A Figure In Stone #1

The Kickoff!

This is the first in a series of posts about carving a female figure.

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This is episode #1 of a series on a significant scale project. I’ve been videoing since I started a few weeks ago. There should be a lot of postings and they might or might not have a YouTube (this one does.)

The piece I’m going to make is as old fashioned as you can get, a marble female figure in stone. I’m go through the classic steps: a one-half size clay model to figure it out, casting the model in plaster, enlarging the half-size plaster to full size plaster, then transferring the full size model to marble using pointing. It may sound simple, but each of these things breaks down into multiple steps–it should keep me busy for a while. There’s definitely a tension between having the discipline to make a plan and follow it and recognizing that your original idea wasn’t quite right.

The female figure in stone is the sculptural equivalent of a sonata. How do you do something fresh when the form is conventional? But that’s always the trick, isn’t it? We’ll see where this goes. The model is somewhere between high relief and sculpture in the round. The original sketch, in fact, is fully in the round; all I’ve done is choose slice of it that defines a highly favored viewpoint. There is an interesting territory between high relief, sculpture in the round done non-finito and what one might call finito-non-finito, by which I mean “non-finito” pieces that were planned to be that way. More on this another time.

I’m shooting videos along the way, including the most mundane steps. Anything is mundane if you’ve seen it a few times, and nothing is mundane if you haven’t. If you don’t have riggers for studio mates, just moving a big stone around the studio and lifting it onto the bench can seem pretty exciting.

The blog postings haven’t caught up with the YouTubes and the YouTubes haven’t caught up with the work. The general idea is to pair the YouTubes and the postings but I’ve only just started and they already don’t line up 1:1. I’ll try to post often.

There are other things to post about too. If I have to make a tool or I’m trying something new, I’ll try to cover it, but not necessarily as part of the sequence of figure videos. I’m just starting this figure series, and I can already imaging a dozen postings for things that aren’t really part of the figure project.

Here’s what’s coming up for the figure project:

• Making the half-scale model in clay.
• Casting the half-scale model in plaster.
• Setting up the enlarging machine.
• Using the enlarging machine to make a full size styrofoam armature.
• Enlarging half-scale to full scale clay.
• Casting the full-scale clay model in plaster.
• Setting up the pointing machine.
• Squaring up the block, wrestling it onto the bench, etc.
• The actual carving. This will be many videos of using the pointing machine for transferring a model to stone, the various carving tools, etc.
• Finishing the piece: abrasives, surface treatment, etc.