My regular readers might remember my recent post in August titled Occasional 3D Works which linked back to an article on memory in art, and how earliest childhood drawings of people tend to be ultra simplified blobs of head-bodies with protruding sticks as limbs, in the style known as ‘tadpole people’…
As the child grows they become more complex with the addition of facial features, the separation of body and head, hair, clothes and so on. Of course my own earliest drawings in 1949 or 1950 have long since disappeared, and I’m sure we don’t have any of our children’s or grandchildren’s, either. Parents tend to keep such things stuck up on the ‘frig for a couple of years, gradually replacing them with more sophisticated artworks featuring more increasingly realistic drawings of the artists themselves standing with other family members, the family’s house, dog or cat, grandma etc. I’ve never been one of those super organised collector types who file that stuff away organised into years, probably for the scrap book for each of their kids for their 21st birthdays, or something like that. We’ve also moved a number times since our offsprings were in kindy and preschool, and I guess that’s worked against us becoming the hoarders we might have become if we’d remained in the one place all our married lives. It’s partly to compensate for this shocking neglect that I began writing my other blog, pickledgizzards.com
That post Occasional 3D Works ended with the thought that since these were on my mind, I really should try a tadpole person or two in 3D, and this morning I took that bull by the horns. This very satisfying result is a first prototype – a wall grouping? Installation? Tabletop? as there will be more. This has a lot of potential.
I learned a lot by making this –
- It was easier and faster than I somehow expected.
- I found plenty of suitable wire in my studio that had been sitting there for years.
- I have heaps of interesting suitable bits of fabric, so here’s another potential stash buster.
- The strips of fabric wound around the ‘limbs’ starting from the feet and hand ends frayed fast with handling, so I’ll try cutting on the cross, or a rouleau tube, or wrap with thread.
- Even when packed lightly inside the polyesterfibre filling in a 5cm x 8cm blob doesn’t need further stiffening inside (so I didn’t need to cut that shape out of an old Xray sheet)
I will now retire with another cup of tea for a good read out on the patio of my current ‘downstairs book’ “A Hundred Sweet Promises” by Sephir Haddad My ‘upstairs book’ (beside my bed) is “Autocracy, Inc.” by Anne Applebaum which I’m reading on my kindle. My upstairs/downstairs system is just easier than remembering to cart the one book up and down!