I would like to talk about the transformation of material in sculpture for a moment as I attribute the delicate quality achieved by the recent bronze works to my experience as a painter insofar as the ‘one stroke’ method of painting translates into constructivism. The landscape is a particularly heavy and cumbersome source of inspiration for sculpture. The key to their lightness has been to sculpt as I paint; with one stroke. Wood constructions, although durable, cannot function as outdoor sculpture. I solved this problem by making castings of the wood sculptures in bronze. Now that the durability of the original was no longer an issue I could use any material to create the original form. Historically artists have used a rather cumbersome method of building a wood armature over which plaster soaked burlap would be applied and the shape of the artwork formed in successive layers of top coated plaster. These days artists use polyurethane foam to carve their originals for bronze. The material is lightweight and carves very easily. As this is a subtractive method of sculpting rather than additive as in the armature method I realized that a profound transformation in reverse was taking place in the way I now approached my forms. I could carve the foam in the manner I had previously done in stone and fine detail work could be fashioned in wood. Actually there are no limitations to the materials which can be employed to create the original to be cast as the entire scheme is to be transformed into metal. So this was an important link to the forms carved in stone many years prior and to my identity as a constructivist but now refined by years of painting. The many layers of exploration in various materials came to a sort of cumulative state as the next series of nearly two hundred pieces were a product of various content and material driven ideas; worked in what is essentially plastic; for a translation into metal and finished to the effect of stone.
1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11