Sculpting in Art

Today we're going to start out with learning a little bit about sculpting all different kinds of sculpture. So we're going to start and open the PowerPoint and the first thing we're going to see is Easter Island. Now sculpture is art that you can walk all the way around. Architecture is art that you walk through. It is three-dimensional art. There are two kinds of sculpture. Additive sculpture like clay and wax and even things that you can just add to and change. Subtractive sculpture is like when you're sculpting a rock or soap sculpting or wood you can't glue it back on. The most primitive of sculptures are called An example would be Stonehenge or Easter Island. One of the most famous architectural finds is the Terracotta Army of Chan as part of the Qin Dynasty. Over 8,000 live soldiers were found buried underground. Horses, chariots, everything was buried underground. You can go to this website and find out a lot more about it. Just one of the many pieces of Egyptian sculpture is Queen Nefertiti. This is from the 14th century BC. You can see you can go on an excellent tour of Egyptian art and we have a virtual place that you can go to. You can click on the link. Now the Charioteer of Delphi was one of the most famous classical sculptures in the Greek age. It shows the perfection of the classic Greek proportions of the face. One of the most famous base relief sculptures is the frieze on the top of the Parthenon. A relief sculpture or frieze is when you can't go all the way around it but it stands out from the surface and it's visible from the front and from the sides. One of the great pinnacles of civilization was the art of the Renaissance from the 14th to the 17th century. The sculptures of Michelangelo are unsurpassed in excellence. He did subtractive sculpture and remarked that he saw the figure in the rock and simply set it free. Below is his sculpture of Moses. It is said that he struck it with a little hammer, a mallet on the knee and said now speak. It was so realistic. After the Renaissance we have the very elaborate Rococo style of sculpting. Here is Puget's Perseus and Andromedo, a piece of Rococo sculpture. The style is ornate and over the top. I actually have this sculpture in my living room, a replica of the Thinker by Auguste Rodin. He's generally considered the father of modern sculpture. Abstract art and cubism you also see in sculpture. Picasso did the sculpture on the left. A very famous sculpture, can you imagine seeing a mountain and thinking I think I'm going to put a sculpture up there. Borglum did Mount Rushmore. He took a mountain and was able to use dynamite and blow torches and create an American treasure. In the first picture below we see the mountain that was to become the magnificent Mount Rushmore. In the second picture we see the model that Borglum created and the third picture we see the finished work. When you do a serious sculpture you draw a sketch of it and you build a model then you create the final piece. My husband actually sculpted life-size dinosaurs from museums and he would draw it out and research it and then he would weld the shape and shoot it up with high density foam and he would put actually like a paper mache around it and then he would use needle mold which is molds which was skin and fiberglass gel and it was wonderful. This is one of the best sculptors of western art, Frederick Remington. His statue the Bronco Buster captured the spirit of the American cowboy. Here you see how to sculpt a horse head and I also have a video of how to do this which I'm going to put in the actual when I describe what this is about and you can look at pictures. You can look at these pictures and see step one, step two, and step three and you can also watch the video that'll show you exactly how to do a horse. Now here are some sculptures that my students have done and I love the fist with the ball. You can do photography. I had a student do the rabbit and then we used the back of the calendar and set it in the grass with the background and created a completely different work of art which is really lots and lots of fun. So remember sculpture is art that you walk around and now it's time to do a sculpture. So enjoy art!