.
Handling it is a joy and creating from it is a magical undertaking.

Legs are attached after being roughly shaped.
The joint between thigh and leg is disastrously complex.
However of great satisfaction on being finished.

If one can imagine how muscle and bone perform to squash, lump and crease the leg, the task can be judged properly in degree of difficulty.

A navel is quickly poked out and ribs scribed under heavy breasts for later remodeling.

Hollowing is now possible.
Half and more of the clay is gouged out and the thickness is reduced to around 6 mm.

Now that the body has taken shape, a base is needed.
Something simple that can, if required, be substituted.

Since I need strength to help the thin arms to locate properly, a square base is chosen.

Zell Osborne, my mentor, makes short work out of it and reinforces the bottom with triangular buttresses.

Arms, wiry and thin are added.
The shoulders shaped around them.

The shoulder-blades are refined and the buttocks carved to form indentations representing 'tense flesh' in the seated position.)

More material is shaved to create the desired stance and breasts formed in detail by weighing up the way their size affected the surrounding skin and muscle.

Creases and folds will have to wait.

A tightly wrapped wad of paper becomes the dowel over which to mold the head.

Clay is too soft to feature it too deeply yet.
Detailing must be left till the clay is stronger and dryer to a "leather" stage.

The head is bonded to the neck and the wish-bone added as well as the neck-muscles and the joint of the back-bone to the skull.

The throat needed Zell to model the position for me.
A complex area and impossible to recreate without the model being present.
Nothing is easy when the soft neck and shoulder tissue is concerned.

Hands are added and the right foot added and blended into the stump which had been neglected till now.

The face is carved to a rudimentary level.
The temple, eye-brows, cheeks, nose, mouth, chin and jaw take shape.
Nothing is set. The drying clay allows for more accuracy during the chiseling of the features.

An overview is taken.
The clay is scratched, picked at and scraped while turning the model on the turn-table.
Detail is added in minute attempts:
A bulge here, a cleft there, a muscle indentation, a hollow in the flesh.

A hundred complete-turns and a thousand tool-marks are giving it life.

Feet, presently just lumps of poorly shaped clay, hold promise of sensuous veins and delicate toes.
The arms, currently a pathetic substitute to their final shape are waiting to reach out and be molded into their final graceful shape.

Time is the biggest enemy.

Today's work:

Eyelids are created.
Skin is polished.
Fingers reworked.
Arms bulked out.
Feet reshaped.
Back moulded in detail.
Hair restyled.

Each touch of the tool brings her closer to the life I want for her.
This desire is now within reach.

The face and head are the life of the statue.
The rest can be perfect but the face makes it alive.

My original was to my liking: aggressive, animalistic and sharp.
Softness is added.
A higher forehead,
Turned-up nose,
Less-pronounced eye-brows,
Diluted cheek-bones.

It feels good to have achieved confidence with an unknown media.

And now for more outrageous work!