heatherbeck
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Venus, Part 3
🕑 Added 2020-06-17 22:03:19 +0000 UTCIt occurred to me that y'all might be interested in seeing the finished products! If you'll recall, long story short, a friend of mine approached me with an idea. She'd been getting back into sculpting during this whole quarantine nonsense, and asked me if she could use my body as inspiration. To which I was like, heck yeah! Sounds like fun!
So, the finished pieces arrived, and I have to say, I'm positively thrilled. Not only was it very kind of her, but I've never been sculpted before, even in the abstract — her one caveat was that my body would be used for the main inspiration only, and that she would have whatever freedom she wanted to use her own instinct. I think that's the bee's knees. As a somewhat creative person myself, I appreciate it when folks "respect the vision;" when it comes to someone using their creativity, I tend to veer away from micromanaging as much as possible.
"Creativity lies in the limitations," as someone once said. "Draw me a picture" doesn't give a person a lot to go on; "Draw a loaf of bread?" That's a limitation where creativity can thrive. "Draw me a photo-realistic, 20-slice loaf of Wonder Bread on a gingham picnic table cover?" At that point, you're asking someone to be a human Xerox machine, and that's no fun. It's somewhere in the middle.
In this case, she had her "limitation." It's been a while since we'd seen each other in person (and even then, I was all bra'd up), so when she asked me to send along a few easy reference shots, I was happy to oblige:
So, she got to work; a little while back, I showed you the pre-fired iterations. She DID have one question for me: what about the color? I thought about it. "Balanced Stillness," the top one, I thought would look nice in a cool, refreshing blue. The bottom one, "Dancing Queen," I thought would benefit from a fiery, deep red.
So imagine that feeling of "Oh, fuck..." that she felt when she wrote a VERY apologetic letter to me, saying that she had accidentally swapped the colors. Which I thought was so sweet... First of all, this was something she was doing for me as a kindness, so where should she even have to apologize for anything? Second, as Bob Ross once said, "there are no mistakes — only happy accidents." And third? I'm glad it turned out the way it did! There was a reason, I like to think, that she was inclined to switch the colors up. That same creative instinct I was talking about earlier.
And the fun part? I really love how they turned out, even more. There's a deeper layer of meaning in the switched-up colors, and if I had it to do again, I would keep them as-is.
So yay! I have some eccentric decoration for my bookshelf, long until I'm an old lady. :-)
And actually... this whole process has inspired me a bit, too... But that'll be the topic of my next post, which will be a video of me sweeping the floor, accompanied by an essay about the importance of supporting visual artists. Hizzah?!
Comments
Stephen Prandy
The sculpture looks magnificent only pales in comparison to the real you
Petrafied
As striking as the Venus of Willendorf herself! :P Somewhat off-topic tangent: my favorite theory is that Venus statues werent fertility or ritual tools but were instead self-depictions from ancient women carvers looking downward at their bodies, hence the exaggerations.
