For a slightly different perspective on the sculpting process: Visualize that I have this one ton piece of cedar stump with a few hundred pounds of stone embedded in the root system. I see it on the beach and I say to myself, "Of all the pieces of wood I've seen on my two plus km's of beach walking this piece just stands out as the appropriate piece, for what to be carved I don't know. From a practical perspective this piece would be a little challenging to move out of the pile of wood debris, into the water, and tow a few km's back to a location where I could remove it from the water and truck it to my studio. On the other hand, it did appear to be a solid, sound piece of wood. Prior to encountering this piece of wood I had considered the 30 40 pound (20kg) Transformation driftwood piece to be a heavy piece. So, I returned to my home/ studio and got on with my life. It was a number of months before I Finally made up my mind to make a commitment and bring back the piece. And then when I got it home I had to do something with it. What was it going to be? I did have a feeling that I wanted to get inside this piece, to be inside this piece, yet I didn't know how I was going to go about doing that. My approach was, not to concern myself with figuring out what it was going to be, although I was certainly curious, not what can't I do but, what can I do. How can I move ahead on this piece? How shall I start? Clean up the outside of the piece, the bleached roughened chipped weathered areas of the piece. Expose the fresh skin, smooth out the sharp angles. The cleanup kept me busy for number of months I slowly got to be familiar with the piece. I got comfortable with it. I sanded and smoothed I sanded more, I smoothed more.
(...to be continued)
