Relief Format

I finished up the details on the other eye today, which completes this second portrait. Already I feel like I’ve learned a lot since the first portrait.  I haven’t sculpted in several years now, so I was feeling rusty and a little out of it when I was working on the first portrait. I feel like I accomplished a lot more in terms of details with this piece, the forms are more assertive and I think I achieved a sense of tension on the form that wasn’t as present in the first portrait.

Now that I’ve decided that the face is the only part of the head I’m interested in, I’m going to abandon this armature for the third portrait and just work on the face so that it’s a relief. A relief is simple enough that I don’t even think I’ll need an armature underneath the face which will certainly simplify things. I can also skip the waste mold process and create a silicone rubber mold directly from the clay piece.

Detail areas

I dug into the detail areas of one of the eye and the mouth this morning. I don’t know why, but I always dread doing the details and sometimes allow myself to get intimidated by it. At the same time, when the details go well it’s always very satisfying to see them finished.  I guess the details worried me today because in the past I never really made any sculpture that had this level of detail before, so in many ways this is new territory for me in sculpture.

Thursday Spotlight: Ghislaine Fremaux

Tell us about your background.

I’m from Washington DC. I left at age sixteen, acquiring my AA from Bard College at Simon’s Rock in 2003. I later pocketed my BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in the winter of 2007. I’m currently pursuing my MFA in painting at Penn State.

Name some people, artists, artistic genres, etc. that have been influential in your work.

Jenny Saville’s corpulent bodies, Egon Schiele’s sawtooth bodies, Michelangelo’s bodies with musculature like “bags of nuts”; hagiographical imagery (saints in ecstasy); the musical projects of Mike Patton; the visceral, horrifying, and beautiful in work by Kara Walker, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Alina Szapocznikow, and Kiki Smith. I like to read Toni Morrison, Georges Bataille, and Umberto Eco. Genres that interest me are Magical Realism and Ero Guro Nansensu.

Where and how do you get your ideas?

I look at my friends. I think about them. I ruminate a long time over their faces, their voices, their physiognomy, and their meaning in my life. Their idiosyncrasies, the way the inhabit their bodies, and the specificity of their forms supply me with all my ideas. People are impossibly complex and very magical.

What materials do you work with? Describe your technical processes.

I use 51″x10yd 156 LB Arches watercolor paper. It comes on a roll, so I pin a big tract of it to the wall. To flatten it, I put a watercolor wash over it, and this sets a precedent or ground of tone for me to draw into. I begin every drawing with vine charcoal. Once I’ve made something of a blueprint, I get my pastels. I use pastels of a few brands – Neocolor, Rembrandt, and my favorite, Diane Townsend Terrages pastels. I block in areas of light first, and from there the language of the color begins to write itself.

What do you find to be the most challenging part of being creative? What is the best part of being creative?

Art-making becomes hardest for me when I dizzy myself with my own argument – that is, when I overthink an image not yet made, or talk myself out of every idea I come up with. It seems it’s better just to ‘put pencil to paper’ and make. It may fail but it can always be another rung on the ladder to some actualization. I love creating because it populates my world with “people” (what are really just images thereof, ha). Making a drawing is a testimony to the depicted, to the body, and to all humanness. That expels some kind of pain from me, and makes me feel happy and real.

What advice would you give to someone seeking advice about being an artist?

Chin up. If you have something to say, knead it, grow it, gird it with research, look behind you, and work all the time. Learn how to be with people and how to speak. If you keep your work close to your heart, its meaning can never atrophy.

Ghislaine’s website
Ghislaine’s blog

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Distortion

I got pretty far on the modeling portion of my second portrait today. Compared to the first portrait I worked on, the forms in this expression are a lot smaller and less three-dimensional, making it more challenging to keep the form active and lively. I kept worrying today that the forms would be too flat looking and therefore make the expression feel too watered down, so I kept thinking of ways that I could suggest a little more distortion into the form. Distortion is never easy, I’m always concerned that I’ll over do it and the portrait will turn into a caricature.   I’m a little intimidated by the tiny forms and wrinkles in the eye lids, so I called it a day and will get to work on those areas first thing tomorrow morning.

 

First cast

(above) Painting on the first layer of plaster. The plaster mixture has laundry bluing in it so that you can tell the difference between the cast and the mold later on in the chipping out process.

I had the entire morning to work on the waste mold, I always make sure that I have several hours when I start the casting process because once you start, it’s hard to stop. As much as I was trying to avoid casting, I have to say that I really do enjoy the process a lot.  I like that it takes intense focus and concentration to do it right, and I like the challenge of being as thorough and efficient as possible with the mold and the cast. I try to keep the mold and cast  thin but very strong and consistent at the same time.

(above) Adding a second, much thicker layer of plaster to the mold. Adding this second layer is always very satisfying.  I use a butter knife to apply the plaster and its very similar to frosting a cake.

(above) The entire mold completed.

(above) The mold removed from the clay sculpture.  I love looking at the mold, I think it’s just as beautiful as the piece itself.

(above) painting the interior of the mold to create the cast.  After this first layer of plaster, the cast is also backed up with sheets of burlap dipped in plaster to allow for a hollow cast.

(above) The cast is revealed by chipping off the mold.

(above) The final plaster cast. I know that I did a good job because I didn’t have to repair the cast at all!

Thursday Spotlight: David Akiba

What is the most persistent myth about the act of making art?

The need to be creative. Making art originates with a simple sense of curiosity that deepens and broadens with the continued acquisition of skills that address the essential questions of technique in the medium of choice. A person may be fascinated by a musical instrument. the smell of paint or ink, or the seeming magic of image capture in a camera. The development of technique opens the door to the necessary freedom required to make art of consequence. Once the artist has mastered sufficient technical skills, that freedom transports her into the process of self-discovery that may, like a branching tree, find many pathways to creating art.

At the age of seventy-one, why do you continue to to make photographs?

Guilt and pleasure in equal measure. Guilt if I’m not doing something related to image making, and  deeply gratifying pleasure that I feel from head to toe when using my camera or working in my darkroom.

What have you been up to lately?

Over the years, my practice has been to alternate between several years shooting in the landscape or the city, and several years making photographs in my studio. For the past two years, I’ve been working mostly in my studio. The two previous years I spent photographing trees and clouds with a panoramic film camera and making  large photographs 17″x54″ that have the feel of Chinese scroll paintings which have been an important influence on my work. Recently, I have been working with raw images of inter-planetary space taken from the internet shot by an  unmanned spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. One set of 14 black and white photographs is entitled “Fly-by” which, in a very loose narrative manner, describes the journey to Saturn and the void beyond.  The other is a sequence of 12 photographs entitled “not this, not that” that was inspired by my interest in cosmology and the idea of entropy, the tendency toward randomness, exhibited by all material entities.

What work of a younger generation of artists do you have an affection for?

I have a great admiration for the work of Cindy Sherman, and look forward to seeing her retrospective at MoMA this spring. She has been called an artist who uses a camera. Critics and curators talk about her work as  performance art or some other “ism” while forgetting that she is one hell of a photographer, using position, the action of light, color and gesture to create images  that shine with intelligence and resonate with deep feelings.

You’ve been teaching photography for 42 years. What keeps you interested?

I enjoy helping students discover the magical qualities of image making, especially in foundation courses where learning basic skills can set students off on discoveries that are exciting to them, their fellow students and me. Also, I’ve had six children, one of whom will be entering high school next year, so I need the money teaching brings in.

David’s website

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Shims

I finished up the final touches on the surface of this face with a very thin watercolor brush, so I decided to add the shims to the sculpture, in anticipation of starting the moldmaking process next Tuesday. It’s been well over five years since I cast anything, so I’ve spent the past day unearthing all of my supplies and trying to remember every step of the process so that I have all of the materials ready to go. As much as casting is time consuming, I really do enjoy the process, part of me likes the unique challenge that each sculpture presents.  I get very anal retentive about making the most efficient mold possible to create the strongest but thinnest cast that I can make, when it works that is very satisfying.

Casting Plans

I’m further along with this face than I thought;  when I sat down to sculpt today I realized that I was done using my wire loop tool (which I use to block out all of the major forms) and was largely picking at the forms. I spent most of the day’s session with a bristle brush, smoothing out the surface of the forms.  I’m itching to cast this piece so I can start experimenting with the fragments that I talked about in my last blog post. I want to make a silicone rubber mold, but since I’m only casting the face area, I think I’ll do a waste mold, and then make the silicone mold from the plaster cast. The silicone mold will allow me to try out a number of different materials and fragments to see what will work.

Rethinking

This weekend I realized that something is not quite right with the way I’m approaching these heads.  The first signal was when I started to think about what I was going to do with the ears and the hair, I completely lost interest, and all I could think about was a way that I could avoid those areas. The second aspect that I couldn’t get away from is I feel like I’m simply creating three-dimensional models of the photo references, right now there isn’t a lot of creativity or conceptual thought involved in the process.  I kept looking at my in progress shots of the head, and the more I looked at it, the more I hated the way things were going.

I started looking at the wax head that Tony Janello gave me a few weeks ago again, and it occurred to me how much I loved the textured edges of the piece, and the fact that the image was a fragment of a face rather than a complete head. I started thinking about fragments, and perhaps concentrating on parts of the facial expression that were the most important or intense for any given expression. Another thought was to completely do away with any sculpture stand or wall, and to suspend these fragments from the ceiling, an idea which is really appealing to me for many reasons.

Immediately I started making the connection to fragments of ancient sculptures, and what fascinating objects they are. The cracks and edges to me are just as beautiful as the sculpted areas. I also started thinking about the moldmaking process, and how I could get that to interact with the form. I’ve always been in love with the way molds look; sometimes they’re more captivating than the sculptures themselves, and I would really like to incorporate the molds into the final pieces.

   

 

Tension and Compression

I had enough of the major forms established today that I was able to get into some of the smallest details like the teeth and the eyelids which was fun: it’s details like this that are so satisfying to carve into the clay. The modeling process is coming along much faster than I thought,which is nice because I’m starting to see more concrete progress.

I want to work on making the forms on the face feel tighter, with a greater sense of tension.  The stretching of the skin is so dramatic in this particular expression, and I  I feel like at this stage some of the skin forms look too mushy and soft. Clay is inherently mushy and soft so I have to transcend the medium to create forms that have tension and compression in them.