Sculpture: Pony Tail

(March 2003)
First to explain the irregularity in the completion dates for my sculptures. The coarse I'm taking with the Toronto Board of Education is offered three times a year, Fall, Winder, and Spring. The Coarse is 9 classes, three hours each. The usual setup is we work with three different models three classes each. So you might think this would result in a regular pattern of nine sculptures a year. But suddenly we've jump from May 2002 to March 2003, and there are a few other jumps like this. Some of this I can't explain, I've been taking the coarse very regular but I can't remember all the details anymore. I know I missed a fall class one year. This was probaibly fall 2002. Whenever I cast a piece that takes three to six classes to complete, so there's another big chunk of time. Finally I've got to assume I just didn't take pictures of a few of them. I wish I had. It's great reference going back and looking over my previous work.

Now on to the Pony Tail. This is another sculpture that I cast and took to completion. I'm very happy with this one. I put a lot of work into it. It's the first one where I really spent the time to address all the elements to make it a complete composition. It also took me a long time. Although these pictures where taken in March 2003. I actually finished work on the casting in Spring 2005. Now I didn't work on is solidly for all that time. But it was also no small task to complete.

The modeling of the head without hair was done in the three classes with the model. There is a fun story with this one. About halfway through the second class I was having a lot of trouble with the shape of the jaw. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. Richard McNeill, the teacher at this time, was doing his rounds looking at peoples work and giving them advice. When he came to me I said, I know there is something wrong, but I just can't figure out how to fix it. He asked if he touch the piece. I never have a problem with this. So he place his hands in a 'V' shape around the jaw and went squish. He pulled his hands away, and it was like wow, that one moved fixed everything. As impressed as I've gotten with my own abilities, I'm always amazed by the skills of people teaching us.

Part of the problem in this case is the fear of making a radical change. Once you reach a certain point, you don't want to make big changes, for fear they won't work and make things worse. It's a hard step to take, making a big change late in a project. But the majority of the time this works for the best. I think it's because you've made the decision to do what you think is best, and you know you can't go back on it, so you put in that extra effort to make it work. If you know it's not going to work if you do nothing, and fiddling about is not likely going to make it much better, you might as well take the chance and make the big change. You'll make it work in the end.

So now that I've made a philosophical point of some sort, back to the sculpture. The hair, as you might imagine, was a lot of work. I think it took me three classes to apply the hair, sculpt and smooth it. Yes this is another sculpture with very smooth hair.

This brings us to the truely radical alteration I made. In the previous Head sculpture the body was left largely unfinished. This sculpture looked much the same. I really didn't want to sculpt the body, because it wasn't the point of the piece. Richard then gave me the idea of cutting the body down into a pedestal. This would be a very radical move. I took a lot of self convincing to actually do it. But like the head, the body as it was, didn't add anything to the sculpture. It would be just as confusingly androgynous. So as I philosophized above, I took the plunge and cut huge chunks of clay from the sides of the sculpture. Completely removing the shoulders and angling down into the body.

It worked wonderfully. People understand it. It draws attention up into the detail of the head, rather then down into the lack of detail in the body. I've very happy Richard suggested doing this, and I'm very happy with myself for taking the plunge and radically changing what was an otherwise complete sculpture.