How do they do that?

This blog is about the practical side of sculpture in wood, stone, and clay-the no-frills skills that artists need.

Sculptors need woodworking skills but you can get lost in detail coming at wood from the point of view of fine woodworking. It’s a lovely skill set, but a woodcarver doesn’t need to know how to make Shaker chest of drawers. It’s enough to be know how to make a work bench and plane lumber to glue up for carving. You need to be able to repair a stone carving chisel or make a custom carving knife but you don’t have to be the guy who forges Damascus steel. If you were that guy, you’d be making exquisite cutlery, not sculpture. Sculpture has its own sensibility; you need the craft, but it’s not about the craft.

I’ve always written, and I’ve been making sculpture in stone, wood, concrete, and other media for decades. It will be fun to put the two together.

Carving a Marble Figure

Apart from random posts about this or that, I’m documenting a significant marble carving project done with the standard techniques that have been common since the Nineteenth Century (albeit simplified at times.)

No matter how experienced, a sculptor is always doing something new, or something old in a new situation so half the time you really don’t know what you are doing. Therefore, it’s warts and all as far as the process goes: the false starts, stupid mistakes, and lucky breaks.

It’s a saga: the big steps are making half size clay model, scaling it up to a full-size version, casting the model it in plaster, moving the stone around, getting it set up on the work bench, preparing the stone, using traditional pointing to copy the model to the stone and dealing with surface treatment. Along the way there are tools to make and repair an many other odds and ends.

Most of the preliminaries are done now–the full size plaster is complete and the stone has been prepared. It’s all in the blog and on YouTube.

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The Latest Postings. See “Blog” in the menu bar for the rest.

• Many Kinds of Realism
• Bruising Marble
• The Figure #11: Every Disaster Is An Opportunity
• The Figure #10: Pointing and Carving!
• The Figure #9: From Full-Size Clay To Plaster

YouTube!

Some of the YouTube channel videos correspond to postings and some are free standing. The ones marked Figure Sculpture #X follow a significant project end to end. As of today, July 26, 2020, I’ve just put up video #3.