After a great deal of thought, I have decided to put the Red Silk Mermaid sculpture on hold for the time being.

The single biggest reason is the economy. If I were to finish her now, it is unlikely she would sell for some time. Instead, for the time being, I am going to make more accessible pieces. Silk Mermaid fans, be assured I am not abandoning the Mermaid, merely delaying her for a better time. My profound thanks to all the volunteers who have helped so far on the great lady. I will contact all of you personally as soon as the work resumes.

This site has become a way to connect with artists around the world and exchange ideas and techniques. This will continue as I document and construct another project very close to my heart, and also much less demanding to build. I have begun work on a new Tree Troll — a 12-foot-tall, two-ton concrete Troll for a children’s playground.

More about the new Troll, with many photos of the foil maquette, after the jump.

Over 15 days in 2005, my team of 25 volunteers built the first version of the Troll sculpture in papier mache. I wanted to discover if you can build very large-scale sculptures with entirely nontoxic materials. We succeeded, but the first Troll suffered in that it could not be put outdoors. Large sculptures are notoriously hard to place indoors; their size really restricts available venues.

This project continues my desire to work with nontoxic materials. Concrete, the only material I am considering, lets me make a sculpture that can be played on by children and adults alike. (Okay, there is bronze, but the cost would be astronomical.)

I began by making a maquette (model) to see the general outline of the piece. A friend took a lot of pictures of me in this pose so I could translate it into a simple wire armature for the maquette.

The fastest sculpting material of the 20th Century: aluminum foil and hot glue. You can do fabulous treelike textures with this, with wonderful freedom to easily create all the necessary shapes and contours.

This foil maquette took about seven hours. From this I can design the larger armature. There are a bunch of considerations:

• Weight of the concrete: two tons.
• Weight of ten adults climbing on it for a photo shot: two more tons.
• The final sculpture must be dissassembled, transported, and reassembled at least twice, and possibly more.
• Each piece must have hidden “pick points” for hooks and cables used during construction.
• All the pieces will fit together with “gravity fit” joints, held in place by their own weight with simple pin and sockets.
• The foundation has to be moved too.

I will post my approaches to each of these considerations here as the Troll project develops.

Send suggestions to improve this feed or the SilkMermaid.com website to the web-apprentice: allenvarney (at) gmail (dot) com

It took me 12 hours to rough out the hands. When I gave her the harp, I realized the harp needs to be thickened up a lot.

Hands are one of the great joys of sculpting. An aspect of the human form is the juxtaposition between the hard bony structure of, say, the elbow, and the soft fleshiness of the surrounding muscles. In the hands, the dance between these two textures is very complex. The bones are like stones in a river with the muscles flowing around them. There is movement, turbulence, and exciting interaction of hard versus soft, rigid versus pliable.

This difference gives the human figure a dynamic quality. Too much softness, and the figure becomes flaccid and uninteresting; too much hardness, and the figure is brittle. Each texture has to be expressed with clarity and distinctness. This is what makes the hands so delightful to sculpt.

Contact SilkMermaid.com sculptor Kim Graham at kimsculptor (at) gmail (dot) com

I’m doing the back scales. Scales, strangely enough, are something I simply love to sculpt. There is a wonderful underlying pattern that transitions through the surface. The best way I can describe it is through music.

When I am sculpting, I have to hold in my mind a certain type of music — in this case a classical piece. The large scales near the dorsal are the oboes, wide deep complicated woodwind sounds. The tiny surrounding scales are the piano, a delicate accompanying sound, light and airy. The delineation scales, the ones that separate the top from the bottom, are the drum beats, distant and low. There are other instruments too, small and less prominent, to fill in the sound and round it out.

Working this way is a lot like being a conductor. You sculpt the sound. It is easy to see that the composition of these scales is not, say, a rock and roll beat, nor punk — but they could be jazz. By thinking this way, I find it easier to hold the thought of the patterns in my mind for long periods of time.

The fins, with the silk and lace, will be the violins. These undulating notes wrap themselves around all the other ones and give them unity.

I have always loved the flamboyant dress-like fins of the lionfish. About ten years ago I realized that no one had ever done a mermaid based on the lionfish, so I did this one, “Coral Mermaid,” in Sculpey with vinyl fins and a coral base. It made a lovely little piece, all fluttery with crinkly edges. (Thanks to Mike Edenfield for the photo!)

The color was critical. Years ago I found a picture of a fish called hemilepidotus. This fish possessed the most glorious, brilliantly patterned fins and scales. It was a complicated dance of pattern and texture on a minute scale.  This picture truly inspired me to make the first sculpture. My little sculpture did not do the photograph justice, though, and that bothered me.

Hemilepidotus

Skip forward 10 years. My business is successful, and my studio has made dozens of large scale sculptures. There are no pressing commissions and in the down time between paying work we try to stay busy. What are we going to build for fun?

Consideration number one: We must learn a new skill that can be applied to future projects. Hey, robotics! That could be fun! We could make something move.

Consideration number two: It must be spectacular. If you are going to take your precious free time for months and build something, there is no excuse for second rate work. You cannot claim client deadlines or lousy budget, since you have control over both of them.

Consideration number three: It has to be big. The opportunities to do the great defining pieces of your career come around once every couple of years. Are you going to waste those rare chances on a less-than-grand endeavor? That chance must be used to do something memorable!

So what to do? To solve this, I referred to my Secret Book of Wonderful Things — a catchall picture album where I keep clips from paper media: shots of furniture from Architectural Digest, crystal growth patterns from Scientific American, cute cards from Hallmark. If something for some reason looked pretty or caught my eye, I dutifully purchased it and clipped it for the album. The book is bursting at the seams with dresses, parrots, paintings, microscopic diatoms, colliding galaxies, and anything that has really pretty colors.

In this book I had saved the original picture of the fish hemilepidotus. Still gorgeous and texturally magnificent, it still inspired me. And I remembered I hadn’t got it right the first time. And then it struck me: a glittering image. Those textures are so similar to the Indian and Pakistani fabrics, the ones that are so heavily beaded and embroidered on delicate silks. My costuming friends has recently introduced to me the concept of layering fabrics to create visual depth. Now, if that moved….

It would be magnificent.