post.. the first

sitting comfortably?
quite some time

then I'll begin.

Following on from some portions of the last project I found myself thinking about personal representation and the concept of portraiture. For me there is a question in portraiture about what you are actualy depicting, are you making a clear representation of the physicality of a persons body? Are you creating a representation of the moment of contact between that person and yourself in time and space? Are you representing the more intangible qualities of a persons soul? Or is it ultimately self focused, is the portrait a reactive process and therefore a record of the artist rather than the subject?

lots of questions, start as they say at the start.

Representing the physicality of the human form.

One of the things i was fascinated by from a recent project was a work by Christine Borland in which she took the skulls of two unknown people from Africa and re-constructed their faces using forensic techniques. This was particularly good in the context of this topic as it is a purely physical portrait due to the model being very dead.
Interesting to note that forensic techniques modeling faces from skulls have been around for quite some time this was done ritualisticly by the people in Jericho although none of the archaeologists can decide which peoples skulls were chosen for this treatment. Although their methods were not as sophisticated as modern day forensic reconstruction

Other similar examples of this are death masks such as thisaztec mask or napoleons death mask

other than this ive been doing some sculptures and quick studies of anatomical forms,
Starting with some creative cleaning in the studio


then thinking and playing with some ideas of three dimensionality

This is relatively flat but it gave me a good oppertunity just to experiment, i like the cracking in the clay here.

Then i started in on some 3d stuff again investigating.



then working on more complete maquettes with armitures, this is a work in progress just now when its done ill post as a giff animation.


next up im gonna do some people so if youve got a spare 15 minutes to pose for photo/sketchies then give me a shout else ill have to do it myself and frankly no-one needs to see this face in stereo!

hugs! andrew