Self portrait

Post dated: 3rd December 2012


For the final three weeks of the residency, I am going to begin a self portrait. It is to be twice life size and in marble.

I want to do this for a number of reasons.

Portrait sculpture commissions have made up a large part of my work and I have some facility with the genre.  However, the form involves someone else and the emotional impact of work is, inevitably, tied up with the personality and reputation of the subject.  Portraiture is, by dint of its commemorative function, limited to some degree in its creative and exploratory potential.  At least mine is. (Lucien Freud is a good example of someone who made portraits more about his own journey than the marking of a particular moment in another's.  And he chose his subjects rather than being chosen by them.)

Self portraiture is more subjective and self-exploratory than portraits of others.  I hope that mine will not become a vortex of either self-aggrandisement or self-flagellation of course.  I hope, instead, that it will enrich the current journey.  Applying for and following through this residency in Pietrasanta has been a significant step in this and to wrap up my time here with a new direction will be apt.

Moreover, I want to learn how to transfer and enlarge a plaster model into stone using the traditional techniques of marble carving.  I do a lot of enlargement etc in my own work, but it is always in steel and clay which are infinitely modal materials.  Although the principles are the same with carving, how you locate points (raised or flush nail heads that form the base camp from which the triangulation happens) in space varies due to the finite act of chipping away stone.  And you have to take the grain direction (and any faults) of the stone into account.

I am doubling the size of my model.  This is a fairly straightforward step up.  For less complete ratios, they use a nifty piece of geometry; of which more later.

The first step is to rough out a life size self portrait in clay.  The block is just behind the clay head.

I talk over the procedures with artisans and sculptors such as Eppe de Haan (below) who works at Studio Sem.

The finished clay

I then take a plaster mould from the clay

...cast a plaster positive from the mould and place my measuring points so that they coincide, proportionally, with the sides and top of the block.

I then find the corresponding points on and in the block...the relative position of the nose point, for example, is ringed in red....

...and start roughing out the form

This is as far as I got in the time. I will bring it to a conclusion once it is shipped to my studio in England. Working with this has opened up a fresh set of forms for me.  The language that works for clay just does not work in stone.  And how this language will feed into my portrait sculpture is filling me with anticipation.