Making ShoutingMan

OK, this one’s for Lynice, since she asked how ShoutingMan was made.

ShoutingMan was created backwards (as are most of my sculptures). I needed a torpedo-shaped inclusion to fit into the bottom of a wacky boat-shaped mold I’d made, it turned into a man’s face that got angrier and angrier at being left to drown in the bottom of a boat, started sending off all kinds of dark images and finally broke free.

Believe it or not, I’d intended to make a kind of volcanic landscape out of the above shape, offset so it wouldn’t look so silly-symmetrical. At some point it became obvious that it was really a nose I was making, not Mt. Hood…and the gaping hole in “Mt. St. Helens” was actually a yawning mouth…and as I worked it became a shouting mouth.

Periodically, I’d set the clay in the mold to test the fit, and each time I did the rage in that shouting face would build. I took to calling him AngryMan, realized I didn’t have the proportions right, and started really looking at photos of angry men’s faces to see where I was going wrong. (Every male colleague for miles around has dropped jaw and posed for this piece–my apologies, guys; this is what you were humoring me for.)

I shoot lots of photos of heartwork in progress because there’s nothing like a photograph to distance you from the work and help you see it clearly. Heads-down and up to my arms in clay, I only see details. If I take a picture, head upstairs and print it out, I can immediately see where I’m going wrong. I’ll throw the pictures up on my laptop and just let it run in slideshow mode while I’m doing my work on another computer…out of the corner of my eye I start seeing stuff I would NEVER see just looking at the real thing.

I’d sent the pic below and others, to Mom (her opinions are invaluable, so we do a lot of e-mailing back and forth and eventually she gets on the phone (“the hand wouldn’t come out of the hosta at that angle…”)). I sent her this photo, and got this e-mail back: “Look at the 2nd picture. What does it look like to you???????????? I had to chuckle. Will it look like that in the finished bowl?”

As I read that, I had the pictures on the screensaver as usual, I was in a client’s office, and I noticed that a LOT of people were stopping to watch the screensaver. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw what they were looking at.

Well, shades of Chicago’s “Dinner Party.” Amazing what our unconscious minds do for us, isn’t it? No wonder AngryMan was getting angier by the minute–I was NOT getting it, and he was definitely getting annoyed.

So I let him out of the bowl and took a good look…hmmm, he had possibilities. AngryMan was essentially a compressed face. By making him a caricature, and using thickness/width to emphasize where his energy was coming from (in this case, the diagonal from cheeks to mouth as he opened his mouth for the shout), I’d darken the glass (thicker colored glass is darker). I made the forehead as thin as I dared. It would be pale, uninvolved, almost invisible because, clearly, AngryMan is past thinking. He is most emphatically NOT symmetrical–the asymmetry makes him more unpredictable and perhaps dangerous.

So, I ain’t exactly Michelangelo, but now that I had a direction, all I had to do was remove whatever wasn’t right. When I liked and was disturbed by him at the same time, and the flow of weird, dark images slowed down, it meant, my mother said, “it’s time to put him to rest.”

I set him on a clay base (to give me some room in the latex), sprayed him with lacquer (to keep the sulfur in the clay from reacting with the rubber) and “pulled a rubber,” i.e., made a latex-and-plaster mothermold. Now I could make as many wax copies of this guy as I wanted.

Then I made the mold (using hydroperm), steamed it out (getting the wax out of the lips was a major pain), and the rest of the process is as described in the previous post.

AngryMan morphed into ShoutingMan, at least for now, and he’s becoming part of a very different sculpture I’m still working out. He needs people to react against, and some place to balance all that energy, and his siblings are popping out of my head like mad. As soon as I finish HostaBowl, I’ll put them all together. Some day I’ll work through the original negative-space-in-boat idea, and figure out how the bowl will react to the force of his anger…but for now the figure itself is more compelling.

So…see why I don’t talk much about the heartwork? Plain old glasswork is much easier…and shorter.

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