07. Sculptural Bust

Artist Statement:

For this project, we were tasked with choosing an individual and creating an in-the-round bust of them out of clay. After bouncing back and forth between a few ideas, I decided to create a bust of Max Ernst; a specialist painter who I came upon while I was browsing the internet. The surrealist movement, I’d have to say, is one of my favorite periods in art history. Looking at all the dream-like scenes, I remember finding it fascinating when I looked at works by Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. I only came upon Max Ernst when I was researching faces for this project, as I thought it would be cool to incorporate some sort of surrealist element into the piece; either through some sort of symbolism or an actual artist themselves. Originally I was going to find a plain face online, and just use that as a base to expand my original artwork; but after seeing some of Max Ernst works, I decided to turn my attention towards him instead. Recreating is his face from clay, I decided to make the face the canvas for a recreation of one of his own pieces. ‘At the first clear world’ and ‘Ubu Imperator’ being some of my favorites of his, I decided to recreate a version of ‘At the first clear world’ on the bust. Using acrylic paint, as I thought the pungent colors that Ernst uses in his own pieces would come up better on the fired clay then ink or watercolor, I painted the scene of the red windows, blue skies, and trees. Though I didn't strictly stick to my inspiration, adding in a few clouds to break up the blue space and not including the hands, I overall like how it came out. If I were to revise this piece, I would probably consider adding another one of Ernst’s paintings to the scene. There's still a lot of blue space on the head, so it’d be nice to break it up somehow; maybe adding the man from ‘Pieta or Revolution by Night’ onto the top of the head circling around. In general, I’m happy with the way the acrylic paint came out and the texture of the piece.; the hair and wrinkles being a favorite of mine even though they took a while to layer.