kadmium

Much progress tonight, although it was more mental than anything else. I did remove a pile of wood from my block, but most of it was in the back – the part that has to be hollowed out so you can wear the mask. One of the issues of working with a big chunk of wood like this (about 10” long x 7” wide x 5” thick) is cracking, and one of the primary causes of cracks differences in moisture content throughout the block due to density. As you remove wood from one area of the block, you need to remove it from the opposing area to keep things balanced. So I spent this evening taking primarily removing wood from the back of the mask to balance all the rough work that I did on Monday.

I started out with a big gouge (sort of like a chisel, but the blade is curved up on the sides instead of being flat) and a mallet, but that got kind of boring after a while, so I tried working with an adz, sort of a combination of a hatchet and a gouge. Much trickier to work with than you might think. I finally stopped using it, but not because I wasn’t making good progress with it. I had to stop because my arm got tired. So I went back to the gouge and mallet. While I was slowly chipping away, I looked over at Joe, who decided to start working on a mask, too. He was doing the rough shape of the front using an adz and it was amazing to watch. It was so smooth it was like he was planing the wood instead of chipping at it, and really fast. When he stopped working on it to help another student, I went and looked at the mask and you couldn’t see his strokes. It wasn’t glass-smooth or anything, but I really couldn’t tell just by looking at it where a given stroke started or ended.

After I’d been gouging for a while, I asked Joe how much I should actually remove from the back to maintain the balance, and he said, “Oh, more than that.” Then he showed me how to do it. He put the gouge in the middle of the block and gave a solid, powerful whack. Then he turned the block a couple of degrees and did it again. He did this repeatedly, until he had turned the block 360 degrees and was back at his original dig. He put the gouge back in that spot and whack it once more with the mallet and popped out a daisy-shaped chunk of wood, leaving a deep bowl in the back of the mask. “There. Now you can drive your gouge toward that bowl and it should go pretty quick.” And he was right.

I just got home today and read all three entries about your new class. I am really glad you are doing something different with sculpture--that you've gotten into it again and in a new way that is part of the culture in which you are living. Keep writing. I'm fascinated.

Comment posted by Ruth | March 13, 2002 08:27 PM