Funny. I'm spending 12-15 hours a day, 7 days a week writing, which hasn't left much time for sculpting. You would think, with all that writing, that the last thing I'd want to do is write about something (aka sculpting) that I don't have time to actually do. But I've got insomnia, and I know myself well enough to know that when I'm this tired, sculpting is a bad idea, so you get to hear my sleep-deprived ramblings.

Anyway, I've had this post simmering in the back of my mind for a while. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the process of learning to sculpt because, for me, sculpting is hard. It's the first thing in my life that I've taken a sincere interest in that hasn't come easy to me. I'm used to picking up things quickly. I'm used to being the top of the class, the first kid done every test (well, not a kid anymore, but...), so the fact that I'm not a much better sculptor at this point is very frustrating to me.

What is it about sculpting that is harder for me than for many others?

I do not have a definitive answer to that yet, but I have put a lot of thought into the matter and have done a lot of reading about the nature of learning. I've got some ideas.

Those ideas are not for today's post. Today's post is about one manifestation of those ideas, however, which is the danger of "technique".

Focusing on technique or asking other sculptors for their techniques for sculpting certain parts of the body is the worst thing an inexperienced sculptor, or even a moderately experienced sculptor can do. The hard part, the important part, of learning to sculpt is all that right brain knowledge of the shape of the human body. The right brain doesn't lend itself well to abstractions and symbols, and words and letters are symbols, which are inherently the domain of the left brain.

Because they can't package up that left-brain expertise in a book, most sculptors who endeavor to write a book or tutorial focus on techniques. They tell you the steps they take and the tools they use to do certain tasks or create certain parts of the body. And, these techniques will often give you a quick jump forward in ability. The problem is, they are a crutch. And if they are a good enough crutch, they will prevent you from learning the real thing you need to learn, which is the shape of the body.

How does the right brain learn? Repetition and practice. The right brain learns by doing, and it learns well by repeated practice with constant corrections. If you want to understand the shape of a particular muscle, bone, or body parts, sculpt it many times. You have to wrap your head around the shape of the whole body, and it's not easy. No book, no video, and no tutorial can give you that. The only thing that can make you a sculptor is sculpting. Sculpting a lot.

Philippe Faraut once said to me —and at the time, I didn't believe him—if you understand the shape of something, you can sculpt it. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have come to realize that he was absolutely, 100%, totally right. Oh, there is always a learning curve with any media, always things to learn, but if you understand the shape you are trying to sculpt, those things are nothing more than minor obstacles.

To hell with technique. Focus on the shape, learn anatomy, draw and sculpt from life at every opportunity you get. The only secret, the only magic, is practice. You need to obsess over the shape and form of people, and you need to not only obsess, you need to recreate the shape of people, and compare your result with a critical eye. You need to be critical of yourself without beating yourself up. And that's not trivial, by any means.

'nuff said, I'm going to bed.

If you've been a figurative artist for any length of time, you've probably at least heard about the Pose File series of books by Elte Shuppan / Books Nippan that were published in the early 1990s and have been out of print for about a decade (not to be confused with the American books of the same name currently being published). These books seem to be very sought-after in the used-book market. They retailed for $49.99 back in the nineties, but in good condition, used copies go from about $75 up to $500 or even more depending on which volume (generally later volumes go for more) and condition; even the more common volumes are somewhat hard to find.

I've been curious about these books for some time. If you read this blog, you're probably aware of the fact that I'm a reference junkie, but by the time I got seriously into sculpting, these books had already been out of print for several years, and I really didn't know if they were worth what you had to pay for them, since I had never been able to look at one in person. Well, periodically, I troll eBay and used book sites looking for things that interest me, and these books are among the things I keep an eye out for, hoping to find them at a price I'm willing to pay. In the course of several years, it had never happened.

So, imagine my surprise one day when a search, sorted by price, showed a list of available copies of Pose File books with the first item listed for $7! The second item in the list was the same book, but was going for $78, and the rest of the items in the search went up from there. The $7 book was "Pose File 1: Everyday Perspective", the most common volume, but even at that, it typically goes for $75 or so. Needless to say, I was definitely willing to pay $10 or so (including shipping) to check it out, since I was pretty sure I could make my money back on eBay even if the book was lousy. I'm cheap, and was in no hurry, so I had them use media mail, which brought my total investment to just over $10. That was a little over a week ago, and it finally arrived today:

Other than a little fading and wear on the dust jacket, the book is in just about perfect condition. It's a good quality book, with a good binding (it is softcover, even though there's a dustjacket). The book uses very good quality paper and the printing appears to be of similarly high quality. Although, I can't find my linen tester to check the line screen, it looks darn good to my naked eye.

These books are clearly targeted at illustrators, and probably more specifically at comic book artists. That's not surprising, since comic books are considered a more serious medium in the Land of the Rising Sun (日本) than they are here with genres targeting all age groups. As a result, aspiring comic book artists are a substantial niche audience there. Regardless, it's certainly not a bad book to have on your bookshelf as a sculptor. Most of the poses are taken from multiple angles, and the lighting and photography are done so that shape and form are relatively easy to discern. The images are all black and white, which is actually a benefit for sculptors since it's easier to judge form from shades of grey than from different hues, and overall, this book is worth well more than the ten bucks I spent.

Would it have been worth the retail price of $49.99 or the more commonly found used prices? That's a tougher call. If I were an illustrator or comic book artist, I think I'd find that $49.99 was a fair price for the quality of the product, but the price you find on some of the rarer volumes would still be off-putting for me, but that may just be because I'm cheap. As a sculptor, I'm even less sure that they're valuable enough to justify the higher amount, at least based on what I can judge from the volume I bought. You, see, there are a few drawbacks about this book as a sculpting reference. I do not know if these problems are unique to this particular volume or exist in all of them, but here are the things about this book that make it less than ideal as a figure reference for me personally, to wit:

• The images are too darn small. Yes, I know that printing is expensive and that the publisher had to balance quantity and quality within a limited number of pages, but I think they erred and went too small, even though the quality of printing is excellent and you can use a magnifier, which helps some.
• There's not much variety. Yes, it's from Japan, so I expected the models to all be Japanese, but even by that standard, there's not much diversity. The few models featured in the book are all female, and they all fall within a very narrow range of body types.
• Blurring - ugh! I understand that there are business (and in some places legal) reasons to blur out the genitals, but it still annoys me. In all fairness, this book actually does a pretty good job with the blurring (especially compared with the horrific blurring done in the Virtual Pose series of books) - in most cases, they blur only the bare minimal amount of the image, but it's not perfect and it does bug me when I see it because it reminds me just how provincial an attitude so many people have toward nudity - even nudity that serves a valid, necessary, and long-recognized function

I'd also like to see at least one larger orthographic shot of each model used for measuring proportion and making scale references with. Now, I'm being really nit-picky with these complaints, and I don't want to end this quasi-review on a negative note. This is a good book by almost every measure, especially for the audience for which it was originally created. The quality of the printing and binding and photography are all excellent, it's just not a book made specifically and primarily for sculptors, which isn't really fair to hold against it.

Let's be frank here: There are no figure references books anywhere in or out of print hat would make me completely happy. We sculptors are just too small of an audience for a publisher to bother making something to meet our specific needs, and publishers know that we will spend our money on less-than-perfect figure reference works developed with the needs of illustrators or comic book artists in mind and be moderately happy with them. Oh, well.

I had intended my first "rant" to be on the topic of sculpting frustration. Oddly enough, the very act of writing this blog seems to be working miracles in terms of dealing with my own frustration, and as a result, my motivation to tackle that subject has waned a bit.

Tonight, I had intended to sculpt, but seeing as it's after 11:00 my time, and two-thirds of the children who are home with me are still awake (jeez, I hope my wife doesn't read this), I'm pretty sure it's not happening tonight. But, I've got them at least in their beds now, so I can spend a few minutes thinking and writing about sculpting.

Instead of a short blurb on what I did tonight, you're getting a long "rant" on what I didn't. You have been warned; feel free to stop reading now.

One issue that is really difficult for many sculptors, but which hasn't really been a problem for me, personally, is that of inspiration. "What do I sculpt?" seems to be a question that many sculptors find difficult to answer. This has never been an issue for me for two reasons. First, I simply haven't mastered the craft to the extent where coming up with ideas for new sculpts is a problem. If you don't often finish your sculpts, your inspiration for those unfinished sculpts remains valid and re-usable, and inspirations seems to come faster than completed works. Secondly, and more importantly, is that my main motivation for sculpting is a very deep-seated fascination with the human body. I could spend the rest of my life doing portraits and nudes and be quite soul-satisfied. There is such an unbelievable variety in shapes, forms, and surface details among different humans that you could never exhaust the possibilities.

Though I do do sculpts with clothing, props, and accessories, the human body is my primary fascination and that fascination is the core around which my sculpting "life" (such as it is) has been built. One source of inspiration that I have more than once considered interpreting into sculpture is the photography of Leni Riefenstahl, specifically her work documenting some of the indigenous people of the Sudan called the "Nuba" and the "Nuba Kau".

I do not wish to embark upon a discussion of the morality of Ms. Riefenstahl. Certainly, she supported and masterfully propagandized one of the most horrific governments in modern memory. It is understandably difficult for many people to forgive someone who helped promote Hitler's regime, and I would not ask nor expect anyone to do so.

But Ms. Riefenstahl lived to be 101 years old. She directed "Triumph of the Will" at the age of 32, and I think that it is important that if we undertake to judge another person, that we do so by judging their entire life, not just a single high-profile portion of it. Leni Riefenstahl was only one of millions of "good Germans", and we only know her name because she was extraordinarily talented and was possessed of tremendous vision, neither of which, in and of themselves, make her any more vile or despicable than her fellow citizens.

However, because of the way she spent the last fifty years of her life, we have knowledge of and a record of something that would otherwise have been lost. Ms. Riefenstahl seems to have made an honest friendship with and to have been honestly concerned about the plight of the Nuba, something that would seem to contradict her support for the eugenic policies of the Nazis.

The Nuba and Nuba Kau were fairly isolated groups of indigenous people who lived in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. By the early nineteen-nineties, the very way of life of the Nuba and Nuba Kau was being threatened by the second Sudanese Civil war which started in the early nineteen eighties. Even as late as 1991, it was estimated that there were 1.3 million people in the various Sudanese tribes that constituted the Nuba. They are now, for all practical purposes, extinct. They are not all dead. Some of them, and their descendants still live, but the survivors are not recognizable as Nuba. At least, they are not recognizable as the Nuba that Leni Riefenstahl documented.

Cultures that had survived unmolested for hundreds of years disappeared in the blink of an eye. By the early nineties, many Nuba women and children had been forced into slavery, and the Nuba men were forced to fight in a civil war that shouldn't have concerned them and in which they didn't believe. Most of the Nuba men were forced to accept Islam with a gun pointed at them or their loved ones. The Nuba, one of the last groups of people who were truly free from serious encroachment by modern strife, modern religion, and modern "values", was obliterated by the senseless violence of the second Sudanese Civil War, though most of us in America didn't even notice.

If it weren't for Leni Riefenstahl, we wouldn't have even known they existed. They were a physically captivating and beautiful people with fascinating traditions and a view of life very different from the modern western view. Some would use the word "primitive" to describe them, but that is a word loaded with preconceptions and inherently conveying a belief that one way -- the speaker's way -- is best. The Nuba culture and way of life worked tremendously well for a large group of people for an incredibly long time. It resisted change for decades because there was no benefit to changing; their culture and traditions worked well for them and it would be hard to argue that the people who were Nuba are better off today for having been "modernized" at the point of a gun. It is hard to imagine two systems of belief more different than traditional Nuba culture -- which saw no shame in bodies or sex -- and modern Islam.

You can see a documentary from 1993 on the then-vanishing Nuba culture called "The Right to be Nuba" here on YouTube. As a general rule, I have no plans to discuss political or world matters in this blog and am about as non-political as a human can be. But I can't help but be sad when I look at the stunning photographs that make up Leni Riefenstahl's legacy. It seems wrong to me, on more than one level, to think that these beautiful images from not so very long ago, represent a culture that no longer exists.

Someday, when my talent is up to it, It is very much my intention to do one or more sculptural works based on the Nuba and Nuba Kau as Leni knew and documented them; the way they existed before the Sudanese Civil War killed so many of them and devastated their culture.

If you can afford it, Leni Riefenstahl's Africa is a visual feast that you really shouldn't miss.