Lesson 31 The sculptor speaks

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Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the abi8lity to respond to form in three
dimensions. That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most
difficult of all arts; certainly it is more difficult than the arts which involve appreciation
of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. Many more people are
'form-blind' than colour-blind. The child learning to see, first distinguishes only
two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances,depths. Later, for its personal
safety and practical needs, it has to develop(partly by means of touch) the ability
to judge roughly three-dimensional distances. But having satisfied the requirements
of practical necessity, most people go no further. Though they may attain
considerable accuracy in the perception of flat form, they do not make the further
intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial
existence.
this is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of , and
use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside
his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely
enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from
all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like;
he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes
its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air.
And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as
shape, not as description or reminiscence. He must, for example, perceive an
egg as a simple single solid shape, quite apart from its significance as food,or
from the literary idea that it will become a bird. And so with solids such as a
shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, a mountain peak, a kidney, a
carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a bulrush, a bone. From
these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms of combinations of several
forms.