| [00:01.54] |
Lesson 31 |
| [00:03.44] |
The sculptor speaks |
| [00:11.55] |
What do you have to be able to do to appreciate sculpture? |
| [00:18.13] |
Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to form in 3 dimensions. |
| [00:24.76] |
That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most difficult of all arts; |
| [00:31.05] |
certainly it is more difficult than the arts which involve appreciation of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. |
| [00:40.75] |
Many more people are 'form-blind' than colour-blind. |
| [00:45.61] |
The child learning to see, first distinguishes only two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances, depths. |
| [00:56.17] |
Later, for its personal safety and practical needs, it has to develop (partly by means of touch) the ability to judge roughly 3-dimensonal distances. |
| [01:08.40] |
But having satisfied the requirements of practical necessity, most people go no further. |
| [01:14.67] |
Though they may attain considerable accuracy in the perception of flat form, |
| [01:20.19] |
they do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial existence. |
| [01:29.45] |
This is what the sculptor must do. |
| [01:32.23] |
He must strive continually to think of and use, form in its full spatial completeness. |
| [01:39.55] |
He gets the solid shape as it were, inside his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. |
| [01:51.31] |
He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; |
| [01:57.29] |
he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; |
| [02:08.22] |
he realizes its volume as the space that the shape displaces in the air. |
| [02:15.81] |
And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as shape, not as description or reminiscence. |
| [02:25.95] |
He must, for example, perceive an egg as a simple single solid shape quite apart from its significance as food, |
| [02:34.36] |
or from the literary idea that it will become a bird. |
| [02:39.38] |
And so with solids such as a shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, |
| [02:48.68] |
a mountain peak, a kidney, a carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a bulrush, a bone. |
| [03:02.58] |
From these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms or combinations of several forms. |
