The slab of alabaster I had for this carving was rather narrow, flat on one side and sort of convex on the other, so my first idea was to carve a profile portrait in relief. In May 2016 at the Affordable art Fair in Hampstead, I'd seen a couple of sculptures I liked by John Huggins, where the heads were narrow at the front, widening out at the back. Then in late 2016 I saw Picasso's portrait 'Jacqueline with a Yellow Ribbon' (Picasso's Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery). This is painted on metal, almost flat with one side having just a suggestion of three-dimensional features. I was particularly interested in the way one profile showed the eye full-on as in Egyptian paintings, while the other side was the more anatomically correct side view. More interesting head carvings found online (above). Another maquette is called for!
0 Comments
This term I'm working on a larger irregular piece of what I initially thought was brown and black alabaster, but what turns out to be most likely soapstone. And it's another crow! This was dictated by the shape of the stone, which happily suits my interests. The three photos below show very early stages of carving. The stone looks very pale because it's covered in dust from being worked on with the rasp. The previous crow carving had given me a lot of experience carving the crow head, but the body and feathers were still a big challenge, particularly as I wanted to preserve as much as possible of the character of the piece of stone, which was crystalline on the brown side. The shape of the black side suggested a partially opened wing. Again, I relied on the internet to supply lots of pictures of open wings and made sketches and another clay maquette. My clay maquettes don't tend to be very successful - this one looks more like an angry pigeon than a crow! In spite of that the carving progressed and finally got finished. The black side with the open wing is polished a little and waxed and some natural faults are visible in the stone. The brown side where it is carved is also polished, but the crystalline areas are just waxed. I also made a latex mould of this crow for possible future castings. A side effect of this seems to be that the original seems lighter than before. Apparently the ammonia in the latex can bleach the stone. My next project was crows. Birds seemed to be a very popular subject for carvings in the group that summer and I like the look of crows. Unfortunately I couldn't get near enough to take a good photo. The nearest I got was a pic of one on our garage roof through a window (rather blurry and not very useful), so had to rely on lots of photos downloaded from the internet. The alabaster piece intended for the crow was a smallish offcut from the abalone shell carving, sort of triangular, but not symmetrical. My main focus was on the head with its long beak and strong 'brow' line, so I attempted to make a maquette in clay. It didn't start too badly, but by the time I'd trimmed bits off it, it ended up looking rather strange with big beak and tiny body. So I decided to mostly forget the body, or rather stylise the whole thing to fit my rather small bit of alabaster. When the carving was finished I made a latex mould with plaster jacket and in class we cast a wax version to send off for casting in bronze to Castle Fine Arts Foundry in Wales, who have a special introductory offer - they send a free block of casting wax and will cast the returned sculpture in bronze for a substantially reduced price. (See link in Useful Sites). As I've found previously, alabaster carvings are really difficult to photograph successfully, but the detail is clearer on the plaster of Paris cast. Initially I asked for the bronze to be finished in black, but when it came back the detail was really hard to see, so I sent it back and they removed the black patina and refinished it in verdigris which looks better. The next project was based on an abalone shell. Abalone shells can seem very ordinary until you look at them closely, then you find all these complicated patterns on the outside with holes and ridges and on the inside swirls of iridescent colours.
Now it was time for the carving to begin with lots of shaping on the outside of the shell and the holes drilled. But the hardest part was the hollowing out of the interior of the shell, which was very laborious, done with gouges and chisels and accompanied by much whinging on my part, as in "How much deeper do I have to go?!" I think it was probably at this point that I heard about wood-block carving tools. These are small chisels and gouges which can be held in the palm of the hand and whereas a vice is needed to hold the stone if you're using normal chisels and gouges, because you need both hands to hold and guide them, short palm-held ones mean that you could hold the stone in one hand and carve with the other. (The wood-block carving set of six tools was from Tiranti's in Warren Street - see Useful Sites for link) I found it hard to get the holes (which have to diminish gradually in size) to flow in a smooth curve towards the tip, and was a bit disappointed in the result even after recarving it once, but the alabaster was by then so thin that it didn't allow for any more reworking. When the ridges and swirls on the exterior and inside were carved, there was a lot of sanding and polishing to do. The rim round the interior of the abalone shell was very thin and very shiny and I particularly wanted to get the same effect on my carving, so this is the thinnest area on the carved shell. I did actually polish it all to a very shiny finish, but it became so transparent and reflective that it was impossible to see any detail when it was photographed. So I used a coarser wet & dry paper to take the shine back a bit and although the detail is still not very clear, it's possible at least to get the general idea.
Joining a new class is always a little scary especially if you're using a new medium and learning new skills. I knew nothing about carving or what to carve - maybe a face? So armed with some family photos for reference, I started with bit of clay, playing around with the idea of making a maquette to work from. But faces are hard! The face didn't work out and gradually, with the help of a bit of plasticine, the idea of a pod emerged instead. I had some lovely black and variegated Cornish stones which reminded me of seeds, so the idea developed of carving a pod-like shape that they would fit into, like conkers fit into their seed pod. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph the plasticine pod, which subsequently had another, different incarnation, so no record survives, but the alabaster pod which eventually emerged is reasonably close to the original idea, though much more detail was added as the carving progressed and my skills improved. There were all these new tools to get used to: a carver's chops (wooden carving vice) to hold the alabaster firmly, rasps to roughly shape it, then chisels and gouges to hollow out the recesses where the 'seeds' would sit and to add texture to the outside of the pod, and finally riflers for the fine detail. Filing the alabaster into shape generates a lot of dust, so I had to keep spraying it with water to keep that under control, and that turns the powdered alabaster into a paste which rapidly clogs up an ordinary rasp. But the Shinto rasp was brilliant for this as the gaps between the grids meant it didn't clog up nearly as quickly. When the carving stage was completed, which meant the recesses were the right shape and depth to fit the pebbles I'd chosen, and the exterior was textured, it was time to work through the grades of Wet & Dry paper (from a coarse 120 grit up to a very fine 2000) to smooth the surfaces until they were almost transparent and ready to polish. And then the final stage - waxing and polishing (and a little wax for the pebble 'seeds'), and then finally, my first alabaster carving is finished! |
AuthorI started writing this blog in December 2016, but it covers projects started in spring 2015 onwards, so it was written retrospectively until I caught up with the current term. Archives
December 2019
CategoriesUseful sites
|