Artist

I went in the foundry today to fix the nose on the big feller. His nose had either copped a poke in wax or it had maybe shrunk a bit funny. The wax does shrink when it cools.

Boy am i *ever* gonna make sure i check these things like with a microscope in future... this timing is ridiculous. Its my fault, as i should have been really anal about the wax pattern when i checked it before they cast it. But a slight squeeze in the nose is almost unnoticeable until you notice it - from then its a massive gigantic powerful eye magnet & torture device for the soul.

I think there is some shrinkage that occurs when you cast a life sized torso & head as one massive hollow wax. I'm so gonna be on this in future. I'm going to ask the foundry to cast me a plaster out of the mould as well as the wax just so we can compare the 2 things next to each other. This time was a bit strange cos i made the original in clay, and then there is no original once you remove the mould cos the clay dries up & falls apart or else more usually its destroyed & recycled.

First thing in the morn there was some dude there in the foundry i'd never seen before. We said hello to each other in the tea room & i said what kind of work do you do? And he said i'm an Artist. I'm sure there was a capital letter in it, and a fullstop after it. Ah well nuff smalltalk. I went & did some nose. Life is a bit too short sometimes innit. In my old age now i got more wisdom & less patience. Later i saw his work. Stuff like that would never have got cast in Paree in the 1700-1900's eh, rather the Academe would have had him taken out th back & shot. But then one of my favorite whinges at the moment is the pathetic state of the skills base in figurative sculpture in Aus, & i count myself in there too mind u, i really need to find a way to improve my skills. There's nobody teaching it but, cos there ain't no teachers with the skills either. What u gonna get then? What we got, shote :)

Anyway we sorted the nose out by 2pm & i had a chat with the patina guy about what we wanted. As my stars said for today regarding an important decision (yes the Amsterdam stars, yeah i know, i don't believe in it either), you can make a soap opera out of it or not, and so as i prefer not, i asked the expert & went with his suggestions of a purply-brown then a buff then a light tan-brown, and in the meantime learned a lot about the chemical personality of some of the colours as well. Very interesting & as you would probably expect it really matters a lot whether its outside or inside, what colour it will tend to change to over time & i also learned that sometimes a scratch can be self-repairing, again dependent on whether its outside or inside & what colour it is & whether its been waxed. There is so much to bronze work that really can be a life's work if you want it to be.