[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.