Out of the comfort zone

Trying new activities to broaden your mind is widely shared on the internet and I strongly believe in it, but belief and action don’t always go hand in hand. Sometimes you need a little bit more to move your a**. That’s why I regularly decide to do random choices and the farthest they bring me from my past experiences the better.🎲

I’ve been spending a year as a so-called “digital nomad” which basically means working remotely in foreign countries. Half of it has been spent in the beautiful city of Florence, a city which can light up one’s curiosity for art.

So, what could be the wildest art-related learning experience I could have there?

Sculpture, definitely.

I would have loved to start on marble but it would have required multiple years of work to reach a decent result. So the school teachers showed me how clay can be a great medium to start sculpting.

As you will see, clay is soft with you, it is a world where irremediable mistakes do not exist. It is liberating and help focus the mind on visual and tactile senses.

The first chunk of clay

When I arrived at my sculpture course in the Academia d’Arte in Firenze, everything felt magical. At least for me, being a sculptor felt like a myth, an art accessible solely to pure geniuses.

Such a belief can easily stop you from even trying if you start to think about it. Instead, you would be better off starting with a simple question:

How does one even start to sculpt?

Starting to sculpt

As simple as it sounds, one does start by finding a school, enrol in a course and hopefully end up like me in a beautiful sculpture workshop.

After a quick chat with the teachers, here you are in front of a big block of clay, a tripod ready to sustain your masterpiece and a simple goal:

Create the volumes…

And it’s not as simple as it sounds. It is actually the most tiring part.

One does not just take big chunks of clay and stick them to the board until they fill the necessary volume.

No, if you do that you will end up with a recipe for disaster: microscopic air bubbles will hide between the different chunks and at the end when you cook it (yes, you will cook it), those air bubbles will expand due to heat and literally destroy your masterpiece.😱

To avoid this fate, one must cut small chunks of clay from the main block, compress it multiple time in one’s own hands and only then, stick them on the board (or already stuck clay) with multiple strong pressure to make sure it sticks well and, no air bubble can be hiding neither inside chunks nor between them.

After 3 hours of intense physical work (and that’s not a joke), I ended up tired and with this result:

The first disappointing result

Not that awesome and quite disappointing, but that’s something I guess.

I tried my best to create the volume for the shoulders and the face. Anyone can see that it’s not round at all like a face and especially my teachers who kept repeating that I had to create an egg-like shape.

One more hour later it was finally achieved and I could start to carve.💥

Starting to carve a face

The first step is to have a skull (for real) and to look at it. The first teacher I worked with, Alessandro, explained to me how the bones actually support the human face and showed me where to carve and where to keep volumes to reach a generic face structure.

He then started the work on one side and I had to copy his work on the other side (Below on the left, you can try to guess which half face is from who 🧐).