TÊTE DE FAMILLE

Neil talking about Tête de Famille

Project Details

Dimensions: 44cm x 24cm x 21cm (h x w x d)

Maquette: 13cm x 8cm x 7cm  (h x w x d)

Date: 2003

Edition: Unique casting

Tête de Famille

In 1994 when my ex–wife Auriol and I bought ‘Graingers’ we were already collaborating as The Lawson Baker Partnership, producing corporate sculpture in our own studio. Our works were often enlarged in Paris by Robert Haligon whose grandfather had worked with Rodin as a plaster moulder. Casting in Bronze was done by Burleighfield just off the M40 on the road to High Wycombe, where the three directors had branched out to create a new foundry after working for many years at Morris Singer in Basingstoke.

Eric Gibbard ran the business with Ted Knell overseeing the foundry and Dennis Ball, the finances. They had already had an interesting career casting most of Barbara Hepworth’s bronzes after 1952. They also worked with Elizabeth Frink, Chadwick, Armitage, all of whom I met in their foundry, together with a host of other well known names from the world of sculpture.

One day in the early 90’s with Auriol driving our old Range Rover, I was playing with a ball of wax while sitting beside her in the passenger seat with our son Tom in the baby seat behind us.  After a while I suddenly saw an interesting shape appearing as if the wax had formed itself into a small human head with man, woman and child erupting from it, as a family.

I showed Auriol. We were both amazed and rather liked it. It was us with our babe!

Eventually I had this small wax moulded and a bronze cast made. It was about 14cm high x 8cm wide and 7cm deep and was patinated green/black and waxed. For years it has sat in my studio and I often thought of that moment when it suddenly appeared in my hands as if by divine intervention. Interestingly enough I often start sculpting with no particular intent, looking for inspiration and the wax and some other power seem to just direct me and tell me what to do.

Now some 25 years later, in 2015, I have decided to enlarge that small maquette and have initially had a cast made in bronze at The Morris Singer foundry in Basingstoke at 44cm high x 24cm width x 21cm deep.

The next step is to take a deep breath and make a heroic work of ‘ Tete de Famille’ at, say, four times that size. The work to produce it is huge and the expense enormous but it will be a strong statement.

NURTURE

Project Details

Client: Seaward Properties

Size: 1.6m x 1.4m x 2.4m

Material: Bronze

Date: 2014

Maquette Edition in Wood: Unlimited Edition

Maquette in Bronze: Edition of 8 (Casts available)

Enlarged Work in Bronze: Edition of 3 (3 of 3 is available to order)

Nurture

When I first started to make sculpture in 1987, I had already honed my hand and eye skills for 24 years working as a dental surgeon. With a very large London practice specialising in aesthetically-pleasing rebuilding of badly damaged dentitions, we used advanced technically skilful gold /platinum/ porcelain bonded crowns and the then relatively new techniques of implantology. For some 40 years I looked after my patients and many became ‘friends and family’. I think we had 8000 patients in our files so we never stopped working at The Wilton Place Practice.

Sculpture arrived by the grace of God or by mistake. I suffered a needle stick injury and caught Hepatitis B and was confined to bed for nearly 4 months. My practice was cared for by my partners and my wonderful team and despite the doctors’ pessimism about the prognosis I managed to clear the virus and was able to return to work.

During my illness, confined to my room for weeks on end, I had called for some wooden slabs, some U shaped nails, some armature wire and some sculpture wax from Tiranti, a specialist outlet for sculpting materials.

I had been shown by a friend in Antibes, Kees Verkade, a Dutch sculptor, how to nail armature wire to a wooden base and then to add wax and find a shape appearing.

I did just that and unknown to me my sculpture career had begun. Sometime later, after I had a show mounted for me in Jermyn Street by the Waterman Gallery, it was suggested that I should try to find a signature or style. I began to use spherical heads and Nurture became one of the early works in my ‘Ballhead Series’.

The original maquette for Nurture was made in wax, only 15 inches high, in my studios at West Ashling and then Roger Parkes, a Chichester craftsman, worked on making an identical wooden model as the first step between the wax and the finished bronze. This was enlarged to nine feet high by Richard Clarke, the well-known sculptural enlarger at Donnington. He famously worked with the late Elizabeth Frink and also enlarged the heroic bronze work, more than 60 feet high, which Damien Hirst made for the courtyard of The Royal Academy Summer Show in 2010.

The final enlarged Nurture has also been cast in bronze and patinated by the internationally renowned Pangolin foundry in Chalford, Gloucestershire and was installed by them in Chichester on 21st January 2012.   It was kindly commissioned by Barry Sampson of Seaward Properties.  It is wonderful that these handmade works of art involve employment for so many British craftsmen. Pangolin alone employs more than 100 men and women full time making fine art sculpture for clients from across the world.

There was another very personal reason which I will share. I had suffered at 34 from testicular cancer, twice believe it or not, and I just had to have ‘the balls’ to keep going and beat the big C. This series of works (The Ballhead Series) is testament to being alive and well over 40 years later. I was blessed and healed and I have enjoyed every day since, once being told in 1972 that I probably had only 3 months to live. It concentrates the mind.

As a qualified Doctor, having trained in Medicine as well as in Dentistry I am naturally a caring human being. These works echo my love for life and for others.