mind (the) pieces: THIS is WORK - sculpture life modeling

The french sculpture sessions came to an end - finishing up a 7 or 8 week sustained pose for black wax statues - I will miss these sessions - over these past few weeks I was indirectly introduced to sculpture and how it works - its fascinating and very, very hard work I found.

Here some important personal thoughts on the experience.

Wax Puzzled

Especially the wax media - I found it, just by observing such a arduous, almost exhausting material to work, to transform from its dead square, rigid, plain way to a organic, living , flesh, bone and blood pulsating human body shape - let me tell you, many times over the hours I was posing I could not help t feel a sense of admiration for these artists who so perseveringly , endured the war with the wax, little by little, patiently, attempt, by attempt over 7 weeks or so to arrive at my suggested sense of shape and gesture in the pose.

When you first look at a block of virgin wax - you can not help to think - how the h*ell are they going to use this to build a body? its so compact, cold and very stiff, being initially manipulation only possible by and cutting with a considerable amount of strength and a good knife. So all the work begins, with the hard work of having to shave thin slices of wax at a time - at this stage they are still stiff so little chance to make it to shape form - so the second stage is to immerse the wax shavings into some hot water - only than, this stubborn material gives in a little bit and makes itself somehow maleable to shaping ( still some considerable pressure and finger physical work needs to be applied to form body shape). If this is not enough to put you off to start to build a 50/60 cm height full 3D body sculpture - them it follows hours, and hours, of minuce observation : body masses assembly, body gesture, movement, bone, muscle, tendons, body proportion, body texture ( its different in different parts of the body - the bony, the soft, the muscular - and its s different from body to body) - and adding a never-ending number of small wax shavings over and over, until the first shapes are created - and them it goes on and on - it is really a never ending work of observation and trial - like RODIN expressed himself, a sculpture contrary to a painting, or a poem, or a piece of music is always a unfinished work.

Weight and structure

First steps, big decisions - no pressure. A 60 cms height full wax statue - apart from observation and perseverance and patient - involves also other type of challenges - ( scultpure really must be technically the most problematic, temperament, persistence tester form of art - the artist seems to be constantly tested on the process of trying to bring his piece into the material world - as I said before, it is not easy) - gravity challenges.

So a mediun sized statue like this one - will require a inside metal armature to support and the body wax building process ( yes, those millions of little wax shavings, pressed against eachtoher stubbornely to express form and mass ). Also this structure will not only define the durability of the piece ( will it stand or will it fall ) but also in its primary construction the artist needs to read the pose movement in terms of main gestures ( skeletal movement) to ensure the right gesture - as all those other 100s of hours will be spent working on this first crucial decisions - you kinda off want to get it right - feeling the pressure (?)

I was (!) - I guess I could not be a sculptor - one needs a very disciplined, analytical, patient mind.

No Pain, no Pose

In terms of the pose, this was also not a easy one for me. Actually I must admit it was one the most difficult sustained poses I had - I was surprised I must confess, you look at the gesture, and though the gesture is dynamic and gracious enough - one would look at it and not make a big physical challenge over it - WRONG (!) - actually you just need the first 30 minutes to start to see clearly all the points where it will go into PAIN territory :

1) Full body weight on one leg ( smartly I decided to use my right leg- which is my weaker leg - at the time convinced the challenge would be good to make it stronger - it did got stronger after 7 weeks - not without pain though )

2) Strong upper body back torsion with back spiral inclination- this obviously will and tension not only to your lower back by compressing it ( in all of my breaks I had to regurlary stretch my lower back ) but also as it is putting you in a somehow off balance position - it is making your body weight heavier - so a extra strain to the body weight on the supporting leg

3) Lower body off balance to front - basically, the pose I wanted to create, was a subtle suggestion of standing spiral movement - to achieve this I had to position differently, different parts of the body - positioning my lower right leg and hip out of axis front side, created a extraordinary amount of extra pressure on my knee joints ( this was especially hard to sustain after retuning from my NY butoh trip - where I gave quite a lot of work to my knees with all that collapsing and falling )

4) The reclining back contorted neck - most of us are not aware how heavy our head is and how strong your neck muscles and tendons are in a natural position - this means - once we change the natural head position, which is straight and standing - we immediately create a unnatural strain weight relationship between head and neck - that the neck tendons and muscles are not familiar with - suddenly you realize how heavy your head really is.

With posing and sustaining shape and movement with the body - here are the facts - here it is how it works:

know all of this things ( the off balance, the extra weight, the torsion's, the compressions, the neck tendons weight strain ) you dont notice in the first 3 hour session so much - it is as the sessions progress- you will realize the body holds the most extraordinary shape and pain memory relationship - so what happens is that while you can tolerate pain well in the first hours - sustaining the same pose - as you go further into more sessions - the first minutes you try to regain the pose - the body immediately alerts you with pain - telling you: hey, wait a minute I remember this from last week, its painful and I dont like it, change it or i will keep on giving you pain - so even after a week rest - you are basically facing the remaining posing time with at a degree of pain or discomfort.

This is the life model challenge, and with experience you learn to control your body and mind regarding pain and these kind of panicky alerts ( its funny to watch how the body can real be panicky sometimes and how the mind can hysterically support that ).

Most of the control is done by the mind: so when the body shots panicky alerts of pain - only by controlling your mind you can kinds off turn the volume down of your body screaming to you - its painful, its painful, stop it. The mind here learns t say: shhh, its OK- the pain is Ok and so the body relaxes to the presence of pain - and this means I can continue sustaining my pose.

The last challenge comes ironically from the mind too - I like to describe it as a mind anxiety attack - that is very common, especially when you dont have a lot of experience modeling - your mind is not used to a situation where it is required from you not to move and to be still for an unusual long period of time - the mind very often here reacts back to this new unknown situation with a anxiety - where for not justified triggering reason your mind just gets anxious and panicky, ordering you to move - when you ignore it, the clever, bossy thing them sends panic to your physical body which can manifest in many different ways: for me personally in past experience it feels like a lack of hair, lack of breathing kind off - as my mind is making a unrational link on my head that if I not move I cannot breath well.
The only way this time to control the mind itself, when it is in this panic, unrational mode is by reason - a kind of reason that only experience can give you - as you know from experience what kind of tricks your mind can play at your and your body - and the reassurance that most of these anxieties are unreal and unfounded.

So, for those of you who thought maybe that life modeling, is to a certain extent a easy job, suitable for a somewhat soulless and mindless individual - I hope my experience could be a redirecting light in that form of tough - as all great artist know truly the role and importance of the model to the final result of the work. Unf. still these days, many life modeling professionals are low rating - and yes, you do get many soulesss, mindless ( even beautiful) people out there who will pose for you - but believe me you will see a difference.

Some of my favorite pieces - some photos below
while alone with the statues, observing my movement, the gesture of my body and also very intriguing to be able in each statue to trace back the artist finger builds up movements - the movement choices of the artist - the finger pressing, allocating another piece of wax shaving - creating, adding, sculpting the pose, the movement, the gesture.

So incredible, one can see two very distinct forms of movement in the final pieces : the model;s and the artists different movement, fused in one final piece - so in a way, it could be seen as a collaboration - pas vrai (?)