Sunday evening

I'm all showered & wearing my celebration shirt, the thai one, all pillowed up on my bed, typing this thru the magic of wifi: humdullah, i have finished the sculpture! Humdullah means as G-d wills it or summink similar. Its what my sister said when i announced the status of the project... :)

The head was stuck on alright, i patched the cracks, strengthened it, haired it, tarted it all up real nice all over, making accents with the great new flexible plastering blade with teeth. Its a bit of extra texture on this one, a little more than usual. Its way cool how you can spend months building up all the forms & chunks & then in one day bring them all together with a bit of drawing on the surface. Its almost a "Doh" moment. Ah, its finished-looking now. Sweet!

i think it helped a lot that i took last weekend off. I must remember that.. you get your strength back & a fresher outlook. You can be objective about what needs doing then & just do it. Work life balance bleat bleat.

Lately I been all inspired by a pair of 2 minute podcasts about Elizabeth Frink. She used to do direct plaster too. She was real big on rough texture. The podcasts say she used to turn bright lights on her sculpture at night & move em round to see the textures well. She hacked at em with chisels & rasps. I bet she'd go off if she had some of the power tools i got. I met her many yrs ago, when i was a bright young unformed fart student - she was havin a show at David Jones in town & she rung the art schools to make sure there were some students there so it wouldn't be too stuck up. She wore a gold lame shirt i remember, looked like a bloody big glomesh handbag material shirt, which was lke real smart cos it meant *everybody* knew who the artist of the evening was. She weren't gonna get lost in the crowd. She said hello to me :) And now i'm older i know what i would have said to her, but she's been dead a while now, so.. but you get that. There were some real nice works there particularly some horses that even then inspired me & there were a couple of huge bronze heads which i never really liked a whole lot, but lookin back, bloody hell - what a massive job! To make and to cast, and to carry upstairs into David Jones.