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Knowing that I would be feeling stressed in late January, I decided to sign up for an adventurous distraction, a two-week sculpture marathon at the New York Studio School.  

The marathons are open to enrolled students as well as outsiders like me.  They are a way to get students ready for the new semester by plunging them into a full day of creative work, from 9-6pm, every day for ten days.  It is intense and strenuous, and also a wonderful way to grow and learn quickly.

The course was taught by the accomplished sculptor, Carl d’Avilia, who was teaching at the studio school for the first time.  My fellow students ranged from painting and sculpture MFA students to first-year certificate program students, fresh out of high school, to people like me, who wanted to be in this immersive experience for a short time.

The beautiful studio space where our classes were held turned out to be the original sculpture studio of Gertrude Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a very well-known sculptor in her own right.  The school was the original home of the Whitney Museum, and the building still has many historic remnants from its days before the construction of the modern Whitney Museum.

The first three days we worked from a live model.  Day one was a full figure pose in clay on a wire armature.  I started strong, filling in the form quickly, and worked steadily all day- but around 3:00, I think my progress began to regress.  As I refined and smoothed my clay, the freshness and gesture that were captured early on, got smoothed away, and soon I had a doll form instead of a lively figure.  At the end of the day, we had a group discussion and critique of the work, and then we were instructed to take the whole thing apart to start fresh the next day.  

The second day we did a seated pose, and the third day a portrait bust.  The model was amazing, sitting long hours in uncomfortable poses.  I tried hard to capture her features in this portrait bust.  Working in 3D is hard if you are used to painting and drawing.  A face is a round shape, and Carl kept saying” Everything must go back!” By which he meant the features of the face are pushed back, as in a ball shape.  While I felt I had done ok with the full-on view of the face, the proportions of the head-to-neck in the side views fell short.  I was only a little sorry to pull the whole thing apart at the end of the class.

The next day we visited Tribeca art galleries in lower Manhattan.  I was not familiar with all the interesting galleries in this area.  We saw about a dozen shows- the highlights of which were sculptures by Juliane Jones at 15 Orient.

The stated goal of the class was to create something that was the opposite of what you usually do, so on the fifth day, we spent some time looking at the work of our classmates and discussing what the opposite of their usual practice might look like.

The final four days were spent working on individual projects.  My choice was to create a sort of imaginary molecular shape using balls and rods.  I created my balls by dipping styrofoam Christmas ornaments into layers of wet plaster and then drilling holes into them.  The piece was held together with stiff wire spikes.  In the end, I had something that was unlike anything I had made before, but which related to some of my geometric abstractions.

At the end of the course, I disassembled my sculpture and brought the pieces home in my suitcase.  I have yet to try to reassemble the work.

All in all, this experience was a wonderful and challenging distraction from the many things going on in the world and I find myself tempted to go back to school to pursue an MFA- if only to prolong the experience of working intensely alongside a community of artists.