a multi-disciplinary dialog
A controversial sculpture by “book artist” and Cornell University Art Department head Buzz Spector. The C-shaped structure is made up of over 800 books, all of them authored by Cornell faculty, students or alumni. The piece was originally installed in downtown Manhattan (pictured above); recently, it was reconstructed here in Ithaca, New York. More information, pictures, and an installation video can be found here.
Any thoughts?
Posted by Karl Zipser
Accidents Happen
Hanneke van den Bergh‘s husband dropped this ceramic sculpture and it shattered on the sidewalk. Her 50 cm high wood-fired piece was a central work for the exhibition to be installed that day . . .
Painting and making sculpture are today considered as separate pursuits with little interaction between the two. Historically, sculpture and painting had important influences on each other. Below Lorenzo Ghiberti (in his Commentaries) describes some of his contribution to this process:
Also by making sketches in wax and clay for painters, sculptors, and stone carvers and by making designs of many things for painters, I have helped many of them to achieve the greatest honors for their works.
These “sketches” in wax and clay were presumably small figure models. For the painter, they would provide life-like models with the patience of a still-life.
For my current painting projects I have been making figure “sketches” in both clay and wax, and I have been amazed at how helpful these are. Lately I have been using wax more than clay, because wax is more stable than unfired clay. Firing the clay produces a strong model, of course, but it then cannot be changed easily.
[This topic thread moved to The Homunculus]
The experience of sculpting from life, which gave me such a rich way of looking and working, made me question the value of the drawing that I normally do. Now that I am getting over the initial shock of sculpting from life, I begin to appreciate the contribution of drawing to the sculpting process. First, drawing is much faster, so capturing a sudden lively gesture is much easier in drawing. The proportions and details may be all wrong, but if the drawing captures the feeling of the gesture, then it is possible to get the other aspects right in the sculpture with a gradual working process. Second, I’ve realized that my life drawings contain more information that I thought, and the sculpting helps me to interpret the drawings more completely.
I also started working with wax today, which has the advantage that it is lighter lets me make figures that stand without any support.
I’ve been having a lively email discussion with the artist-sculptor who runs the Michelangelo’s Models website. Although the history of Michelangelo’s sculptural models is controversial (I discuss one viewpoint in an essay on the Sistine Chapel), the various proposals about his working methods can be inspirational for artists today. That is not to say one should be casual about evaluating Michelangelo’s methods, of course. It is only to say that even a speculative art-historical idea can be of value in the creative process, if it proves its worth in practice.
Today I worked for many hours on a clay model of my two-year old son’s head. I worked from some dozens of life-drawings that I have been making over many weeks. Each drawing is from a different viewpoint, which is what I need for the sculpture. And yet it was difficult to get the likeness. Finally when he came home from daycare, I followed him around the apartment as he played with a toy tractor. With the clay model in my hands, I made rapid and decisive progress on the sculpture — even though he did not remain still for more than a moment. In half an hour I accomplished more than in the eight hours working from the drawings.
This experience has challenged my idea of what I am doing as an artist when I draw. Some time ago a sculptor said to me that painters and sculptors draw in different ways. He did not elaborate — perhaps he could not — but the concept has intrigued me ever since. Today I begin to sense the need for a different manner of drawing for sculpture. As a painter, I try to draw to capture light and shade, and through this, the illusion of form. What I realized is that the illusion of form is precisely that, an illusion, and the actual information conveyed is less than what we might imagine. Next time I draw I will try to focus on conveying the information of form more explicitly, rather than the illusion of form through the effects of light.
I have been drawing from life for years, but I only recently tried modeling in clay from life. For one project I made a portrait of my three-year-old daughter (now four years old). Three-year-old girls never pose, of course. This makes drawing them difficult.
Sculpting in clay is a different matter. I made a clay head about one-third life-size, not attached to a base so I could hold and turn it in my hands. Every time she moved, I turned the sculpture and modeled whatever view I had for that moment. It took time and persistence, but after a few sessions I made a good likeness. I was surprised at how easy it was, given how little experience I had in this medium. But there is a logic behind it.
The challenge in drawing is to transform three dimensions into two dimensions. Without a consistent viewpoint, the process is somewhat hopeless. With sculpture, this transformation in dimensions is not an issue, and every viewpoint holds useful information. By going to the third dimension, the most difficult drawing problems become doable as sculpture.
Cennino Cennini devotes his Il Libro dell’ Arte (late 14th c.) to a practical explanation of the materials and techniques of painting. And yet Cennino also writes of painting as an occupation that deserves “to be crowned with poetry”, because the painter has the ability to compose from the imagination, “presenting to plain sight what does not actually exist.”
It might seem there is a mismatch between focusing on the physical aspects of the work, and at the same time emphasizing the role of imagination in creating art. But this combination of the mundane and the fanciful is appropriate for a simple reason: an artist creating from the world of the mind must nonetheless work in the world of the materials. The physical nature of those materials, and the way the artist uses them, will inevitably influence how the inner world of the mind is discovered and expressed.
Contemporary artist Hanneke van den Bergh recognizes and makes use of this interplay of the imaginary and the physical in her clay sculpture. She explains “I like to make the heads by moving a little lump of clay until I can just see the face. I like this quality of the imaginary form beginning to emerge from the raw material.” Van den Bergh does not attempt to disguise the properties of her materials. In the example shown here, Danae III, she leaves visible the coils with which she constructs the main form. The contrast of the repeating pattern of coils with the rhythm of the body contributes to the expressive effect of the work. “By avoiding too much detail,” she says, “I maintain the contrast between material — the physical — and the imaginary.”
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Related:
Art and imagination: Cennino says…
