I-Dare-You

The Black Madonna Evolves....

Remember I showed you how the Black Madonna got started and what the first few days of carving produced?

Well, here she is (and her child) after about 15 sessions.

I carve at about 2 or 3 hours at a time, although sometimes I'll put in a full day. Hard to do as it's pretty tiring work. Imagine swinging a 2-pound hammer all day - you get tired!

It probably will take me a good 45 to 60 hours total to create this using just hand tools. If I were using air tools, it'd go monstrously faster, but I like the pace of hand tools.

Neat to see how it progresses, isn't it?

You can see how I have raised the hand on our right up so you can now see the child's belly and the top of her thighs. It looked way too ponderous the way it was before. You actually have more latitude for moving elements around than you'd think, and I push the envelope as far as I can!

I also widened mama's chest so her breast is larger, because it was hard to see what was going on in that part. I wanted her to look like a mother, not a girl-friend, so I made the chins swing away from each other - this way they are pressing foreheads together, and that's it. I also took away a lot of that heavy hair on the side. I'll show you more when it's all done. It's pretty close.

Now it seems to me to be a double entendre: is it a child imagining being held by her mother? Or is it a mother holding her child? Or maybe it's a child imagining herself as an adult, or dreaming an angel. I like to think of it as a mother transmitting her innate wisdom to her child. Now you make up your story about it!

See more artwork at Lyon-Art.com.

The Black Madonna

On the left, you can see how the stone looks as it sits on my carving table ready to draw the deisgn on its surface.
You can see my carving tools on the table, as well.

I carve soley by hand - only hammer, chisels, files and rasps and sandpaper - no air tools, no grinders, drills or dremmels.

In the shots below, you can see how each aspect of the design is gradually becoming more distinct. I work on the whole piece little bit at a time to keep a cohesive unit.

Sometimes there are cracks, marks or striations in the stone you don't know about before you start out.

If you look below at the lower right corner of the piece in the last 2 shots, you can see where part of the stone blasted off as I struck it with the chisel.

Sometimes this is a good thing, enhancing the design - as this time it did - and other times technology comes to the rescue with epoxies and super-glues!

I have a friend who drenches very thin parts of his marble sculptures with super-glue - it makes them impervious to water (marble is quite porous and needs to be sealed anyway) and very, very hard.

Can you tell that the child is a girl? When I was a kid, I could never figure out why girl-children didn't get their time in great works of art. I know, I know, most of the children are Jesus - but here's one for the girls!