Sculpture Challenge PAWS

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

This Saturday is the annual Sculpture Challenge, hosted by Philip and Michelle Hoggatt at their beautiful location for Carved Stone. Located in Dripping Springs, Texas, it is a quick drive southwest into the beautiful Texas Hill Country. The event features stone carvings in a variety of styles and stone.

I have three stone carvings in this event, two of which you have probably not seen completed before, except perhaps in images online. I have written to you about the marble “Gymnast” and you may preview her online at:

www.borsheimarts.com/sculpture/2011/gymnast-marble.htm

My newest carving is in a new stone for me: a pink limestone from Texas. This work was mostly carved during The Vineyard at Florence’s sculpture competition in the spring and fall on 2011. I finished her in November and delivered her with the others to Philip and Michelle’s sculpture garden before I left Texas.

“Ascension Invitation” is a combination of a variety of ideas that I have been working on in my studio, but is the only one that has been fully realized. I had been designing a series of figures set inside of a vertically oriented rectangle topped with a circle. The other shapes, such as the angel’s wings, fell into place as I thought of turning a wall design into a three-dimensional garden sculpture.

I like the word ‘ascension’ for its upward connotation, the meaning in astronomy as “the rising of a star above the horizon,” and well as one dictionary definition of “to go toward the source or beginning; go back in time.” And invitation seemed like a fitting word because of the stairs in the composition, with the angel pointing the way.

I hope you enjoy. I left the stone unsealed because limestone is perfect out of doors. And when it rains on this stone, she turns a deep color of pink. I hate to lose this variety of color by sealing a stone that so wants to breathe!

Sculpture Challenge at Carved Stone, Inc.
WHEN: Saturday, March 3, 2012, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
WHERE: 5300 Bell Springs Road, Dripping Springs, TX 78620.
http://sculpturechallenge.com/ (for map and more information)

Sculpture Challenge is a benefit for PAWS Animal and Humane Shelter. Admission requires a $10 per person donation to PAWS. All ticket proceeds benefit PAWS. Also, if you purchase one of the sculptures entered into the Sculpture Challenge, 20% will go to PAWS.

Why Beauty Matters

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Sometimes it is what we take for granted – or even deem as not necessary – that turns out to be the thing that is the essential difference between existence and a life well-lived. I hope you enjoy the video link below. On the following youtube.com page, you will see links to more discussions along these lines.
Why Beauty Matters by Roger Scruton

Amerigo Vespucci Anniversary

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),
Today was one of those days that caught me “with my pants down.” I mean that figuratively, of course! That means that I regret not having my good camera with me because today I received a surprise invitation and it would have been wonderful if I had not left the house nude this morning (without camera). I did have my little Nikon, but that is a POS [Piece Of S...] camera, and hardly worth the effort (read WORST PURCHASE EVER!)

Upon arriving in the studio this morning, the Maestro John Angel asked me if I would mind spending my lunch hour at a publicity event with the Sindaco di Firenze (Mayor of Florence, Italy), Matteo Renzi, that John, Lynne Barton (owner of the Angel Academy), Anna, and Jered were invited to attend. He had his good camera with him and likes the photos I take.

Today, 22 February 2012, is the 500th anniversary of the death of Amerigo Vespucci, whose name appears on two continents. Vespucci was a Florentine and Florence wants to celebrate this year with Americans through a variety of activities. The three main classical art schools in Florence (Angel Academy of Art, Florence Academy, and Charles Cecil Studios) that use English as the primary language in school are involved in celebrating the arts for this occasion. I am sure that I will write more about this as the year progresses.

In this first image, the Angel crew (Anna, Jered, Lynne, and John) are meeting up with Charles Cecil (right) at the entrance courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, which I had just visited in my last blog post.

The unveiling ceremony (which is what this turned out to be) was held in the Palazzo Vecchio’s Sala dei Gigli (Hall of Lilies), named in honor of the French, who have historically been defenders of Florentine freedom. [The Florentine fleur di lis has two extra stamen in its design, which otherwise closely resembles the French symbol.] You will see this French symbol in gold with a blue background on the walls of this room. Those are also there because much of the commissioned art back in the late 1400s was never completed by the same artists who had recently finished commissions on the Sistine Chapel in Roma.

Mayor Matteo Renzi . . . as a street painter, I am not sure what I am supposed to think of some of his actions… but then, in all honesty, other than his diverting traffic to the street on which I work on my hands and knees (see my book for more on this), I do not really know the full details of the struggles of the madonnari. I MUST learn more of the Italian language!

In this snapshot of the crowd, you might be able to pick out on the third row back: John Angel, Lynne Barton, Anna, and Jered Woznicki. In the row behind that, from the left: Charles Cecil and Sandro Zecchi.

This next shot is of the map that the three girls in Renaissance costumes and dolled-up hair unveiled. I must admit daydreaming through most of the several speeches, and not understanding the rest. However, I was told that the map of the world was actually purchased by Vespucci in 1424 from the Chinese! I cannot verify that at this moment, but I can simply leave you with the curiosity of the cat…

And finally, I was so thrilled to have been invited to such a cool thing and was thinking that it would be nice for me to have a photo of me with the Angel staff in this Palace. At the same time, it dawned on me that the reason I had lost the mayor was because his back was sitting right in front of me! He had taken the chair of the current speaker! I looked around for someone to use my camera to take a shot of me with him. One woman nearby was too enraptured by her phone and next thing I knew, a tall Italian man with an enormous press camera offered to take the shot for me. Ironically, the mayor’s eyes were closed in each one … so I leave you tonight with this image of us (with John Angel behind us) in the Hall of Lilies.

Florence Italy Palazzo Vecchio

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),
The Palazzo Vecchio (“Old Palace”) in Florence, Italy is the seat of the Florentine City Hall government. Like so many other buildings in Florence, it is also an incredible museum. Thanks to a posting on Facebook by Freya’s Florence Tours, a friend of mine and I got to enter the Palazzo Vecchio for FREE this past Saturday. I have wanted to see more than her courtyard for a very long time now, so what a fun thing to do on a winter day in the Renaissance City!

Having been disappointed with my digital cameras over the last several years, unable to take images with high enough quality to sell as affordable stock photography, I broke down recently and bought a Fuji X10. While I have not really sat still long enough to get familiar with its many features, it was quite easy to discover its panoramic 360 image maker! No doubt I will get better at this with practice, but I hope that you enjoy these handheld panoramas of the inside of the Palazzo Vecchio.

On the left side of this first image, you will see covered scaffolding as the search for a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci fresco is taking place. Links of interest:

• National Geographic writes about search for Leonardo’s art in Palazzo Vecchio: cool photos.
  
  
• Discovery News: Searching for Leonardo’s Lost Art: “At least $265,000 is needed to build a portable particle accelerator and a germanium crystal detector.” [sounds pretty cool, like science fiction, si?]
  

This third panorama is of the ceiling of the main room and the first one we entered after walking up one flight of stairs.

The rooms are certainly elaborate and I cannot even conceive of such a thing being attempted in anyone’s palace… but I was told that the Medici or other ruling families might never even leave the confines of this building. If true, one would understand the need for lots of eye candy!

Do you not just LOVE how they believed in child labor? I mean – do you see how many young ones are holding up the ceiling art?

I am including only a small sampling of the art on the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio, but you can see that the artists of the time were quite imaginative in the creatures and in the decorative way they arranged elements.

This last image is of a niche that I think should hold one of my sculptures, don’t you? Haha. One can dream, right? And, hey, why not? I could carve a stone figure that would complement this environment!

Florence Italy Figure Art

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),
I have not decided whether it is because I have no shame or whether it is just because I am a horrible liar that I am about to share with you what I am. You may remember my blog post on 15 January 2012 about my struggles to learn how to figure paint here in Florence, Italy. I often feel like a bit of a fraud when kind people remark that creating figure art comes so natural to me. It does not. I work and work and work at it. No lie.

Despite the fact that after my first day of frustration and the next day Maestro John Angel gave me a compliment in front of the whole class, I am still trying to overcome my first bad day on this painting of Federica. John Angel does watch his students paint; even if he is standing far enough away that you think he is not looking at what you are doing. Of course, I also get lost in my own brain when I am drawing and am not much aware of my surroundings.

At some point, he recommended that the class do as I was doing – cross referencing relationships using triangles. I have always felt that the more relationships I make (or notice) between specific points, the more my drawing will be successful. In this case, I had used my knitting needle to determine the position of the hand based on the line formed by a point in the shoulder and the belly button… or something similar that escapes my memory now.

I have failed somehow to get the gesture I once was happy with and I have yet to return to that first drawing that I erased during my frustration spell. Still, with refinement of the shapes I am designing, I hope to “scootch” my way back to something depicting emotion.

So, are you ready? Scary gets less so, I hope…

Image 1: really horrifying … no gesture, bad proportions. The only emotion I feel when looking at this is embarrassment.

Image 2: I am attempting to get the face, but it is still too narrow and poorly done. Her belly is way too round, and … need I go on?

Image 3: Frustrated with my own work, I chose to move on through the process. Here I have left behind the sketching in raw umber in favor of adding the light tones using Titanium White and Ivory Black. I have started the Big Form Modeling, the beginning of the process of creating the illusion of three dimensions.

Image 4: More shape refining, especially in the face, is starting to occur. My figure is looking better, but is still off on too many proportions.

Image 5: Another reason that I am here is to learn to be a painter. As John Angel has been lecturing us, poets use words, musicians use notes, and painters are in love with shapes. But also, we love the quality of PAINT! My tendency is to use too little. Ironic since it was originally the “squishability” factor of oil paint that led me to want to play with clay.

Image 6: By this time, Frederica had cut her hair into a shorter do that is quite attractive. In my attempt to refine the shapes in the face and still use this particular style of a grisaille (white and black) painting with a brown shadow tone, I have added yellow ochre to my raw umber to give some opacity to the browns.

Image 7: Still, so many problems with my shapes! However, I am starting to feel that I am beginning to capture her emotion of at least boredom. Sometimes the model looks teary eyed. She said this happens when her contact lenses start to bother her, but I actually enjoy the sad and pensive expression this gives her. It suits the slumped over posture as well, do you not agree?

And since I prefer not to end this session with any ugliness, here is one of the more subtle skies over my beloved Florence, Italy. Some days, I happened to walk out of the studio at just the most beautiful hour! Enjoy.

Designing the Figure Art

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),
I spend half of my weekdays working with an art model named Federica. She is really cute and a trooper to model in the winter time. Like my apartment here in Florence, Italy, sometimes the old doors and windows do not fully CLOSE! The studio now has a piece of glass missing as someone tried to close an unreachable window all the way. Using a ladder and climbing as high as I could, I used a stick today to “secure” a piece of cardboard over part of the window. It was a horrible fix (the cardboard I found was not large enough), but as Federica and I agreed, “Meglio di niente” (better than nothing).

I include here some of my daily snapshots from some time ago to show you a bit of the process. I am painting a grisaille, but instead of using black and white, I am painting with Titanium White (Michael Harding brand) and Rembrandt’s Van Dyke Brown. It makes a warmer gray. I am painting on an primed linen (I think) canvas with a loose gray campitura (starting background color), tacked onto 80 x 40 cm stretcher bars.

Image 1: Blocking-in the mass of the figure, trying to capture the gesture in the form.

Image 2: I have now drawn in my contour lines of the figure’s main parts, the background props, and have even designed my shadow shapes and colored them in (except for the face). The face took more time because of the more intricate shapes that I needed to design. I say design because the goal is not to “copy” the live model in front of me, but to use her as an inspiration or reference for my own creation.

Image 3: Now the face. I am amused by this because this face reminds me of my cousin Carrie a bit. And NOT the model. We all tend to draw ourselves [family being a part of the same face(s) that we see most often].

Image 4: Now I painted in opaque paint two tones for each background segment… designing the darks and lights of the background (wall); the tall black box [box in light and box in shadow], and the stool (here not differentiated so well yet: the stool in light and the stool in shadow).

Image 5: I love this image! I added an averaged light tone to the figure in light. Now you may truly understand how my figure is really only a pattern of abstracted shapes! Federica had just gotten her hair cut into a new do – and it is really cool on her!

Image 6: Close-up shot of the abstract design.

Image 7: Here you can see that I have started creating the “Big Form Modeling” to change my 2-tone design into something that begins to look three-dimensional. I have always been a “butt and legs man” so I tend to start with the pelvis and work my way down.

Stay tuned . . .

Universal Through the Personal Artist Interview

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

Cool - this interview by Andrew Cahner on the site “Artist-Perspective.com” in California just went online: http://www.artist-perspectives.com/interviews/kelly-borsheim.htm