Summer 2022

Course Description

The life-size figure is a touchstone of sculpture. To make something one’s own size, standing like oneself, with every surface, every feature– a head, a face, a gaze like our own– that’s a peculiar proposition, unlike everything else mankind makes for itself. It must have been very strange and intimidating the first time, in prehistory. Done right, it continues to be.

Since Rodin, the life size figure walked away from rhetorical demonstration, toward daily life. Which has recently been perhaps best exemplified in photography– the Beach Portraits of Rineke Dijkstra and the Museumgoers of Thomas Struth, for example. Likewise, the figure of this course is the body as lived-in today.

For the quickest possible start, the armatures will be ready for work the first morning. The pose is nearly at rest: very little implied motion, very little gesture, so “signing,” behavior trending to zero, so the body speaks for itself. This class is not an anatomy lesson, though of course anatomy is employed and learned. We ask what can be carried from the model to the clay– not everything. We think through what tells and what suggests– what makes “message” of a body? One need not have done this before to try it in June. Bring readiness to try for trying’s sake. Pure working experience is on offer—the 10 days do not include preservation of the work in clay. One takes away a creative confrontation with life, and everything it took to make Form of confrontation.

Course Syllabus