All humans need to love and be loved, which is why great sculpture, with its extra dimension and near-permanence, stands so far apart from all other art.
Why should you distinguish sculpture from the myriad visual messages purporting to be art that assault your senses every day? Advertisers and marketers, sometimes with justification, think of their product as every bit a work of art, along with masterpiece of sculpture, painting, or literature.
After all, isn’t art, even at its most basic, meant to uplift us? If advertising can so influence us to spend our money satisfying a need or dispelling a fear, hasn’t it succeeded just like art in making us feel better?
First impressions can overwhelm
Think of Las Vegas, Hollywood, Broadway. First impressions can overwhelm you: an often-violent clash of shape, light, colour, sound, and animation. The combination may challenge you at first, but with a little more exposure, a kind of immunity sets in. You soon begin to distinguish between the probable, the possible, and the preposterous.
Natives of these temples of marketing scarcely notice the numbness as it takes hold. As stimuli increase, the mind’s auto-immune response powers up to repel the legions of sensory invaders.
Reverse the process, and of course the opposite takes place. With fewer stimuli, and more bandwidth to interpret the messages that make it through the circus of distraction, meaning multiplies.
In sculpture, a complex combination of dynamics creates long-term engagement and a heightened sensation of exclusivity. For me as an artist, craftsman, and project manager, those factors include psychology, empathy, design knowledge, production skills, and process experience. I combine all these skills to settle on the most appropriate size for your work.
Sculpture’s unique character
The personality of the sculpture’s owner means every combination of these components has to vary in quantity and intensity. The variation spills over into the finished work, giving it its unique character.
I invest substantial time probing and grasping the owner’s purpose behind the sculpture. That way I can eliminate extraneous elements that might distract them from the emotions behind this act of self-expression. The process helps me uncover and reveal the essence of their personal message.
I believe the real value of sculpture lies closer to the owner’s heart than to viewers’ opinions. Our customised diagnostic questionnaire drills down through six levels of personal focus to identify the deepest desire of our clients. Visit the link Six categories of questions to help you decide on your sculpture. [Blog 31].
This initial investment in understanding kicks off a journey of transformation for you and me. The journey for you steps out in three stages:
1. an exploration of your sense of history
2. a definition of your enduring personal values; and
3. a realisation and celebration of your symbolic place in the future.
Size, scale, proportion, and balance
The bigger they are the harder they fall could have been written for sculptures, particularly those celebrating the egos of political figures who’ve reached their use-by dates.
Size can bedazzle us. Mount Everest, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, are genuinely monumental. They awe us with their magnitude and seem to put our mortal, flesh-and-blood dimensions into an almost puny perspective. Yet all things are relative, including size.
In an earlier blog, Sculpture, our closest thrust to immortality [Blog 1 Personal], I referred to sculpture as a mature art form admirably suited to maturing humans. As personal, career, or financial fulfilment approaches, you begin to recognise that mere possessions aren’t everything.
Connect to the spiritual
You yearn to connect to the spiritual, and to leave a legacy that acknowledges the human continuum. While your mortal tenancy comes to a close, others could benefit from your gift of sculpture for generations to come.
You also accept that, not only does size not matter for itself, but that meaning matters more, and good sculpture expresses meaning in any size.
Great design, and the great sculptures that flow from it, have proportion and balance. They’re fit for purpose and place. They reassure you that they belong, not only to their place and time, but that they belong to you, and you to them.
Scale is just one element that can affect viewer response. Creating sculptures bigger than required can alienate your viewer by unnecessarily exaggerating the context. More, they waste money, materials, and resources.
Not having the budget for a large sculpture doesn’t mean it can’t be effective. A higher quality, smaller scale, lower budget sculpture can be just as engaging if not more so than a poorly designed, more expensive, larger scale piece.
To get your sculpture balance right, contact Todd Stuart on +61 4 5151 8865, or visit mainartery.art about the benefits of involving a sculptor early in the process.
You might also look at other useful links: sculpture as investment, and How to choose the right sculptor to bring your vision to life.
