Taking the girls for a stroll

There’s an essential part of artistic growth that until recently I mostly missed: Seeing your work through others’ eyes. I’m finding it’s every bit as educational as actually making the things.

Case in point: Met up with Alicia Lomne (and Bonnie and Eric and Andre and Janet and a bunch of other folk down at the BE Resource Center–hi, guys) Tuesday afternoon. She’d asked me to drop by her pate de verre class with the two May sculptures.

Win-win situation, that: She gave me some advice for moving forward with this series (lower the heatwork a bit, pack a bit more evenly) and in exchange she let me show off the Mays to her class. I definitely got the best part of that deal.

And I got a bonus, i.e., highly educational responses from people who haven’t been staring this daggone sculpture in the face for the last three months. First, they were surprised at the size (these portraits are nearly twice life-size), which makes me wonder if I should photograph them with something that shows scale.

Second, and pretty astonishing, was the repeated conviction that these two sculptures were male and female. “Brother and sister,” decided one student. They were sure they were looking at a woman on the left (May I) and a man on the right (May II). I mentioned that they’d come from the same mold and quizzed them for awhile on why they thought that, and reasons were a bit murky.

May II is broader across the face because I reangled her hair and cheeks into a softer slope. And I resumed my habit of dusting a little Gold Purple powder across the back of the eyes to emphasize depth and feeling. Those two things, apparently, were enough to turn May II into a boy.

Cool.

Some saw May II as sad, others as wicked, and one saw a pioneer lady on the prairie, determined to survive. Most caught the anger right away, which was gratifying. Even more gratifying, though: They were telling the story of the person in the portrait, and not just the glass techniques used to make the pieces (especially neat since this was a class in those very techniques–thanks, folks). May has a very strong story on her own, but more and more I’m thinking that it’s irrelevant.

An RC customer suggested that the black background was too dark and plain. “Can’t you jazz up the background a little bit to match the portrait? You should get in there with the coldworking tools, carve in some curves and designs. It’s just too flat and dark.” That was a little grimacing, considering how hard I worked to create a flat, dark background, but he definitely made me look at it twice. Or maybe three times.

And an interesting point: I had originally planned to simply attach hanging hardware to the back and put May on the wall, stark, black and alone. I may still do that, but I’m a little nervous about anything that glues. Maybe it’s time for me to meet up with my local metalsmith.

The BE folk (I think) got a kick out of my “Cynthia discovers that regular black glass is MUCH runnier than Stiff Black” adventure. I could see the amused “we TOLD yous” all over their faces, even if they were too polite to say so. (Well, they DID tell me…)

Oh well. And, as usual, the stuff I see as flaws everyone else seems to see as intentional design and actually think it improves the work. (Ain’t we lucky? Microsoft has yet to convince anybody but techies that its software bugs are really features. Artists do that with aplomb, every day.)

Maybe that’s a sign, as an artist friend puts it, that “Perfect is not as good as DONE.”

BTW, if you want to see the entire series of posts on this sculpture, i.e., May from concept to final, here are the links:

• The inspiration for the sculpture “May”
• The constructing of May’s clay model
• The making of a silicone mold of May
• Planning May’s mold
• Making May’s mold
• Packing May’s mold
• Decanting May’s test run
• May the second (final version)
• Taking the girls for a stroll (this post)
  

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