Neill-Wycik, Giving Notice

September 1988 was the first time I moved into Neill-Wycik Co-operative Collage Inc., as a place to stay while attending Ryerson. In November 1992 I moved from the student multi-units into a one bedroom apartment.

Today, after 17 year and 7 months in the building and 13 years and 4 months in my apartment, I am giving notice.

It's a very odd feeling knowing I'll no longer be living here in just a couple of months. Somedays I'm very excited about moving to my condo, other days I notice all the things I'll miss about this place. Overall I can't wait to get into my new place.

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.

Sculpture: Seated Man

(November 2003)
This pose begins a long series of male poses. Most with the same model. I'm not fond of sculpting the male form. I'll be honest it doesn't hold much appeal for me. I don't mind doing one from time to time. It's good practice and there are striking differences in the male and female form. However this is the start of almost a year and a half of strictly male models.

This wasn't the fault of the school. Although they were bring in more male models then usual, it was mostly the result of bad timing on my part. I had to switch the night of the class I was taking twice. When I did it just happened to work out that the model was switching nights too. And then I chose to cast a piece and work on the Pony Tail. I happened to do this when female models where posing. It was all just bad timing.

Anyway, I do like this piece. I also like the pose. It's one of the most crunched up pose I've done. Because sculpture poses have to be held so long, it's rare for a model to take a pose that's in any way uncomfortable. Or at least to the extent that holding any pose for 3 hours is uncomfortable, they rarely do anything that increases the discomfort.

The one nice thing about male models is their musculature is much more obvious. This is one the good thing about sculpting the male form. You get a better idea what is under the skin. This helps when working on the softer female form.

As with most of the sculptures I've shown, this is not a complete composition. If I had decided to complete it there are several things I would have done to clean it up. For one the head would be less skeletal. I would have done something more detailed with the hands. In particular I would have figured out why I gave him 6 fingers on his left hand and a mitt for his right hand. Probably would made the lump he is sitting on into something too.

Movie: King Kong (2005)

Pros:

Smashed a weather station.

Cons:

Mr. Smithers didn't get eaten.

Spoilers:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/05

Sculpture: On Her Side

(October 2003)
I really like this pose. Had I sculpted it at a different time I probably would have kept it. But at this point the sculpture classes had just started up again and in the spring classes I had gone through the arduous task of casting the Pony Tail. I wanted to model, not work on casting again.

As you can see I had fun with texture in this one. This effect is created by a tool called a rake. It is basically a wire loop stuck into a wooden handle. A finer wire is coiled around the wire of the loop. As you drag the rake across the clay the fine wire rapping makes grooves in the clay.

It's a cool effect, because it allows you to make flowing lines around different forms in the body. This then accentuates curvatures, pulls and twists in the body. My tendency is to go for a very smooth look. I'm glad I tried something different here.

The legs are incomplete, I'm not sure why, probably a time constraint. I probably figured it looked better without them, then with what I had.

I know I slapped the hair on very quickly. I wanted to avoid the problems I had with Napping. I really, really like how this hair turned out. It still needs work to clean it up, and it's not giving proper coverage at the back of the head. But this would have been easily correctable.

But unfortunately this one went back to the clay bin.

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.

Happy New Year!

Taking a brief break from posting sculpture pictures to wish everyone that visits my blog a Happy New Year.

Even if you don't visit my blog I'd like to wish you a Happy New Year.