Shadrach's Lamps

[Shadrach]

Thank you @rjohns39 @MaryJanet @Sequel @Aussie-Chookmum @bruceha2000
It came out okay in the end.

 

[Shadrach]

I've got two pieces for sculpture under way. It's too hot to be working in the sun so plenty of time to play.
This is the first piece. Got a bit of camera colour suck out again.
The colours in the wood are William Blake reds and browns. Once I had cut the front of the circle away and given it a bit of a clean up the name of the lamp got a lot easier. It's got to be Dante, or Inferno.
The very dark brown and black in the bottom is to stay. If I sand it much the colour will change. A fine brass brush gets it clean enough to oil and wax.
I've cut away most of the soft wood now and got some fabulous colours going up the tall section.
The gap between the two sections is a bit of a nuisance as is the cracked wood on the left of the hole. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that part. Otherwise this particular piece of wood dictates the theme and to some extent what can be done with it.

 

[Aussie-Chookmum]

I've got two pieces for sculpture under way. It's too hot to be working in the sun so plenty of time to play.
This is the first piece. Got a bit of camera colour suck out again.
The colours in the wood are William Blake reds and browns. Once I had cut the front of the circle away and given it a bit of a clean up the name of the lamp got a lot easier. It's got to be Dante, or Inferno.
The very dark brown and black in the bottom is to stay. If I sand it much the colour will change. A fine brass brush gets it clean enough to oil and wax.
I've cut away most of the soft wood now and got some fabulous colours going up the tall section.
The gap between the two sections is a bit of a nuisance as is the cracked wood on the left of the hole. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that part. Otherwise this particular piece of wood dictates the theme and to some extent what can be done with it.

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Wow!

Those are stunning colours and the shape is mesmerizing!

 

[RoyalChick]

This sculpture is called Arboc.
It is the first piece I've done with the intent of producing a serious sculpture.
The pictures are compressed so they shouldn't slow the site.
It's not perfect. If it is perfect then it isn't art, it's product, my friend Hugo says.
The commission was to make something people would want to touch. A step further was to make the piece portable and still touchable with no pointy bits. This meant it either had to have a very rounded base that flowed into the sculpture, or have a detachable base. I went for the detachable base.
The person who commisioned the piece had seen the basis of this loitering at the back of many of the other pictures I've posted. In essence the commission resurrected the piece of wood.
I was asked to put a carving on the piece, but the more I looked at it the more I though any carving depicting a thing would spoil the piece. One way round this was to carve a picture into the base. The tree limb carved into the base is a depiction of a limb of the tree arboc; the round thing being the fruit the tree produces.
This piece has generated some comment from people who have seen it. The pictures this time and in the light they were taken in gives a fair representation of colour. At night, in slightly dimmer light the piece looks darker and deeper.
I'm going to try my hand at some more sculptures. The lamps do to a certain degree limit what shapes I can make.


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Completely stunning!

 

[Aussie-Chookmum]

I've got two pieces for sculpture under way. It's too hot to be working in the sun so plenty of time to play.
This is the first piece. Got a bit of camera colour suck out again.
The colours in the wood are William Blake reds and browns. Once I had cut the front of the circle away and given it a bit of a clean up the name of the lamp got a lot easier. It's got to be Dante, or Inferno.
The very dark brown and black in the bottom is to stay. If I sand it much the colour will change. A fine brass brush gets it clean enough to oil and wax.
I've cut away most of the soft wood now and got some fabulous colours going up the tall section.
The gap between the two sections is a bit of a nuisance as is the cracked wood on the left of the hole. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that part. Otherwise this particular piece of wood dictates the theme and to some extent what can be done with it.

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I've just gone back to look at the post of the piece of wood for this sculpture. It is an amazing comparison.

Here it is

I hoard odd bits of wood. There, I've admitted it.
It gets worse. Not only do I hoard them but I keep a few bits in the house to study and talk to; the chickens aren't always here.

This is another piece of Arboc (strawberry tree).
It isn't suitable for a conventional style lamp and even after a rough clean up there are lots of places it could all go horribly wrong with a chisel slip, or worse still, a fumble and I drop it! Yup, it has happened.
Given I seem to have avoided a nervous breakdown doing the sculpture in the posts above, I've had a sudden flush of confidence and inspiration and though I might have a go and turning this into a bit of a sculpture.
The large hole shown in the last picture is probably going to have to go; at least the front of it. There is no way I can get into all the crevices to clean them up while the wood makes a full circle..ish.
It gets very thin in places and that can be a major headache.
Having had a bit of a prod and poke, I've been pleasantly surprised to find a lot more solid wood than I expected. What's more, there are some fabulous colours in this piece.

I'm going to split one of the cherry billets I have later. Cherry is lovely to work with. It cuts and sands easily and the pieces I've got look fairly uniform throughout.

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Have you thought about doing a "before" and "after" post of your pieces side by side when they are finished?

 

[bruceha2000]

Inferno

Perfect name! Charred at the bottom red "flame" running up the inside. The 3rd angle looks kind of like an Olympic torch.

 

[Shadrach]

This is the other piece.
It seems every sculptor I can think of at some point did the obligatory vase/pot. I think it's a bit like going to art classes. At some point you'll get to paint a vase and then in the advanced class maybe even some flowers in it.
I had this piece of Arboc lying around. It was too thin to do much with for a lamp and I had thought about making a bowl stand out of it at one point.
Not quite sure what came over me; I had been looking on the net at some wood sculptures.
More on this topic later....
Anyway, I squared off one end and stood it on my table and thought, I know, I'll do my apprenticeship and make a vase! Well, vase led to jug and then to pitcher and a few hours later I had this.

Not too sure about that half a hippy sign I've got there...it's going to have to be radicalized!
I want to keep the little vase image on the right of the piece if I can though.
The back is mostly just a clean up job. Not an awful lot I can do with it.
The sides can be made to look 'nice' though.
I'm a bit short on something suitable for the base.

 

[Shadrach]

I've just gone back to look at the post of the piece of wood for this sculpture. It is an amazing comparison.

Here it is




Have you thought about doing a "before" and "after" post of your pieces side by side when they are finished?

I have done this. The trouble is I often only remember to take pictures after I've got something worth photographing.
Also, a lot of the wooden pieces have been cut and cleaned up in a batch, before I even start to think about what to make with them.

 

[Shadrach]

I've been looking on the web for pieces of wood sculpture.
I'm very disappointed.
Check out these links. Check out those prices!
They're taking the piss aren't they?


https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/d...ulpture-mounted-on-wooden-base/id-f_11282223/

https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/d...wood-sculpture-katsuhisha-sakai/id-f_6177543/

https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/d...lptures/abstract-wood-sculpture/id-f_1196672/

https://www.1stdibs.com/art/sculptu...morphic-willow-basket-sculpture/id-a_6389492/

https://www.1stdibs.com/art/sculptu...head-italian-neo-figurative-art/id-a_6399412/

 

[Shadrach]

I got a bit carried away.
The reason I got carried away was the sculpture has a joke behind it which at the time it occurred to me just cracked me up. The chickens think I've completely lost it.
I'll try to explain the joke when I post the final pictures.
I got the big bit looking like it might get there when I though about a base. I'm so accustom to making lamp style bases that the idea of a plain support didn't occur to me for a bit.
The support/base you see in the picture was knocking about in one of my lamp boxes. It just needed flattening off.
So, I stuck the main sculpture in the middle as one does and though the base looked a bit on the long side. Standing by the work bench with a saw in my hand ready to cut a bit off I saw a scrap piece of Arboc from another project. I don't know. I looked at it and saw a cup.
A few hours later and I had a funky looking cup and now have two sculptures.

A couple of clues to the humour that got to me.
The entire sculpture is called Three pitchers.

It's an ideal gift for an incompetent middle management person prone to using all those meaningless bits of jargon.

Oh yeah, taking the links in the post above into consideration I reckon somewhere around four grand is a fair price.