A month and a half since my last blog entry - that wasn’t supposed to happen!
I’ve got two current works in progress, both untitled (I’m sure something will come to me at some point), which are slowly progressing.
This one started out as roughly ovoid Alabaster boulder weighing 30kg (Having hacked away at it for a month or so, it’s now much lighter!). It’s so far taken many hours just to rough it out, and there is still a lot of detail work to do. The most time consuming job was chiselling the hole through the centre. I prefer to do this with chisels rather than electric drills - but it was three to four hours work. The narrower ‘spine’ holes are comparatively narrow, so had to be drilled, and will be rasped and filed out later.
This is the first time I’ve worked with classic white Alabaster, and I’m very pleased with the working properties. I think that I’m going to do a lot more in Alabaster. The sculpture is quite unlike any that I’ve done before, and clearly owes some inspiration to some of George Kennethson’s work (he did quite a lot in Alabaster, though mainly figurative, which is something I’m not really looking into at the moment).
It has veins running through it, and is very translucent, so when it’s finished and the sun gets behind it, it should have a nice glow to it.
The one was started a year and a half ago, but didn’t really have a strong direction, so was put on hiatus for a while. It’s very much in the same style as ‘Chalice’ and ‘Archetype’, and will be mounted onto a base using an aluminium rod, and will have painted areas. What is different is that it’s made of two different types of stone - one the rust-red pyrophylite, the other an insert of black Serpentine. This sculpture is at its wet-working stage, so I just need to do the last stage of sanding, then glue the insert in. The pyrophylite on this one was slightly different to the others, as it has tiny inclusions of volcanic glass, which means that normal tools tend to skate across the surface. To get a smooth, flat finish I had to use diamond needle files. So, it’s been quite hard work, but is getting there.