Speak to us of Love (The Kiss) – bronze fine art sculpture

Contemplation – bronze, fine art sculpture by Neil Lawson Baker

The Gibran Sculpture Series

How enlargement works

I’ve put a larger version of the photo below and on the small bench you can see the original bronze from which we are scaling up.  The ordered jumble of vertical steel rods is the armature and that’s where the clay is going to go. That’s the next stage.  Richard Clarke, the enlarger, who is really talented at this stuff, is standing behind holding the pantograph tool.  It is a sort of mechanical magnifier, used to accurately replicate every tiny detail of the original onto the new enlarged clay.

Click on the photo for a video about the process.

See more about the finished Speak to us of Freedom sculpture here.

Recently, I went to the Morris Singer Foundry to see how the latest works in my Gibran Sculpture Series are coming along.

At the same time, I am making a sculpture of Greg Gilbert’s drawing ‘Mother and Child’.  Greg is a truly talented artist and friend.  I’m pleased to say that it is well-progressed and I met him there to decide on the size of the base and to choose the colour of the patination (which is the process of finishing the surface of a sculpture).

This work will be available in a limited edition to help swell the fundraising for Greg’s cancer treatment. www.gofundme/give4greg.

I took a short video showing the beginning of the patination process while we were there.

Here’s Greg holding the blowtorch used for patination next to the almost-finished work.

I have just come back from Richard Clarke’s enlarging studios where we are making yet another of my works.  She’s called Emily.  We’re making her in resin as an experiment to see how she looks when she’s lifesize.

It is, of course, an enlargement and this is the first stage in that process.  The item is transformed from a small bronze casting, into a lifesize statue in polyurethane foam.  Once the polyurethane is finished and perfected, it will be layered with fibreglass resin and then be coloured to resemble bronze.

Of course this could be used as a finished work, but I always cast my works in bronze and have never let a resin go from my studios.  In my view, however they may look when they are first finished, resins are just not long lasting enough.  They will eventually deteriorate, although that might take many years.  And, although they look really pretty good, resin never has the finish or lustre/patination that a bronze acquires.  That finish grows and enhances, year-on-year, in a beautifully finished, cast work of art.

Here is ‘EMILY’ being enlarged.  She’s just work-in-progress at this stage.  Soon you will see the next step in the making of this sculpture…

To see the finished sculpture, click here.

‘I Wish’ is a work which I like to allow people to make up their own mind about… I would love to hear from anyone reading this blog what their interpretation is? 

I made the original work as a small wax model, enlarging to a maquette size which I have cast in bronze as a patinated and also in a polished white bronze.

Polished White Bronze. 55cms.

Patinated Blue/Black. 55cms

 Here is ‘I Wish’ enlarged in resin prior to casting the work in bronze or perhaps making her in marble in Pietrasanta in Italy.  This is 215cm wide.