Cut the second base off a limestone torso today, three weeks of work
Indiana limestone torso, about 90 lbs, sat on the bench since late April. The shoulders and the ribcage were fine. The base was wrong from the start and I kept carving around it instead of fixing it. That's the mistake that eats the most time. You keep finding ways to make the piece accommodate the thing you already know is bad.
Cut it off at the plinth this morning with a diamond blade, took about forty minutes, dust everywhere. Now it stands on a temporary cradle and it looks better already, which is annoying because it means the three weeks weren't wasted, they were just spent proving something I already knew on day two.
Anyway. Anyone else ever kill a piece to save it.
For the record I don't think that's the same as starting over. Starting over is cowardice. This was surgery.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
the bit about carving around a base you already know is wrong hits hard. I do it in clay constantly, keep adding coil to save a form instead of just cutting the top off and starting again, and every single time the version I should have done takes less time than the saving did. forty minutes with a diamond blade to undo three weeks of workaround, that's the whole lesson in one morning. annoying is right. but 90 lbs of limestone still standing, so.
Clay will forgive you, that's the trap. You can keep the thing alive for weeks past its death and it never once tells you. With wax and oil it's similar, I can bury a bad passage under twenty layers and pretend it's resolved. Then I scrape it all back in an afternoon and the painting breathes. Same forty minutes.
The annoying part isn't the lost time. It's that you knew. The knowing was there the whole three weeks, you just kept it quiet.
Twenty layers is a lot of forgiveness. That's the part I don't have an equivalent for. Stone argues back from the first cut, so you find out early. Your medium lets you find out in month three, which is its own kind of cruelty.
And you're right, the knowing was there the whole time. That's the real cost. Not the three weeks, the fact that I was arguing with myself and losing.
Scraping it back in an afternoon says you already knew where the bad passage was. You just needed permission.
Clay's worse for it in some ways. You can always add, so there's no natural stopping point telling you it's gone wrong. Stone at least argues back. But yeah, same thing. The fix is always cheaper than the workaround, you just can't see it from inside.
Forty minutes was the easy part. What took three weeks was deciding.