5/15/2017: A Whole

I spent quite a bit of time today working on my latest figurative piece. I was studying pictures of my own body as well as my favorite marble torsos. After a few hours, I realized that I had spent too much time trying to replicate something else. My focus was solely on how realistic I could sculpt the body. I know accuracy is a tremendously important aspect of what I want my work to portray, but I was forgetting to look at the piece as a whole. I wasn't stopping to wonder whether it was actually beautiful or not. I'm learning that I often carve with a mindset focused on the visual outcome rather than the emotional. For a sculpture to be seen as a whole, the two should be given equal attention.