Just Returned from Paradise

Yup!  I just returned from paradise.  More about that later as I first want to show you a piece I finished a month or so ago.  I have been to lazy to do a posting so let it go but now I need to get busy.  As I said I finished this piece a month or so ago and am particularly pleased with the results.  The reason is that I do not do the human figure, let alone faces, much and so am really pleased with the result.  This carving is a deep relief.  By deep I mean 3″, done of a 3 1/2″ slab of butternut.  The resulting carving shows up so well with the grain of the wood and color.  I did stain the wood of the cross with an Early American stain to give a little contrast to make the cross stand out.  I am particularly pleased with the result and hope you agree.  Here is the result of this effort:

"Father Forgive Them..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now to the paradise bit.  I just returned from Sedona, Arizona, a place where, if you have not been, is about as close to paradise as you can get without dieing.  My wife and I had vacationed there last year and had a ball but this trip was not a vacation.  I went to Sedona, along with a friend, John Holmes, to attend a week long clay sculpting seminar.  Getting back to Sedona, if you have not visited you need to.  While my wife and I were there we also visited the Grand Canyon.  The Grand Canyon is grand, huge, and all those other adjectives but Sedona is just plain beautiful, I personally was more impressed with the beauty of the area than with the GC.

Enough about Sedona and on to the seminar.  The seminar was Sculpting from Life.  The class, sponsored by the Sedona Art Center, was put on by Ken Rowe, who has a gallery in Sedona.  Ken is a wonderful wild life artist that works in bronze.  His work is for the most part “from life”.  What does that mean?  Like painters who take their canvas out in the woods to capture a scene as it really is, that is what Ken does.  He goes where he has access to the live animals and sculpts them from life.  That is what we did, though fortunately or unfortunately, we did not have wild animals.  We did get the point of the class, however.

The class was a very intense five days from which I can safely say I have never learned so much in one course.  Ken is an excellent instructor and imparts his knowledge in an easy manner that makes learning easy.  We had 15 students in the class, from a wide variety of art backgrounds, from jewelry making to chain saw art with us carvers in between. 

We started in the classroom with our first subject being a dog.  I have never use my pocket calculator as much as I did durning this course.  We had to reduce actual dimensions of the dog to 1/3rd scale.  We spent two days working on the dog and then went to the field for two days.  The “field” was a 105 year old ranch about 25 miles from Sedona where we had the choice of a draft horse or a donkey to sculpt.  Most of us chose the draft horse, mostly because of the size of the animal.  These animals we sculpted a 1/5th scale, again the calculators went to work.  We were all amazed at the animals, how docile they were as we measured and poked and proded them to feel muscles and contours.  The final day was back in the classroom where we for the most part finished our dogs and discussed.

As I said earlier this was a very intense course but also a very great learning experience that I wish I had had years ago.  I strongly recommend this course for any artist interested in wildlife art and animal art in any medium.  Ken only gives this seminar once a year, in April, and the class fill everytime.  You can learn about the class on the Sedona Art Center web site, www.sedonaartcenter.com.  You can see some of Ken’s work on his site, www.rowegallery.com.

Our first model

Below are some pictures from this event.

"Sculpting from Life" Class 2011

Our second model

Dog, in progress

Four Texans + Ken (left of table)

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