This three day workshop included a demonstration of Beth's building process, which she has spent a great deal of time developing and is very specific to her style and materials.
The first day was spent entirely on maquettes and armatures. I always knew sketching and maquettes are important to the artistic process and the development of ideas, but I never spent much time with anyone working on these things. Beth builds multiple maquettes with an oil based clay and bamboo skewer armatures. This gives her the ability to move the armatures many times, leave them out for observation without worrying about drying, and the skewers act like a skeleton maintaining realistic looking joints. The maquette is all about the gesture and roughing out the form.
This is an improvement for me, as I hadn't imagined oil based clay, and my maquettes are often little gestures that always are broken somehow just a few weeks into building. The skewer skeleton is genius.
Her armatures are a work of engineering genius. I've attempted to use piping for armatures before, but it wasn't appropriate for the way I build. Beth builds solid, packing clay around the pipes and using a 2x4 for shaping. People have suggested building solid to me before, but it never made sense. Building solid figures creates a much more realistic muscular structure that I couldn't get to translate in coil building. I guess I just needed some one to show me how to do it because I couldn't visualize how building solid then hollowing and compressing would work in my head.
The next day Beth continued her building demonstration and gave an in depth lecture with a power point that illustrated her entire process complete through firing (which is something we couldn't do in a 3 day workshop). I've already adopted some of her firing tips for my own work. I had to take off the legs of one of my pieces to make it fit in the kiln, and I used her techniques for including registers on the pieces and supporting the reconnection points to prevent warping during firing.
The last day was essentially a big q&a session with Beth. We talked about everything form the concepts behind her work to the many epoxies she uses (and why). We also covered her surface techniques. Beth often paints her sculptures, which if you've been following my posts, is something I'm experimenting with. Her painting process was so much more involved than mine, but I learned I should probably use a primer and should probably try thinning the paint and using some smaller brushes.
I wish I could write down everything I learned, but my time and attention span are waning. Big lessons I learned from Beth: she doesn't sculpt anything or put anything that's not necessary, she works a lot like I do for a conceptual standpoint, maquettes maquette maquettes, support support support, and sculpt with shadow. I also need to practice my mark making. Beth's gestural mark making is one of the most seductive thing about her pieces.
She also has me thinking a lot about my use of the figure. There are certain things a figure can and cannot do. There will always be a certain psychological alienation of the viewer from my figures because when do we ever see a naked person in the middle of a room. She uses animals because they are familiar and can be anthropomorphized, but different enough that the viewer can identify psychologically without being entirely vulnerable.
I'm still working out a lot of the information I got from the workshop, and I'm completely frustrated that grad school has started thus limiting my time to have my hands in clay. But mostly I'm excited to give some of Beth's techniques a try and get really big with my my lady figures.
For those of you choosing not to go to Beth's website (although you really should) here is a taste of some of her work:
1 comment:
Oh, wow. I love her work. The movement and mass of the animals is so spot on, and you're right--her gestural strokes are just brilliant.
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