Just what I have…

…another hunk of plastic.

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A collaborative sculpture made by Lehigh and an anonymous sculptor many years ago: it’s a toy indian that she chewed up a while back. Lately I’ve been wondering about who it was that acually sculpted all those army men, farm animals, cowboys, etc. The original of each had to be made by hand. How many billions of those tiny figures are there in the world? How ubiquitous is that hand work, and what did that person get paid for it? What criteria did they use for success of the sculpture? When did they decide they were done? Which ones failed? Each had to be made not only with considerations of how it would stand up, but how it would work with the molding process. It’s just a two piece mold, so how can you get any twist into the figure without making the mold too complex?

Look at the modeling on that hand; it’s less than an eigth of an inch wide. Why make all the fingers? Devotion to an ideal that will barely, if ever, be noticed. I find that moving, and I wish that more artists practiced it.

Here’s the sculpture that we all first imprinted on – our first understanding of figure and base, our first bit of projecting personality onto a piece of inert stuff.

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