Figurative Inspiration

(Because a couple people were concerned about the appropriateness of nudity in a piece I presented in a post last year, I am giving fair warning that the sculpture here is topless, although without any easily discernible details. I cannot eliminate artwork that includes tasteful nudity from the examples here if this blog is to fairly represent the breadth of our art form, but I do understand some people aren’t comfortable with it, so I will give a heads up when present.)

We have spent a lot of time on jewelry the last couple weeks so I thought we’d switch it up and focus on another popular polymer form: sculpture. A lot of you will think, oh, this isn’t going to apply to what I do. But if there is any form of polymer art that can be said to apply to the broadest spectrum of polymer clayers, it would be sculptural work.

We work with a sculptural material. Our initial manipulation of polymer will be sculptural, if only at the most base level of creating and cutting, punching or otherwise changing a smooth thin sheet of clay. It is still three-dimensional manipulation of a material and therefore sculptural. The tools used in figurative sculpture, consideration for how to handle the clay, textures, development of forms and mixing of color are applicable to nearly all other type of polymer artwork.

The first idea I wanted to chat about is the figurative element in sculpture — the beauty and inspiration you can take from the human form. The components of the human body come in such a variety of shapes, textures, colors, and structures; and because we are working in a material particularly suited to recreating whatever the imagination can think up, we aren’t really restricted to even the wide myriad of choices we have in reality.

Forest Rogers‘ voice in sculpture, especially as it is in our medium, is so vibrant, dynamic and unique, and her work plays almost exclusively off the human form. The breezy, almost organic transformation of this figure’s legs in this piece, Sea Maid’s Music,  echos the movement of flying, merging the human figure with the feel of wind (a visual metaphor for the music alluded to in the title, I would presume).

Even if you don’t create sculpture, the gradation of colors, the textures in the wings and the sea creature’s scales, and the patterning on the base are inspirational and translatable into any type of polymer work. And if you sculpt but tend to be more literal, does this not give you ideas about pushing representational work a bit beyond reality, or adding more motifs and movement to  your work?

Although I don’t create a lot of sculpture, I do return regularly to Forest’s pages for inspiration as well as a good heavy dose of amazement and beauty. She has a new page up, with some of her most recent work ready to click through on the right hand side. Enjoy a little time with her work and the constant question that will undoubtedly arise: “Where did the idea for that come from?”