Pan now has two little hands made out of hard wax that I had to keep warming in the toaster oven to make it workable. (Did I melt a hand I’d nearly finished? Yep!) I’m about 90% happy with them. Fingernails and all!
And I now have a lot of respect for people who make detailed small models. It’s a way to go crouched and crosseyed. I always wondered why sculptors like making big abstract lumps. Now I know!
<3 this, from here. Its pre-tumblr provenance is, as so often, a mystery. I’d rather like to know the story.
I always wanted to fix the hat on that pic I did of Gwynn dressed in wallpaper-like clothing. It was too big. So I fixed it. The complete dissonance between the patterns on his clothing also needs fixing, but maybe I should just do another painting, since the anatomy’s crappy too.
Mucking around with Photoshop, I got this effect, which I really like. It’s only a dark strokes filter over a paper background, but somehow it just worked with this picture. I’d rather like to see if I can make another picture in the same style.
At But does it float, from Galerie Krause where there are more of Brunovsky’s works.
http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2011/12/suzanne-van-damme.html
Awesome artist, there should be more info on her! Short bio here.
A couple more of her paintings:
On the train the other day I saw a woman with a beautiful, unusual face — sort of a Thai version of a Leonardo da Vinci angel. I tried to make her from memory when I got home, but couldn’t. The head I’d made decided she wanted to be a fairy — here she is. She’s nearly finished. If I knew what I was doing I could finish her today, but I don’t know what I’m doing! In real life she doesn’t look so much like she’s puckering up for a kiss, it’s just how the picture came out. I’ll definitely get her cast, probably with a green or blue-green patina.
I’m learning that one of the challenges with little pieces like this is not getting your bloody fingers all over them. I’m at the stage of refining details and I’m holding her on a stick (the end of a tool, actually), but I still forget and keep squashing her hair and dress, chiz.
These are the two heads I’ve made for Pan, looking rather like David Bowie’s head in the sandpit in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Neither is quite what I want, but they’re better than the previous ones.
The carpenter made the stand, so now I can make bigger pieces at home and unleash a few ideas.
Man, these bronze sculptures are hard to photograph. These pics are Photoshopped to try and bring out natural colour and shadow detail. I don’t know if I can do better than this with the camera and lighting (i.e. the sun) I’ve got. (ETA I’ve bought a better lightbulb…)
Well I’ve knocked the main bulk of Gunpowder Tea (everything before the end) down by 8000 words. I might have to put a few back, or write a few new ones, but I can also see where more could be cut.
I’m giving myself a week off writing to recharge. I’ve second-guessed this story far too many times, and I need to come back to it with a rested mind.
Yesterday I mucked around with the hair on Pan’s legs and tried out two new heads. I’ve tried open eyes, but so far can’t find an open-eyed look that works. Perhaps it’s a cliche, but so far I’m finding eyes the hardest thing about making a face, since you don’t have the colours of the eyeball to work with.
As for the leg hair, I’ve tried showing it in different ways — literal and detailed, abstract and “painterly”, and something in between. I admit my own taste when I make images is for literal representation and detail, perhaps just because of the pleasure of “making it look real”, which I’ve never outgrown (but which I seldom achieve unless I’m copying a photograph with a pencil), or else for a pretty kind of stylisation (and always with the detail still); but I know that when I look at other people’s work I appreciate more impressionistic and expressionistic styles as well. Plus, there’s a limit to what I can do. I could make the hair very detailed, but the legs have to go with the body. Not having a model means I don’t even have a chance of making a figure with all muscles and flesh folds present and correct, so I need to leave some areas simplified — and the hair texture definitely shouldn’t dominate the piece in terms of interest for the eye.
I’ll probably go for the in-between, and ditto on the body, with some areas more more carefully rendered (e.g. face, hands) and others more “painterly”. I need to think about how the metal is going to look. Smooth bronze is hard to achieve and doesn’t suit every piece. A rougher surface is more interesting in itself, but I think I need to do a controlled kind of roughness. Variations in texture are interesting — smooth here, rough there — and I need to think about where I want to emphasise tension, bulk, movement etc.
I’m caught between a currently impossible desire to do something very tightly rendered and realistic, and knowing that it’s more than fine to be looser and more expressive. The deciding factor here is going to be less my will than my limitations. Maybe once I can accurately model a figure I’ll relax and get more adventurous.
There’s a messy bit in the middle that I need to bully myself into writing properly. The plot thickens, it’s talky, and I’m having trouble with POV and characterisation.
Women are said to be good multitaskers. I’m anything but — at least when it comes to writing. If I have more than one thing on the go I find it hard to switch between them. I also find it hard to get out of art mode and into writing mode, though not vice versa. If I’ve spent all day at the studio I don’t settle easily to writing the next day. My head’s usually full of images and ideas and ways to solve problems and I’m not good at shoving all that aside. (Whereas if I’ve been writing my head is full of doubts and fears and problems I have no idea how to solve, and I’m quite glad to forget about them!) Multitasking with art is no prob, though — there’s no danger of losing track of something you can see in front of you, so it’s easy to hop between pieces.
I’ve got a lot of ideas for sculptures. This week I’m going around to a local furniture restorer (closest thing to a carpenter in the neighbourhood, and I assume they have wood, glue and a saw) to see if they’ll make me some stands so that I can work with pieces on armatures at home. For quite a while I’ve been unsure about whether Bangkok is a good place for me to be, but these art classes make it a good place.
