Sunday morning, 11. am.

Sunday morning- been for a cooked breakfast down the road and I'm now reading '200 years of american sculpture'. I've always felt there was a lot of good sculpture from across the pond. They classify Louise Bourgeois as American, which isn't really how I view her, but I'm discovering lots of great figurative stuff like George Grey Barnard and A. Stirling Calder. The americans also have a great tradition of wood carving, which seems to be a bit in the doldrums over here. Nowt wrong with good craft, but for english woodcarving this seems to impose lots of meaningless rules and too much whimsy for my liking. Have a good weekend.

Portrait session

First session (2 hours) with J for her portrait today. She brought a lovely colour with her in that sweater.



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NEw venue and mushrooms

Today I visited Doddington Hall in Lincoln as I'm going to be putting some pieces in a show there in August. It is a very well-run and beautiful old house with a farm shop, cafe etc. It hasn't been sold by the family since it was built in 1600. Even the shortcake that came with my latte was really nice. I returned to the studio to find mushrooms had started to grow out of a crack in a large sculpture that I've temporarily abandoned. Does anyone know if I can eat them?

Carving time lapse.

I'm working on the video quality, but here's a bit more footage of the hand in progress.

wood carved hand time-lapse

Here's a video of some of the carving I did today- most interesting to me are the growing number of chisels on the bench. They move around like insects as the vibrations of my chipping make them move minute amounts. My coffee cup also does it. My mate Emlyn made a massive stone egg when we were in college. It was so big he had to use two pieces of stone because it needed to be naturally bedded to go outside. As he spent a day carving the top half he would find he had moved round as the day wore on. The stone, which weighed about a ton, had shuffled round a tiny bit every time he hit it with hammer and chisel and he'd been chasing it. There's an artwork in there somewhere.

Whitewall show

Whitewall exhibition at centre:MK installed despite inclement weather. Thanks to Jessica at Norcottarts ( I think that's right ), Nikki, Ewen and Clive for being there and helping hang things. Also thanks to Alyn at the Crocus Gallery in Nottingham for coming out to meet me at the Gallery so I could collect one of the drawings. With all that help from others I really think you should go and see the drawings if you happen to be nearby.


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Many hands

More work on the good doctor's hand portrait. At this stage there are copious amounts of measuring and very methodical marking out. There's been a lot of discussion of Euan Uglow's work at the studio this last week or so, and it feels like he used a similar level of rigorous measurement as a sculptor has to apply.











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