Finishing touches

In November last year I posted about 'A sad little man with matchsticks for hair', and here we are, almost a year later and he’s finally finished.

There’s been a lot happening in my life in the intervening months. Opened a new restaurant, then closed it, renovated my house (my partner and I did most of the work, and I have the medical bills to prove it!) and started yet another restaurant. In between all that, there have been occasional free moments and I used them to finish some work.

For some reason, the most challenging aspect of creating these sculptures has been to find an appropriate ‘finish’.

                                

        I experimented with all sorts of techniques:

Besides technical limitations, there were aesthetic problems too. What worked on one piece, didn’t work on another. Some finishes made a figure look cheap and tacky; some robbed it of all its energy. It was a huge headache for me until I realised that every piece had its own personality, and that I wasn’t going to have the luxury of a one-size-fits-all finish for the entire collection. Every little phergle would have to be dealt with as if it were a living character.

Up to this point, all the previous sculptures had somehow called for a ‘serious’ finish, and they worked very well in aluminium foil and rubbed-in artists oil paint. But with ‘John Willie’, I was in a quandary. The foil route seemed too serious; he needed less monumentality and more manga. So I did two versions.

Version#1 I envisioned in monochrome, because he reminded me somehow of the drawings of Ralph Steadman and Edward Gorey. Yet stark black and white seemed too harsh, so I eventually settled on an oil paint mix of black and vandyke brown rubbed into the off-white of the casting material. This incarnation of John Willie had a sketched look, but softer, a little used, as if he’d been standing under dust and spider-webs somewhere in an attic.

 

Version#2  I deliberately made more cartoonish, which some people have remarked reminds them of a character in an animated Tim Burton movie. I used oil paint, applied with a brush, though finding a colour scheme that expressed a different mood to Version#1 was a challenge in itself. I really had to fight my

old habit of using ‘nice’ colours and come up with some that didn’t sit together too comfortably, which I think I have.

For me this version is the better, yet it’s very softness, especially the marshmallow pink of his face, emphasizes the vulnerability of John Willie.
I find him heart-breaking, and he’s my favourite.