BEAR STUDIES...

This over sized plasticine study for a bear bell contains hundreds of three dimensional sketches made tonight which must now reside in the muscles of my fingers as well as my imagination's memory... I still have not captured the cubic geometries of the graceful loping pose I want to keep trying to find. This would have been work much less possible in the hard wax in which I will eventually carve the final version, simply for the advantage of the relative fluidity in this very old material... I can smooch it quickly into innumerable forms to study the planes of various gestures & proportions. Of course, I must constantly look for a composition which will create a sound bow. I am designing a bell...






The fetish behind it was a gift from my friend FEK who found it in Santa Fe...

I do not use this clay often, so when I retrieved the box in which it was stored I discovered a similar study for the STATELY CAT bell, having been taped up for over a decade!



This cross-media work obviously holds more capability in study & change than resolution. It softens too easily to do any detail of the quality I can carve in the harder wax. Here is the wax with which I broke my fast into this session of design work. I'd begun this several months ago as a replacement for the original GINGKO bell, which has a history of production difficulties. I hope to resolve it differently...