Sculpture: Man 2

(November 2003)
Look Familiar? This is the second male standing pose I've done, and it looks a lot like the first one. Same model too, I think. It's rather stylized. The lines of the body are very exaggerated.

This one has a funny story, and it explains a bit of a problem with the piece. When the time with the model had finished it wasn't this far along. Much of the smoothing and accentuating of the lines I did in the next class. This meant I no longer had the model as a reference. Anyway I liked it enough that I wanted to keep it. I'd never cast a male figure before, so I figured it was about time. Casting from a standing armature posed some interesting technical challenges, and I decided to try casting it in cement. All my other pieces I've cast in Densite. But first I needed to finish cleaning up the piece.

The one thing I hadn't done when the model was there, was give him a penis. This brought about a big debate. Did the absence of a penis stand out such that it distracted from the rest of the piece. I kind of thought it did, so I wanted to add it. But I didn't want it to overwhelm the piece. Penises are hard this way.

So, I couldn' t use the model as reference, I didn't want a penis that stood out, and I really didn't want to get into all the details and other bits. It wasn't what I was going for, I just wanted enough that people wouldn't say, where is it. So I started with the little bit you see in these pictures.

The next class I had setup to do some final cleanup before going down to the other end of the class to start casting. A few women in the class wondered by, pointed and said, it's too small, it needs to be bigger. I wasn't really sure what to think, so I made it a little bigger.

Later another women was looking it over. She liked it a lot, but thought the penis was too small. So I made it bigger.

Later the original group came wondering back. They really liked how I had cleaned it up and smoothed it all out, but still said I should make it bigger.

So from this experience I learned, that it's never big enough, you just got to work with what you've got. But I also made it a little bigger.

Later I will post pictures of the completed casting. I still haven't got around to making a stand for it. I'd like to do that this summer. Then he and his small penis can stand out on my balcony for all to see.