You wouldn't say so from the posts on this blog, but I've been very busy these past few weeks. In preparation for the exhibition at Kunst en Kastelen (Art and Castles) I've done all kinds of work, and created a few new sculptures in stone. Here is the first one: a sculpture in Anröchter Grünstein, or dolomite.
It is about 50 cm high and wide. The rear curl is carved completely detached. This sculpture is actually a brother of my bigger one 'Ferns’, that I made previously in dolomite as well.
The sculpture is still quite dark now. But this stone, which, incidentally, does not come from the Italian mountains but just from Germany, has a special feature: once it is left outside for a while, it will gradually turn bright green all by itself, which I find very beautiful. So over time it will only become more beautiful!
First I modeled in plasticine a sketch model for the brick layer. After approval, I enlarged that with compasses and scale calipers in 1:3, in green pir foam. It's a pretty crude sawing model, which I'm going to use to quickly saw the big outlines. Because pir foam is very soft , I coated it with polyester to give it a hard top layer. The next few days I'm going to start cutting and carving. Earlier, I have already split a block of dolomite from which I will carve it. I was originally planning on sculpting the statue in the direct carving method, but this is much faster and easier. But much direct carving work still remains, because this model is not very detailed and slightly too bulky, so I still have a lot of leeway when carving. That keeps it interesting!
