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Okay... I don't generally veer away from sculpture-related topics, but today I am. I just have to. And I feel a real potty-mouthed rant coming on, so stop reading now if you're averse to a little old-fashioned profanity. It is tangentially related because it has to do with nudity, or more specifically, a manufactured controversy about nudity, but without any actual nudity.

Please tell me we're not this fucking stupid.

Seriously. Does anyone in this country NOT realize that this is a manufactured controversy. This is nothing more than a brilliant but truly skeevy, form of marketing, folks. Let's take a look at it:

Some fifteen year old actress who heads a wildly popular cash-cow of a media franchise has her picture taken by Annie Leibovitz. Annie took a picture that shows *gasp* said teen's bare back. The picture comes out in Vanity Fair magazine, a magazine pretty much defined by its regular use of nude-but-not-really-nude images of celebrities. The day it comes out, the fifteen year old actress issues a statement of regret through her agent, painting herself as a helpless ingenue taken advantage of by the wily and edgy photographer. Disney issues a similar statement claiming that one of their most valuable assets, err.. I mean stars was taken advantage of by an unethical magazine in the name of increased sales.

Okay, step back. Annie Leibovitz, right? Getting your picture taken by her is a big fucking deal. It means you've arrived: you're somebody. Ordinary schmoes do not get to step in front of Annie's cameras. And Annie Leibovitz isn't fucking edgy. She's never gone near the edge of anything photographically speaking. She's a competent photographer, even a good one in many people's opinion, but edgy? Hell, no. She's as mainstream as fucking possible. Robert Mapplethorpe was edgy. Andres Serrano was edgy. Annie Leibovitz shoots for goddamned magazines you buy at Barnes and fucking Noble and put on your coffee table but never read.

Now, our poor little ingenue... our poor little multi-millionaire ingenue with her handlers, PR people, agents, and (I would hope) parents had no problem with the shoot at the time. Nobody advised her not to proceed. Nobody, apparently, was the least concerned at the time. And why should they have been? Annie photographed the girls' fucking bare back! Big fucking deal. You can see more teenage flesh at the public beach in the summertime. It doesn't count as "topless" just because we can tell she's not wearing a top. That's topless in the same way that I'm naked right now - because I'm naked underneath my clothes, see, you just can't see anything, but I would be naked, y'now, except for the clothes. See how that works?

And Disney... c'mon, Disney. This is about as transparent a move as fucking possible. They issued a statement to appease their bible-belt constituency knowing full well that by doing so, they were causing every god damned straight male in the country to go google for "hannah montanna nude". In one fell swoop, they've taken the moral high road and, at the same time, with a wink and a nudge, got their starlet's name every-fucking-where and raised her profile a hundred fold. Hell, I didn't even know who Hanna Fucking Montanna was when I woke up this morning. Seriously. I know that's probably hard to believe, since she's apparently crazy popular, but I don't watch television and despise manufactured pop music. My kids don't watch television either - we don't have cable or satellite and get exactly one fuzzy channel on our archaic seventeen inch television that we use primarily for watching DVDs on "movie night" once a week. But now I know who the fuck Hanna Montanna is. Coincidence? I hardly fucking think so. Now, had there been real Brooke Shields style underage nudity, then I'd be inclined to believe that Disney was completely taken off guard by what happened and would completely understand why they issued a statement condemning what happened. As things are, I'd honestly be surprised if they didn't arrange the god damned shoot to begin with. I have trouble believing that they wouldn't play some part in the affair; this girl makes too much money for them not to be involved.

And another thing. Even though she's not actually, in any meaningful way, topless, it really shouldn't matter if she was. In my state (New York) a woman of any age can take her top off at the beach or in most other public outdoor places legally. You can't stop her; it's her right. It doesn't happen much, and a lot of people are unaware of it, but that's how it is. That's how it is in much of the world. Breasts, as wonderful as they are, are simply not sex organs and shouldn't be causing such a god damned panic. They are not intrinsically sexual: by making them moderately taboo, our society has sexualized them. But nobody is going to be harmed by seeing a pair of breasts or by having their own breasts seen by others. Certainly nobody is going to be harmed by having their breasts not seen as is the case here.

You're being manipulated people. This is a silly distraction that shouldn't have ever made the news. There's no controversy. Let me save you the trip to Google: These pictures aren't edgy, or controversial and there's no nudity. These aren't the pictures you're looking for, move along... move along.

I went to Sunday night open figure drawing tonight. That makes it, what? Five or six consecutive weeks of life drawing. Tonight was a good night for more than one reason.

First, the models were great. Yes, models, plural. We had two, a male and a female. In my first draft of this posting I called them a "couple", but there are connotations to that term that might not be applicable here. I don't know and don't really care, but didn't want to misrepresent anything one way or the other. Anyway, the male model was middle-aged, older than me I'd guess (unless he's had an awfully hard life) but it's hard to gauge exactly. I'd put him at somewhere between 45 and 60, thought I'm admittedly not very good at guessing ages. The female model was college-aged, probably twenty or twenty-one.

They made a nice contrast. She had a very soft body, pale skin, and a very innocent look; he had a face and body that showed the benefit of many years experience. Yet, they worked beautifully together; they obviously had a rapport, whatever their personal relationship might be, and were comfortable working with each other. The only bad part about tonight was that I seem to have picked the worst spot in the house. With the exception of a couple of the gesture poses, I had a rather poor viewing angle for most of the night. I didn't have a frontal view of the female model even once after the gestures, and only once for the male model. Now, the odd angles were good for me, no doubt, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I would have liked one or two of the poses to be more straightforward from where I was drawing. Thankfully, they're going to be coming back in a month.

The second reason why it was a good night was because I had a few fleeting moments where I felt like I knew what I was doing. They didn't last long, and they didn't stick around long enough to guarantee good drawings, but they did give me hope and made me feel, for the first time, like I was making progress. It probably sounds stupid, but to draw a line and have it be exactly what you intended to draw - a line that exactly captures the shape you are looking at - is truly sublime, especially when you generally struggle for even an approximation. It only happened a couple of times tonight, but If I keep attending and keep drawing (and sculpting, of course, but that's a given), I have this strange feeling that I might actually learn to draw someday.

Last week I said I might post some drawings. I'm hesitant to do so because, for the most part, my drawings are teh suck. But, what the hell, I'll throw a few up as long as you promise not to laugh.

These are all on 9"x12" sketch paper using colored lead imported from Japan in a mechanical pencil. I did some larger pieces in graphite and charcoal as well, but I have no good way to scan those. As a sculptor, you'll see that I focus on line and form and generally don't do much in the way of shading. I guess I should, but, oh, well... doesn't interest me right now. Someday I'll learn to paint and to draw for drawing's sake, but for now, I'm interested in drawing for sculpting's sake.

Here's one drawing from last week. The model was a middle-aged woman who is a cancer survivor and has just a great outlook on life. It's not a great drawing, but it was a tough angle and I feel like I did a respectable job given how tough it was.

There were several drawings from tonight that I felt moderately good about, though they don't look as good scanned as they did to me earlier in the evening. Not that they were great even then, but they do show noticeable improvement. Here's a five-minute sketch of two models, a first for me (that it was two models, not that it was five minutes long). Sorry for the bad scan - I couldn't get a good scan of this one for some reason.

This next one didn't scan very well either - I think it's something to do with the spiral binding on the sketchbook. I was actually quite proud of myself on this one - the angle was tough (for me) and it's actually recognizable as the model. It's not an exact likeness by any stretch of the imagination but if you saw the model and then this sketch, you'd likely go, "yeah, that's her", or at least, "that could be her", which is a big deal for me. This was actually a pose with both models, but they were not touching, and I did two separate drawings instead of a single one because I misjudged the scale and didn't leave enough room on the paper for both. The drawing of the male model was not worth posting, unfortunately.

The male model was behind her on this one. All I could see was part of one leg and one arm, and a bit of shoulder, so I didn't bother drawing him. I actually drew her tattoo on this one, which I don't usually do, but I spent a lot of time looking at her back tonight, and although she was a lovely looking young woman, there was not a lot of detail in her back to draw due to the combination of strong lighting and pale skin. She has soft features that would require more subtlety to capture than I'm capable of at this point... so I worked the tattoo into a few of the sketches. And for the record, her right arm was not really that wide. In fact, I drew her as wider than she really is in most of my drawings. That's actually unusual for me... I usually draw people skinnier than they are in real life. Anyway... I had just erased the top line of her leg with the intention of re-drawing it when the timer signaled an end to the pose.

This was the only drawing I did of both models that I'm comfortable posting. The others are even worse. You'll notice that I was looking at the back of the female model again, but at least I had the front of the guy for this one. The stick he's holding was also being held by her, I just never got around to drawing that part of the stick. After break, her position changed a bit, so I ended up basically re-drawing her, and the stick just wasn't a big concern.

In real life, he also didn't like he was about to smack the living shit out of her, though the size difference is actually pretty close to reality. He wasn't particularly large, but she was a rather petite girl. Standing up, I don't think she came up to my armpit, though at 6'3" I'm a little on the tall side.

New post, same story - not much time for sculpting, etc.

As you can see, I've been focusing on the face and hair, and not giving too much love to the rest. After holding her around the torso for a while, she's become pretty distorted, so I made some effort to start getting the body back into a more human shape, but I've got a long way to go.

The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture... Sometimes... it seems to me that... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

-Michelangelo Buonorotti

Michelangelo very strongly believed that drawing and sculpting were "sister arts" and that to become a good sculptor you must draw a lot. This is not a universally held opinion, as I know several phenomenal sculptors who do not draw much. But, I'm becoming more and more convinced that Michelangelo was right, at least for the way I learn. I'm sure that I need to learn to draw better if I'm going to continue improving as a sculptor.

Let me put this right out in the open: I'm not very good at drawing. Or, at least, I'm nowhere near as good as I'd like to be. I mean, I don't sculpt as well as I'd like either, but the differential is much more dramatic with my drawing. I have been working on it though: I've started attending a weekly open figure drawing studio, and have been forcing myself to do preliminary sketches before touching clay on any new project. I also keep a pad of paper in front of my keyboard along with a few pencils so that I can doodle if I'm on the phone or if my brain isn't functioning and I need a stress-relief break. Drawing is pretty good lubricant for my thoughts when they get stuck.

Anyway, I've had a hard time finding a type of pencil that I really like. I like doing sketches and the early stages of all drawings in an erasable medium and in a light color such as light blue red, or green. There aren't many erasable colored pencils on the market, but I've tried what I can find and until recently had kinda settled on the famous animator's pencil the Col-Erase as the best I can do. But I like a very fine point on my pencils, and the Col-Erases are awfully soft, which means I'm constantly sharpening to keep the point as sharp as I like; I like being able to draw a thin line of consistent thickness, and having to constantly stop to sharpen the pencil really annoys me.

Now, I really like 0.5mm mechanical pencils, especially the Pentel Quicker Clicker (of course this is subjective - not everybody share's my affinity for this particular pencil, though I will concede that the older version—of which I still have a few—was better than the current rubber-grip models).

But the pencil is only half the equation, and the only colored pencil leads I could ever find were Pentel Hi-Polymer red and blue leads that claim to be erasable, but, simply put, are not: They leave very noticeable images on the page no matter how much or how hard you erase, and the very act of erasing the marks from those leads causes the color to bleed all over the page creating a cloud of red or blue around your drawing area. Additionally, these leads just don't have a nice feel: The lead slides across the paper with a very artificial, plasticky texture. It's nothing like writing with regular graphite pencils or even with the regular black Pentel Hi-Poly leads, which I find to be quite acceptable in terms of texture.

My ideal pencil for sketching would be a .5mm mechanical pencil with a truly-erasable colored lead that has a nice smooth texture. This "perfect" sketching instrument has been eluding me for years and I had basically given up hope on finding such a thing.

But then, I recently stumbled across an academic paper about the Japanese and their love of mechanical pencils. According to this paper, there is much more innovation and generally better mechanical pencil products in Japan as compared to America.

"Hmmm....", I thought, "then maybe the Japanese have better colored pencil leads."

So I googled around and came across a few web stores that sell imported Japanese pens and pencils. Over at JetPens, I found a product from Japan called Uni-Color colored pencil leads, which were highly recommended by a few people over at the Polykarbon Art Forums.

As an import that is not generally available in the U.S. they are expensive, running $3.00 for 10 leads plus shipping, but they come in several colors including two shades of blue as well as red, orange, green and pink. They are supposed to erase well and have a nice feel, so I ordered a pack of all colors except the pink (I'm not being macho, they were simply out of stock), and when they came, I dumped all the old leads out of all my Quicker Clickers and loaded them up with these new leads, giving me a rainbow assortment of mechanical pencils at my disposal. I then anxiously started to draw with them.

Wow. These leads are truly awesome. They are smooth and feel like writing with an expensive graphite pencil. You can vary the darkness of the line quite a lot by varying how much pressure you use (something I've never found to be true with mechanical pencils), and you can even shade with them to some extent. They are soft leads, and I've yet to have one go through the paper, something that periodically happens with me when using other .5mm leads because I'm a brute and push down too hard.

I especially like the sky blue and the green, but the red is nice also, and all the colors are acceptable. No matter how dark a line I use, it's nowhere near as dark as a graphite or pencil line, giving me the option to go over and refine the drawing after doing my initial light color sketch.

The only downside to these is the cost. Being soft, they get used up pretty quickly, and at 30¢ each lead, they're considerably more expensive than buying graphite pencils, black mechanical pencil leads, or Col-Erases.

But, in the scheme of things, it's a small price to pay for a product that encourages me to draw and, in fact, makes me exited to draw.

I brought them to open figure drawing last night instead of using charcoal. Maybe I'll work up the nerve to pose a few of my sketches. Maybe.

I'm not normally a big fan of flash-based web sites, but this one is awesome.

I have a great many books on figurative art and sculpture and I think I own just about every figure reference that exists; certainly I own all that my budget allows. So, I was very surprised recently to stumble across a reference book for figurative art that I not only didn't have but of which I had never even heard. The book is called Body Parts by Simon Jennings.

I was in a bit of a rush, so I bought the book just on the strength of its visual appeal. It is rather well done in terms of design, though the 7" x 7" format is awkward. This was just the first of many places where the design of the book failed to take obvious practical matters into account. When I got the book home, I started reading.

The page above is one of the earlier pages in the book, and was the first page I turned to. Now, the author of this book has some pretty hefty credentials and several art-related books to his credit, but none of those thing guarantee accuracy or quality and I was just floored by the number of inaccuracies on this one page. Polyclitus did sculpt during the fifth century BCE, but also well into the fourth century BCE and it is most likely that he published his Canon in the fourth century BCE, not the fifth. This is certainly forgivable given how little we know about Polyclitus' work, however, and is easily the least grievous problem on the page.

Polyclitus' Doryphoros or Canon sculpture was sculpted as seven heads tall, and his published treatise on proportions used that same measurement, not seven and a half heads as is stated here. Leonardo Da Vinci most certainly did not believe that ten heads was the correct measure of human proportions. There is overwhelming evidence that he thought that Vitruvius' eight-head canon was ideal for use in figurative art, though he almost certainly also knew that even eight heads was not "correct" in terms of capturing reality. Eight heads tall became the accepted "ideal" a heck of a lot earlier than the "early twentieth century"… arguably around twenty-one centuries earlier, and certainly by the 15th century it was widely accepted. It has never been and never will be universally accepted as the only way to depict an adult, but it has been in relatively common use for at least half a millenium.

It may sound like I'm nitpicking here, but to put it in perspective: There are more major mistakes on this page than there are paragraphs. The signal to noise ratio is bad enough due to the small size and design, but with these mistakes thrown in, the words became meaningless. I think it's fair to say that I had a hard time being objective about this book after reading this page. In fact, it was only a few pages later when I stopped reading the words altogether after suffering though a few more pages of nonsense, including a horrible, but thankfully brief page on the concept of Phi.

But, this book is not completely without value. A good amount of the book consists of photographic reference material. As I said, the awkward size of the book is less-than-ideal for a visual reference book; the images are small and the book doesn't lie flat no matter what you do. But the images are competently photographed and well printed.

The book features just three models: two female and one male. Both of the female models are young and attractive; the male model is middle-age and completely lacking in muscle definition. Now, I am not opposed to older models or models with less-than-ideal physiques, in fact I welcome a diverse range of models, and I am sure the male model used in this book is an excellent life model. But, if you're going to feature only a single model in a book billed as "a visual sourcebook for drawing the human body", it seems like one on whom anatomical landmarks and muscles can be discerned would have been a better choice.

The two female models, though quite different from each other, are both young and much closer to the accepted concept of an "ideal" figure. Although I would have preferred the inclusion of more models, given the constraint of having to use just two models, the author actually made good selections.

It does seem to me that the author is capitalizing on the physical attractiveness of one of the two female model, though I can't fault him for that, since I'm sure it helps sell books. He devotes far more pages to images of this one model than to the other two models combined. But even the pictures of this model are far too few to really justify the cover price of the book ($24.99). If the book were in the $10 range, I would wholeheartedly recommend it as a visual reference given the superb technical quality of the images. At the actual price it's being sold for, it's not a good value.

The words, on the other hand, well… you really shouldn't even be able to give away the words in this book.

I figured out (mostly) how to set up a list of links in the sidebar. I haven't figured out how to keep the links from showing up as regular blog entries, so for the time being, I'm just giving links an old date so they don't show up on today's page.

If you have any links you'd like to see in the sidebar, drop me a note.

It seems somehow criminal that I've been writing this blog for six months and I've never done a posting on Rodin. I mean, if you asked me to pick a "favorite" sculptor, I would have a really hard time. It depends on a lot of factors, including my mood. But, if I were to assemble a list of my favorite five or ten sculptors, one who would consistently be on my list is François Auguste René Rodin.

I know, he seems like an easy and obvious choice. I mean, everybody knows who Rodin is, even though people generally don't know much about sculpture or sculptors. How many ordinary people know who Bernini or François Rude were? How about Polykleitos, Phidias, or Praxiteles? And really, it's not even worth asking most non-artists about lesser known sculptors like Per Hasselberg or Carpeaux.

But everybody knows two sculptors: Michelangelo and Rodin. If you ask most people to name a sculpture, they are going to pick the Thinker, The Kiss or, of course, the David. I'll deal with Michelangelo in another post, but I have long felt a sense of kinship with Rodin because of his attitude toward the body, his eager embracing of new technology, and his go-to-hell personality. I also happen to feel that his fame is well deserved.

Now, well-deserved fame does not mean he was infallible even as an artist, and let's not even get into his personal life except to say that it is unlikely that anyone will ever nominate Rodin for a Best Father or Best Husband award. Rodin's later life was filled was some amazing artistic innovation, but also tremendous arrogance. He suffered the fate of many artists who experience great success during their lifetime: He began to believe what people said about him. He got to the point where he would ship bronzes off to clients without even chasing the seams; he would recycle and have cast half-finished pieces and people would rave over how innovative it was that he left tool marks in and did not sculpt the details. You can find books to this day that make excuses for the fact that he threw out unfinished work for easy money. In a way, you can almost trace the modern notion of the avant-garde artist back to Rodin.

But, let's not dwell on those flaws; many of them are understandable considering where he came from, the poverty that he suffered through, and the eventual fame and riches he acquired. I think few of us would do better handling that level of fame and riches under the same circumstances. I mean, it's really hard to grasp today just how famous he was. A sculptor now would never acquire that level of fame by virtue of being a sculptor. His funeral in Meudon was standing-room-only and was attended by a great many dignitaries and other important figures of the day.

Rodin was prolific, and it's really a shame that people aren't familiar with more of his works. My personal favorite piece of his is the Danäid.

This is a work that has to be seen in real life to be appreciated. I saw a cast of it for the first time when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I don't remember which museum it was - perhaps the Legion of Honor Museum. It wasn't a marble version like the picture above, but a fairly late bronze cast with a gorgeous black patina. I was spellbound by the effect of the piece. The anatomy was flawless and the surface was so shiny it looked molten. As I moved, it would catch light in completely different ways, revealing subtle nuances of the form that I hadn't noticed before. No photograph can do this piece justice. I didn't want to stop looking at it had a strong urge to reach out and touch it.

Another thing I realized during that visit is that not only do pictures not do the Danäid justice, but that nearly all photographs of it are taken from a, shall we say, "discrete" angle. Rodin, unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries and predecessors, had absolutely no qualms about sculpting detailed genitals, and honestly didn't understand why that was a problem. As he got more famous, he had less reason to conform to other people's sensibilities, but even early on he was prone to doing much more detailed sculpting with little regard for contemporary standards of modesty. Other examples of this are the Andromeda, Women Damned, and Ecclesiastes.

Early on, Rodin was often forced to add fig leafs to his sculptures when entering them into a salon or otherwise exhibiting his works; he only grudgingly covered any part of the body, and despised sculpting clothed figures at all (ironically, though, the clothed Burgers of Calais is one of his most powerful and moving pieces).

In Rodin's later career, he took this fascination with the body to further extremes, and for many people then and now, these more explicit works ("explicit" by the standards of the day) such as the Iris and a handful of life drawings define him as an artist and a person.

The funny thing is that out of a corpus of thousands of works, his "explicit" works consist of just ten drawings and a single sculpture (two if you include the Ecclesiastes), and only one of those drawings was overtly sexual, the rest were just nudes, albeit ones where the genitals were more prominent than was typical at the time.

A few exploratory pieces really shouldn't define Rodin and certainly shouldn't mask his true genius, which was in capturing motion and in conveying emotion. While his Iris is, perhaps, uncomfortably shameless, it's not particularly arousing. On the other hand, many of Rodin's more "acceptable" works, like the Fugit Amor, Eternal Idol, and Fallen Angel are very sensual because they manage to convey to the viewer exactly what the figures are feeling. You can sense the desire the figures have for each other and feel the passion in a way that's completely absent from the Iris or any of his "scandalous" drawings.

Even the popular Kiss smolders in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with its nudity. Those figures could be fully clothed and there would still be no confusion about what they are feeling or where this embrace will lead. Thankfully they weren't sculpted that way because it's hard to imagine it being as effective with them wearing overalls and spats.

Anyway, that's about all the Rodin I have time for today. While there is some good Rodin information on the Web, you really should do yourself a favor and see his works in real life. You'll appreciate them in a whole new way if you've only seen pictures before.

I came across this blog today. It's the blog of a life model named Claudia: a life model with a deep appreciation for art and a way with words. There's a lot of great art in her blog, both classic and contemporary, and a lot of great writing about art. I especially liked this post, mostly because I love Rodin and love the quote she found from him:

“I can only work with a model. The sight of human forms nourishes and comforts me.”

There's another quote from Rodin I have in a book (Rodin: The Hands of Genious by Helene Pinet)

"The nude is a real religion with me"

It very much echos my sentiment, and probably that of most figurative artists. I only wish I had the luxury of using one always, but I consider myself lucky to be able to work from a model every week, something I recently started doing again, and it's been a tremendous help. I do need to draw and sculpt more, though, but my work life is not cooperating!

I think I feel a Rodin post coming this weekend. If I do, it'll be doozy.

Been just working the face and hair, very much a two-step-forward-one-step-back kinda thing. It's amazing now much time I've invested in the hair... you'd never know it from looking at it.

I realized the other night that with her mouth open like this, the nasolabial fold would be more pronounced as the skin around the mouth stretched with the jaw. I had been shying away from making it more noticeable for fear of it aging her but started working it a little.

I recently came across a book by a German author named Gottfried Bammes who was (and might still be) a proessor of artistic anatomy in Dresden. Mr. Bammes has written a lot of books, and many of them have been translated into English. This one, to the best of my knowledge, has not. It is called Der Nakte Mensch (Naked Humans) and from what I can judge without being able to read German, it looks to be one of the best references to human anatomy and proportions that's ever been published in any language. Though the link above says it was published in 1978, it was actually originally published in 1964 and has been re-published several times since, including 1969, 1978, and 1984. But never here in America.

The book appears to reference artwork both classic and modern, as well as the works of other authors in its pages. It contains a stunning number of images. According to one source, there are 840 anatomic figures and photographs of 190 separate models of all ages and builds. It contains extensive coverage of human proportions through the entire life cycle:

It also contains detailed anatomical illustrations and cross-sections, often accompanied by photographs of the same body part at the same angle for comparison. Photographs are used to show proportions and surface landmarks, and also to show center of balance and distribution of weight and effects of movement. The models used cover a spectrum of body types and ages, which is refreshing, though they are all white. Physically fit models are used to show musculature as you would expect:

but other models are used to illustrate important points, such as where fat tends to accumulate on the body and the effect of aging. There are pictures of many poses that were obviously chosen specifically to show anatomical implications of movement, and there are many places where a combination of images, illustrations and classic artwork are used to illustrate and reinforce a single point.

I only wish I could read German or somebody would translate Mensch into English. It's a treasure even without knowing what the words say.

Degas is not my favorite sculptor, but I do really like his work and I am fascinated by the fact that he was not even known as a sculptor during his life. While alive, he displayed just one piece - Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans). It was called many things at the time, mostly very negative. Yet, today, well over a hundred years later, it's one of the most recognized and liked works of figurative sculpture in the world.

At the time many people assumed that after the horrible reviews of the Little Dancer, that Degas stopped sculpting. Nothing could have been further from the truth. When Degas died, they found dozens of sculptures in his studio, none of which had ever been seen except by his closest friends and, of course, his models. The original wax of the Little Dancer still exists (it was sold at auction in 1999 for over $12 million), as well as twenty-seven lost-wax bronzes made from it. To this day, museum reproductions of the little dancer are among the most popular reproductions sold.

Here is a picture of one of the bronzes, the one at the Musee D'Orsay:

Here is Degas' preparatory sketch (sorry, couldn't find a bigger copy):

It was a different world 100 years ago. There are, as I said, 27 casts of the Little Dancer in museums and collections around the world, each "dressed" using different fabric atop the bronze. At D'Orsay, they also have sketches and a nude bronze maquette that Degas did in preparation for the final Little Dancer sculpture. The story goes that by modeling for Degas the young dancer was able to continue dancing lessons which she wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford because she came from a very poor family. It's silly, but I like the story. I like to think that she got to continue dancing. My daughters both dance, and they love it and would be crushed if they had to stop because there wasn't money.

But, it's a deal that could not be made in this country now, at least not openly and legally.

Though I generally like very polished, finished sculptures, there's something about these rougher early versions of the little dancer that I really like. The sketch has very strong lines and captures the essential forms perfectly; it amazes me when an artist can capture the complex using simple lines. The maquette is much less polished than the final piece, but still has a lot of the same power.

I've had a few inquiries about the PDF I wrote as an introduction to sculpting media. I thought I would post the link to it is here, as it has started to fall off the first page of searches. I do need to revise it; I've learned some things since I wrote this, and other things have changed - for example, the manufacturers of polymer clays are being required to remove phthalates from their products.

If you see any issues in this document concerning your favorite medium, drop me an e-mail and I'll make sure it gets fixed.

I'm being pulled in a million directions work-wise lately. I know I should sculpt - it would help me deal with the stress - but I'm often sitting at my computer until well past midnight, then back on it the next morning after a quick breakfast, with breaks only for meals. Not a schedule I can keep up long term, but it may be like this until June.

As you probably know from some of my previous postings, I'm fascinated with human proportions. There's a really, really good book on human proportions for sculptors called the "Art-Student's Guide to the Proportions of the Human Form". Unfortunately, it was published in 1883, and it's very hard to come by. When copies do show up at ABE books or on eBay, they go for hundreds of dollars, sometimes even more.

Tom, over at FigureDrawings.com has a copy, and has made a very high quality e-book version of it. The physical book is very large, and Tom has included both full spread photographs of every figure, as well as each spread segmented out into letter-size chunks ready for printing. It's really a great resource, and worth dropping a few bucks on.

Here are two low-res sample images from the PDF, one showing the full-page spread, the other showing a printable, color-corrected tile:

A low-res sample of a two-page spread

A low-res sample of a printable tile

And just for the record, I don't know Tom and don't get any sort of kick-back or revenue for making this recommendation. In fact, I don't have any advertising on this blog at all and I don't use referrer links to Amazon or other merchants. I do everything I can to make sure I'm able to give as honest of an opinion as possible on the matters I write about. In this case I just happen to think this is a great resource that more people should know about.

Last Sunday I checked out a local open figure drawing studio session. It's the first one I've found (after five years of looking!) that was both not too far away and works with my travel schedule. It was held at Neptune Studios in Utica, New York, and it was really great. I mean, well, my drawing wasn't so great, but everything else was. Everyone there was very nice and down-to-earth, the environment was casual (a must for me), and the model (in addition to being nice) was just superb. Jan Burke, who owns Neptune Studios, was a pleasure to talk with and her efforts to help promote the arts in this area are both admirable and impressive. I'm looking forward to next week already, and hoping to get some time in sculpting at some point this weekend as well. I've already dusted off my drawing supplies and bought some new ones in anticipation for next week.

If you're in Central New York and are free some Sunday night, you should think about checking it out.

So, it's now time for my current excuse for not updating the site often as I used to: I keep getting extended on my current project (day job stuff), and at the last minute, too. Just as I think I'm about to roll off, I get extended, making my work life a constant series of impossible deadlines. But, I'm going to start pushing back; I can't keep up the crazy hours forever, and I've got some side projects that I'm supposed to be working on that I haven't been able to put any time in on. And, of course, I want to sculpt. It's been almost a week since I last touched clay and that's just not good for my sanity.