Sculpture

Augmented Reality Exhibition Opportunity for Your Real-World Physical Sculpture in Public Sculpture Park

You have the opportunity to participate in a cutting-edge sculpture exhibition that is anticipated to be the first of its kind in the world: An Augmented Reality exhibition of real-world sculptures that will be virtually displayed via an app onto a real-world outdoor pedestal in a beautiful forested public sculpture park setting. Your preparation steps can be done simply and remotely from your studio or wherever your physical sculpture is currently located, with no requirements for travel or onsite installation. This unique ongoing show comes with many artist benefits including public exhibition at a popular sculpture park, association with a whole new way of experiencing sculpture, marketing of you, zero commission on sales (100% to artist), and no additional costs beyond the entry fee. We seek unique, exciting artistic visions that will enthrall viewers through both your original sculpture and this new interactive way of experiencing your art. Sculptures will be exhibited in small groups and rotated over time, with the possibility of making repeat appearances.

Up to 10 selected artists will each be paid a $500 honorarium for your participation. As an added bonus, only Pacific Northwest Sculptors members will receive a 50% discount on the entry fee. Follow the entry instructions, just pay $15 ($30 for non-members), and include a note that you are a PNWS member.

Price Sculpture Forest (www.SculptureForest.org) is Where Art Enhances Nature and Nature Enhances Art. We are a 501c3 nonprofit public sculpture park and nature preserve set within a mature native Pacific Northwest habitat north of Seattle, Washington. Visitor and media reception to the sculpture experience has been terrific and is continually growing, with art lovers strolling among the exhibited sculptures and walking paths throughout the year.

Your real-world physical sculpture will be digitally transformed for onsite display by a technology startup company we are partnering with. A custom Augmented Reality phone app has already been created specifically for this exhibition at Price Sculpture Forest. Visitors will download the app onsite (free WiFi is provided) and be able to view your sculpture via a QR code on your sculpture plaque that shows your name and sculpture title. The visitors can then see your high-resolution sculpture on the pedestal seamlessly placed within the visual context of the entire area, background, and people there. They can walk around your sculpture to see it from all angles and view it up close or from a distance. They can even stand by your sculpture and take a picture with it. The app will include artist information about you plus links to your website and social media for additional information, contact, and sales inquiries.

The behind-the-scenes technology we have developed for digitizing your sculpture is complex, yet the steps needed from you have been optimized to be both quick and simple. We will provide straightforward step-by-step instructions plus be available to help by phone or email, if needed. You basically just need a good quality high resolution video camera (most modern smartphones will work), good even lighting all around your sculpture if possible, and the ability to upload a large video file to a website. We handle everything else for you from there.

We are looking for sculptures that represent either of two specific themes, Nature Nurtured and Whimsy Way, as described in the prospectus. Go to https://SculptureForest.org/ARExhibition for more information and to apply.

How drawing influences sculpture

Sculpture takes a great deal of time to create. How do you think through a sculpture?

Not just the mechanical/technical process, but the important aesthetic work of meaning.

What do you want it to say, and how do you shape a physical object to have emotional resonance for others?

Drawing sharpens both your eye and your hand. To be able to record what you see takes practice. A lot of practice. If you’re a sculptor, drawing also helps you understand what you WANT to see. Drawing becomes the conversation between you and the muse to discover what the art wants to be.

Detailed drawings can be a blue print to follow so that the finished sculpture looks like the original rendering. Drawing can be a detailed map for sculpture, but it’s not the three dimensional territory. A flat two dimensional drawing can restrict your spatial thinking. As a sculptor, it’s your job to fully explore every angle, facet and form, even if it’s a bas relief.

These days, I use water colors to think through new sculpture. It’s so much easier to make a bad drawing than it is a bad sculpture. Don’t like it? Make another drawing. Quick drawings and loose washes of color keeps my thinking flexible, open to different possibilities and meanings. Carving feels playful, more exploration than execution. Some of that looseness even makes it all the way through into the finished work!

Look at the drawings of sculptors to see how they use drawing to think through their sculpture. Rodin’s sketches are loose washes of color with lightly drawn ambiguous lines. Think about how the faceted surfaces of his bronzes flicker and bounce light and catch shadows.

Michelangelo’s cartoons are often detailed blueprints for finished work. Look and see how he’s drawing how light hits a form, he’s thinking about volume and surfaces.

Consider your materials. If you use a pen or brush, you train yourself to see lines, through lines, contour lines, etc. If you’re using a charcoal or soft pencil, you attune your eyes to nuance of form, shadows, volume. What medium draws you?

Each drawing is another opportunity of composition, editing and thinking. As you draw, you shape HOW you see and WHAT you see. As a sculptor, drawing sharpens all your skills so you can make what you WANT to see happen in three dimensions.

To learn more about Pacific Northwest Sculptors, contact us today!

Giacometti – Charioteers Rolling in the Money

A hundred and one million dollars is a lot of money but that’s what hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen paid in 2015 for Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, The Chariot. Giacometti was a multifaceted artist who achieved his greatest recognition for his freakishly elongated spider-like human figures. A prominent existentialist philosopher explained Giacometti’s figures as depicting the estrangement of modern (post WWII) individuals living in an empty cosmos devoid of meaning.

Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture, The Chariot, 1950

To me, one thousand and ten dollars is a lot of money and I was thus inspired to carve and assemble my own Spoon Charioteer. The one hundred and one million dollar version of Giacometti’s bronze masterpiece is number two of an edition of six, cast in 1951-52, and is only three inches less than six feet tall. In comparison, my humble version stands only three inches more than two feet high (25Hx8x12 inches) and is made of scraps of wood and metal. The most cunning features of my chariot are the wheels made from Progresso soup can lids, drawer pull escutcheons, and a rusted electrical cord spool. Everyone should have a shop with such serendipitous junk. My Spoon Charioteer is really one half unpainted black walnut spoon and one half painted and low relief carved charioteer.

Robert McWilliams sculpture, Spoon Charioteer — Robert McWilliams’ sculpture, Spoon Charioteer

A spoon may seem to be a perplexingly mundane motif for serious sculpture but I have been first, whittling, and now carving spoons since 1972, so even if you send the sheriff to try to make me stop, I won’t. Although otherwise not remotely comparable, my spoons are to me what Michelangelo’s ignudi (naked men-women) were to the greatest sculptor who ever lived. Spoons combine the male handle with the female cup, the sinuous, unpredictable curves of the voluptuous mature woman with the predictable stiffness of the militaristic male and the convex with the concave; and spoons are neither left or right, or up or down, and they spoon (nest) in perfect unity.

The charioteer side of my sculpture is an androgynous, golden haired adolescent who looks to me like one of the Archaic kourus that preceded the golden age of Classical Greek sculpture. He is gloriously beautiful, naïve, and lusty. He is representative the new generation, both female and male, the one that always, and without fail that rolls in to replace the cynical, the plumb tuckered out, and the put into barn wet and tired.

Spoon Charioteer is not a mere copy like Steve Cohen’s, mine is original, unique, and still for sale.