#then i figured i had to include a karamazov since reading that book took up half of my year. and ivan was my favourite of the 3. so <3 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

brokenmusicboxwolfe · 4 years

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Day 6 without sculpting...

In a way it’s weird I miss sculpting so much. This near daily sculpting is actually a relatively recent thing for me.

Actually, for about the first 20 years of my life I can count every time I sculpted on my fingers.

My father inspired my first sculpting. Before I was born he’d dug some clay out of the river bank and sculpted a little baseball sized head with marbles for eyes. It facinated me, so at about four I dug some clay out of a ditch and tried to sculpt two full figures. I let them dry on a plank in the summer sun....and they crumbled. Amazingly, one of the heads survives to this day.

In kindergarten we had a cool teacher with his own kiln. Technically he had us making little pots. I used the scrap and made a little alien head with big almost Mickey Mouse ears that he glazed for me and a little alien with loops for arms that I colored with crayons. He left at the end of the year, takng his kiln with him.

In second grade the new teacher had us make dough art angels. This was an “everyone copy the teacher” deal, so no real self expression. Let me tell you, dough art does not last in this climate. That angel no longer existed within a year.

My parents gave me some plasticine type clay for my 10th birthday. Unfortunately that sort of clay never can be made hard, and I really wanted something that would “stay”. I barely used it.

When I was in 9th grade the art class had a paper mache project. Or at least they called it that. Really it was a structure out of wire, newspaper and masking tape covered with plaster bandages. I made a dragon, Lockheed from the X-Men in fact, but that was that. No way could I get the plaster bandages myself, and I didn’t care for the rough surfaces.

And that was that for growing up.

The weird thing is, I actually was always drawn to sculpting, but it never occured to me I should sculpt. I loved physical objects that depicted living things and always noticed when stories included sculpting. Heck, I even started writing a fantasy story involving a sculptor and magical sculptures. But actual sculpting wasn’t even a daydream.

And then one day my hands got bored. It was an unusual day, a day off while Pop was away. Free time meant I could do what I wanted. In this case it was to watch a movie (The Brothers Karamazov), read a book (don’t remember what), read a magazine (dunno) and listen to music (forget what)....all at the same time...

Yeah, I’m like that. Always wanting to do several things at once.

There I was, sitting on the floor, all these things around me, and I noticed my hands were bored. Because hands do get bored. Mine do anyway. Just ask them! Pop had some boxes of clay he’d bought for a project but ended up with some left over. On a whim I decided to try sculpting with this “proper” clay.

I made a little bust, a woman with a flower in her hair and a beastie lying round her shoulders. If you look up pics of it (all my sculpting that exists is on my blog) you will see how crude it is, but at the time I was pleased. I’d expected sculpting to be hard, but this was easy!

But we didn’t have a kiln. Well, Pop had one somewhere out in the shop, but he didn’t know where, didn’t have time to look, and wasn’t keen on me pawing around when it was probably behind some unmovable things.

So that was that all over again, the old problem of wanting to sculpt something that would stay.

And then I discovered sculpey!

Now you would think this would kick off constant sculpting, but it was more fitful at first. The trouble was, I did not want to be watched sculpting. I just wanted to goof around with it, stress free. So what I did was sculpt every time I was guaranteed a solid hour to myself. I’d usually go stand on the ramp outside, sculpey in one hand and an old dull pairing knife in the other and sculpt.

This is probably why I sculpt so quickly even now. Back then I just wanted to do it unseen, baking as soon as there was anything at all I liked about it. Now fast sculpting is just secnd nature.

After a bit I branched out, making ornaments and getting roped into making a dollhouse doll for a cousin. I also made several dolls that scale for fun and gifts for my family. I also pleased the four year old me by making a Sleestak from memory. I experimented with gluing a face on one of the boxes I’d painted. (Painting boxes was a thing for me for years) I started running out if space for the busts so I started making magnets and lining all the metal bookcases in my bedroom with faces.

But during all that I could go weeks, even months, without sculpting. I’d paint boxes. I’d write. But all these things shared a little space of free time.

We were busy. The fiberglassing business took a heck of a lot of work. There were all sorts of organizations, causes, meetings I tagged along to, obligations to my family. Making takes time, even if it’s just an hour, and back then I never had insomnia so working after everyone went to bed wasn’t an option.

Still, I made things right along until the weirdness happened. For a several years I had a creative block.

Totally.

Completely.

I didn’t sculpt. Didn’t paint boxes. Didn’t write stories. I didn’t even dream at night.

It was hellish.

I can’t tell you why it happened. I can’t even tell you why it ended. All I can tell you is was if my imagination started to reawaken in 2012, a year that at that time I thought was one of the worst in my life. It started with a painted box here and there. Slowly.

Then 2013 happened, the terrible year of Pop’s illness that made the bad things of 2012 seem pale in comparison. Suddenly I was dreaming, dreaming in overdrive in fact. The dreams I was churning out boxes as fast as I could paint them to “exorcise” those dreams. The dreams occupied my mind constantly. At night they were like serialized stories night after night, during the day I was like an obsessed fangirl disecting and rerunning her favorite show that just happened to be created by my subconscious.

This frantic box painting lasted until the last stages of Pop’s illness, when it stopped. I haven’t painted a box since.

In mid to late 2014, the year Pop died, the cousin I made the Beast doll for sent me a letter. Actually, now that I think about it, it was the last time I heard from her. She said she’s shown the doll to someone she knew that had a dollhouse collector store and they said I had talent, that in fact it was as good as many professional dolls. The cousin suggested, now that our fiberglassing business was gone I should take up doll making.

It sounded reasonable, though I completely doubted that “talent” part. But there were problems with this plan. I hadn’t sculpted in several years and didn’t know if I still could. I wanted to make fully jointed dolls, but making them by hand out of sculpey would be tricky to master. Everything I made (and make) is one of a kind and feels like a part of me, so parting with them would be painful. I needed to figure out how make it easier on myself.

I mean, there is a reason I jokingly call my sculpting “making friends”.

And so I got to work. I decided to use my werewolf box as inspiration, figuring that with these wolf people I could make them enough alike it would be easier to part with them, but enough different I wouldn’t get bored. I could learn to make mold from them, and then selling wouldn’t hurt.

This is when I think my sculpting addiction really began. Instead of sculpting occasionally I was sculpting most nights, and would stay up late when making the bodies.

This period of experimentation lasted for a few months, long enough for me to suffer the disapointment of being an outsider exhibiting at an art show with my odd fantasy dolls. I actually WAS making progress. I liked a few of the dolls snd thought in a few more months I’d be ready to go to the next stage, I even bought molding and casting materials to learn to use...

And the floor collapse happened. This started an ever increasing cascade of disasters that continues to this day.

At first I thought the interuption was temporary. By the end of 2015 I’d be back at learning to make dolls...

Obviously this didn’t happen. For months I kept making heads for future doll experiments, complete with metal loops for stringing them on. I even built a storage box to keep them all in. Eventually the room with the box started to go, so I “temporarily” moved it to the other house. It’s there still.

By then I had a sculpting habit. I needed to sculpt. My fingers would twitch around sculpey. Mom would laugh at how on nights where I didn’t sculpt my eyes would dart to the sculpey every few seconds. She would tease me about it calling to me, but it’s sort of right. In 2015 sculpting had become something that I constantly felt I should be doing.

To be honest, the addiction aspect has only gotten worse with time.

When Mom was here there were more nights I didn’t sculpt, and if I started sculpting as she went to bed she’d remind me not to stay up late. Since her stroke and her going to stay with my brother I’ve been alone. Alone to watch movies and sculpt, with no socializing to distract me and no one to tell me to stop.

Now the nights I don’t sculpt are rare (see last November when I sculpted more faces than there even were days in that month because I sculpted more than one a couple nights). The faces stick with me less though, to the point that when I post pics a month later I have actually forgotten many of them already.

I don’t do anything with these faces. I sculpt them quickly, photograph them, wrap them in tissues and throw them into one of the storage boxes I have for them. Those boxes have literally hundreds of faces by this point.

I shouldn’t NEED to sculpt.

I have spent more days of my life not sculpting than sculpting. I have sculpted more faces in the last year than most people do in a life time. Ignoring the fluke of the one face I sold, I don’t profit by it in any way.

The sculpting is a compulsion, an impulse I can’t resist. I feel a weird guilt and unease when I don’t sculpt. It hasn’t even been a full week without sculpting and it’s driving me nuts. Believe me, I know it’s ridiculous!

#sculpting #artists on tumblr #art

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tonyvanrompaey-blog · 6 years

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Mastery By Robert Greene

Okay! Let me explain to you briefly how this came about. I started reviewing books that I read almost three years ago as a means to force myself to read. You know that modern buzz-word accountability. And it worked, not so much the book reviews as I had about twelve subscribers for two years but I read more books. In fact from about the age of sixteen to thirty-two I probably read a total of three books and somehow managed to score myself a university degree in that time. But in the last three years I’ve read 80+ plus a bunch of others that I didn’t finish. I fell back in love with reading books.

Some of the books were easy reads that took a few days but I also challenged myself to get through some monsters as well. Most notably Tolstoy’s War & Peace (1150 pages) and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (900 pages). Though to be completely honest I only read around 1050 pages of War and Peace but I felt by then Tolstoy had made his point. I started with self help books, then philosophy, some business books, books on strategy, sport biographies, books on how to write as well as fiction including Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Aldous Huxley and those mentioned above.

While the book reviews ceased a year ago my love of reading and writing did not. I feel now is the perfect time for me to kick things off again as I would love to share with others the books that have given me tremendous joy. I felt a weekly review is a little outside of my capabilities so I am going to do it for that reason. I will however kick things off with rehashing some old content, but since only twelve subscribers have only ever read this before it will be new to everyone else.

Anyway, this is the second book review that I have revised and plan to send one out each week. If you haven't checked out last weeks one you can do so here. Where Good Ideas Come From By Steven Johnson

In the meantime here is a book review of Mastery by Robert Greene

A subject that I have become quite fascinated with over the last few years is Mastery; people who have achieve these extraordinary feats that are somehow made to look superhuman. We see what these people achieve but rarely do we see everything that goes into to it. It creates a real aura, almost mystical. It’s a myth in our culture and in Mastery, Robert Greene demystifies this myth. Mastery is partly based on the idea that to achieve greatness in a field we need to spend 10,000 hours of deliberate practice on that subject. Robert uses a combination of both historical figures and contemporary masters in their field. There are anecdotes about famous masters that you may expect to hear such as Wolfgang Mozart, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin. As well as less famous people in fields of science, sports, writers and artists. Robert shows that there are similarities across disciplines on the path to Mastery.

I found this book enlightening and at the same time terrifying because of the realization that whilst people are born with advantages a lot of what the great geniuses achieve comes down to hard work, discipline and of course a little luck. I again have decided again to go with the same format as last week. It seemed to work well for me and was also a good way to digest the book. Even though it is more like 100 things I learnt I have gone with 5 Things That I Learnt From Mastery

1. Hard work is more important than talent. A major hurdle we tend to encounter in our culture is the tendency to look at someone like Albert Einstein with the belief that it was his innate talents that propelled him to achieve what he did. However, as Robert discusses in this book that this is not the case. We tend to get a false picture of heroes and geniuses because we only see them once they are well known and we miss the story of how they came to be. The problem with that is we fall into the trap of believing they were special and born with a gift. This does a couple of things; one it makes certain feats seem unattainable to the average person but the other thing it does it lets us all off the hook. If people have been born with a gift and we haven’t then there is no way we can compete. However, Einstein and Darwin were cases of children who were not born with gifts, neither were exceptional. Darwin was constantly compared to his far more brilliant cousin and chastised by his father for only showing interest in the outdoors. Einstein was considered a fairly average student. His parents even a little concerned there might be something wrong with him when he was quite young. He achieved great things mostly due to his hard work and discipline. Robert says in this book that if anything about Einstein was extraordinary was his tenacity.

2. Find our ‘calling’ The term vocation comes from the Latin meaning ‘calling’ or to be ‘called.’ I love that idea even though it’s a rather different experience most of us have in our jobs. I personally can’t stand work, I find it depressing. I have had twenty or so jobs in my life and not one of them has felt like my ‘calling.’ Photography I enjoyed but it was certainly not a ‘calling' even though I did it for ten years. There is an exercise Robert suggests to find our calling is to reflect on what it was we loved doing when we were children. Children are naturally drawn to what they love so reflecting on that and exploring those old passions may be the way to get closer to finding our purpose. Whilst we may not be able to do this within our current jobs we can start to explore it in our spare time.

3. Make do with less As a culture we fatally underestimate this as a virtue. Remember Oasis “You’re a slave to the money, then you die.” Being able to get by with less actually gives us more options. When we are able to make do with less, we don’t have to work as much and can therefore spend more time seeking things that light our fire. When we get used to certain lifestyles before we know it we are making decisions because of money and that is slavery. Epicurus was an Ancient Greek Philosopher who spent his life living off very little. He decided that he didn’t want to have to work for people he didn’t like. He wrote over three hundred books.

4. Find a mentor. Robert explains that during the Middle Ages in Europe one of the most important systems developed in the field of Mastery. The apprenticeship. He explains that as family businesses expanded they needed people who could work in their business who were not part of the family. This created a problem because a family business required loyal workers not simply people who would float in and out temporarily, so the apprenticeship was conceived. A young child would start in a business at around ten and serve an apprenticeship for seven years. A contract would be signed to make sure both parties saw out the agreement. This meant that the business had a loyal worker and an apprentice would learn a craft. A system that has since been lost but recognising its importance, Robert explains is a key in the path to Mastery. The reason the apprenticeship was so successful for so many years was because the apprentice would spend so much time watching, copying, mirroring and in internalizing the mentors work until it becomes natural or second nature. We are discovering today through modern science how mirror neurons work in the brain and in fact when we see something happen over and over again it imprints in their brain. Robert also says that books can serve as a mentor at least for a while on the path to finding one.

5. We can still create even if the job you are doing is not your ‘calling’. Einstein was really selective when picking what his first job was going to be after university. He ended up getting a fairly menial job that suited him to a tee. It meant that he didn’t have to expend too much mental energy, he actually got so good that it job only took him a couple of hours a day and he was then free devote the rest of his time to his study and creative thought. It reminded me of a writer Nassim Taleb who says the best job you could get is a night security guard as they have hours of uninterrupted time for creative thinking and when they finish work nothing comes home with them.

Thanks for reading my post or scanning over it or just jumping onto the page and then leaving either way, thank you. As I said I started this originally for myself but am now really keen to share some of the amazing books I have discovered. Please sign up on the bottom of this page if you are on a phone or the top right hand corner if on a PC. I promise I will only email you once week.

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