Occasionally I get asked what is the hardest part of making sculpture. Distilling an idea into an image certainly is certainly a painstaking process, with many twists and turns, often with starts and stops over years. But for me it is the arms. In grad school my figures were armless. Knowing my ability to cast would be eliminated upon graduation, I stockpiled a number of figures.  Later I supplemented my stockpile by taking a community college casting class. By then I was experimenting with casting them with arms.

In 1979, I impulsively added a pair of wooden arms to one of the armless castings. Our legs and body take us to places, but our arms make it possible to express and create. Because my faces are largely featureless, the arms are essential to evoking my intent. I like the contrast of making them out of a different material from bronze. By making them after the bronze figures are cast I am forced to try to imbue the figures' shapes and stances with purpose and still have flexibility to alter the arms later as the pieces inevitably evolve once they come home from the foundry.

I am far more comfortable with additive sculpting (making the wax figures) than subtractive sculpting (carving the arms). Once they are made, mounting them is by for the two most stressful moments in making a piece. Sometimes it goes smoothly and sometimes not. The first two pictures are from 2020, when I was gearing up for a show. The third picture is from yesterday, as I prepared to mount the first arm for new piece for my upcoming Umpqua show.