I've related before my failed attempt to become a sculptor, having produced only an incomplete 2-foot high carving -- "A Bird in the Hand" --that's now aging in place in our back yard.
Carving the small band of sample shapes pictured at the top had been easy. Trying to make a dent in a hefty yellow cedar log was not.
In retrospect, there were other signs that sculpture was just not in the cards for me. I once signed up for an evening course and after a promising start on an introductory relief sculpture, our class arrived one night to find all our stuff had been thrown out. The daytime instructor had more clout than the evening instructor and declared that we always left a mess he had to clean up in the morning. Class cancelled.
But some years back, I thought I'd make one more attempt at sculpture, this time in clay, before I decided to pack it in. To "the summer studio", as we optimistically called an old stable on our cabin property, I brought five pounds of professional-grade clay, moistly packaged in plastic. From among my life class drawings, I chose a simple classic pose -- seated female nude with arms stretched to clasp bent knees. And mostly because of those outstretched arms, I decided to use the traditional method of making an armature first, to support the weight of the clay.
You could think of an armature as a simplified skeleton. In big sculptures, it might be made of lengths of metal pipe bolted together. For my small summer studio version, I used small branches secured with twist-ties. For Show & Tell, I've created this simplified version as an example:
I had to get used to working with the moist sticky clay, but I got off to a good start building up the figure on the armature. Then it was time for us to return to Vancouver for the workweek. "Between working sessions, keep the clay moist and workable with wet cloths and plastic," said my reference book.
...which somehow was not enough. When I unveiled my work the following weekend, expecting to begin to refine the figure, I found that the clay had outweighed the armature. My promising little figure had relaxed into a pose that reclined more than it sat -- with a very flat bottom! -- with too-long arms, knees still upright with legs looking out of proportion, and feet suggesting swimmer's flippers.
The tilted head that was always part of the pose took on a mournful aspect. The clay had dried too much to alter the basic structure so I left it to dry completely and eventually installed the figure as a presiding genie in my home studio.
I later used it in my painting "The Artist's Hand, the Artist's Eye."
When I packed up my old studio for our 2012 move I found that over time, the figure had developed cracks, and I came very close to trashing it. Packrat alert! Packrat alert! ("Never throw out something that you can keep.") Flawed as it was, the little elongated figure was an irreplaceable remnant of an irreplaceable time in our lives -- so along it came to the studio in The Yellow House.
Recently I had quite an adventurous idea for how to use it in a new painting that's now nearing completion. Watch this spot.
