If you're familiar with my posts, you'll know I took a sculpture class in 2019 with Peter Rubino. I'd hoped to follow that up with another in 2020. The pandemic had other ideas so I dusted down his book and tried to follow the stages he outlined in crafting a reclining female torso. His book is full of photographs of the nude model from different angles which helped mimic a live model sculpture class.
Rubino's technique starts the figure by using clay blocks. Then pieces of clay are added to build up the figure. The hardest part for me was taking the my reclining female form and 'abstracting' it. Effectively this meant taking away some of the work which had gone into the realist part of the sculpture. After the first few tentative 'slices', I became more free with my abstractions. I've charted the different stages and the final sculpture which now sits in my living room, front and center.
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