Things I Don't Do Part 2

Today I am talking about sculpture or perhaps 3-d art for lack of a better term. I used to think that sculpture was, as someone told me, that thing you bump into as you are backing up to look at the paintings. As with many things it took me the act of doing (or trying to do) to get a fuller understanding of the nature of sculpture. Its job is to change the space that it exists in. Often a large bronze of George Washington in a park has less of an impact than a smaller indoor space and that is probably the mistake I had been making over many years. Once I did hit on this concept it opened a whole world of appreciation. The heading of things I do not do might not be so accurate. I have done some things that might qualify as sculpture, the matches I do, if used in the way I had originally intended qualify. The idea here was to have them taken as matches and used thusly. To be carried around with the expectation of discovering the art work on the inside. This is an item that one can handle and ideally changes the space it occupies in an art minded manner. So there is that. This little skeleton hand qualifies in the same way. Certainly not highbrow but it has some impact in its own way. The City of Rust , like the Poetry of Bent Nails is meant to be done as photographs but there is room reinterpretation. Then of course there is my pet favorite Green Glass works that I enjoy as an idea and a labor. There is plenty to say or argue as being sculpture. With some small scrutiny it seems I do dabble in sculpture. The reason I brought up the topic at all is that the Cicada pictured. It is something I did in the one 3d class I took. I liked the piece and was even proud of it. However when it came time to find it a home it was too big for me to take and no one seemed to want it. What do I do with it??? There were no reasonable storage options and it had to be destroyed. Clearly the aforementioned pieces are of a small scale but one assumes that to embrace sculpture it might be closer to an installation more than a curio. Bigger might be better in this scenario. My point being that to sincerely embrace the media one has to pull out the stops. This is true with painting but it is much much easier to store even a very big painting than a sculpture. I am not trying to argue against doing it but it is something I have experienced and was not happy with my solution. The Green Glass stuff has another issue. This was a guerilla art project and in many ways was successful but it is quite possible in the short time it was in existence no body noticed it. One does have trouble not having the expectation of wanting people to notice and maybe appreciate what they see. By definition, if no one notices then it isn't altering the space around it. This is tugging on the thread of another conversational sweater. One of the things I do not do is sculpture. The reason for this is that it might be too big to handle for my current lifestyle. There are many many great things to say about sculpture and its possibility. There is probably a middle ground but I think I am still trying to be a painter. ciao r.