25 posts tagged “sculpture”

This is the second Shawn/Rooster combo. The prior piece was my first Centaur Chicken, and sold almost immediately. It now lives in England. This one has some additions; the comb & wattle, and spurs. The prior piece joined the legs to the bird at the knees, while this one goes all the way to the hips- it stands at nearly 4 feet tall. All-thread runs the length of the legs and bolts to the underside of the base. The plaster sub-base was poured in place to ensure stability. I used Hydrostone, a new-to-me kind of high bond plaster backed with hemp- and it is much stronger than my previous Hydrocal/burlap/bandage figures
The base color is established, but still needs patination, while the wood base needs wire-wooled and another coat of stain- but this is as far as it will go for quite awhile as I am heading back to Montana this weekend. I'll bring the laptop and post some Cowboy images when I head in to town.

This is why I have been absent from my post for a few weeks: the latest Figure With Heavy Ball- the ball as metaphor for all the unseen weights borne/perpetuated/imagined/real.  I started him the Monday after The Existentialist, and have been working on him and the previous unfinished female figure with heavy ball (she has been a bit of a nemisis...). I think this is the best figure I've created to date, so that implies improvement- which is encouraging. The model is 47 years old, 6'2", 190lbs, shaved bald (E's brother-in-law: sorry ladies, he's taken). Quite a lean and muscular build, which inspired capturing his sense of strength. I took digital photos and created a slide show on the MacBook, then worked from the laptop images- I'll have him over sometime mid-month to work on the face/portrait. This is a half-sized figure, but still large at just over 3' tall, he took about 8 gallons of clay.

This figure  languished in the studio through the winter- looking quite a bit different. Yesterday afternoon darkened with storm and felt like twilight. I figured I'd work on him till the rain began. I plunked him down on the gurney and took a look, and actually started getting a steady stream of direction. The rains began in the early evening, and I was done.

The series of Centaur Chickens is now my H5N1 series, in honor of the Chinese gvmt's admission yesterday of the virus jumping from human to human.This is no surprise to the WHO, or to the viral community- who have mutated through thousands of generations since I first created this hen.
I created her last spring in my plaster figure spasm, and had some issues with her figure mold beginning to collapse (rubber molds will deteriorate over time) creating weird areas. I thought I'd move on to other things and repair her later- and later became now, a year later. I brought her out of the basement and looked at her anomalies,and determined a triage plan. I ripped down with files and built back in with plaster, and she lived through it all. I painted her a bit differently- and she came out with a stronger metallic sheen than the past few painted forms. I used two layers of thin washed color (vs 1 heavier layer) over the opaque base layer of stainless steel- the stainless steel paint is a craft paint that has real stainless steel suspended in acrylic. The result is a complex French Brown patina.
This hen is a mix of a Polish Chicken, a breed kept as lawn ornamentation that are nervous critters as their vision is impaired by the pom-pom. She also has a V-Comb, which has a nice devil-horn quality. The female form was sculpted from a 24 year old model who posed back in my MFA process (hence the mold being old enough to begin to slump).