Now that the main page is done, I am working on the entire web site making changes, starting with the store pages cleaning up the layout to a newer style, eliminating the rapidly outdated tables method I’ve used for years and replacing a lot with css instead.
To see the first page of the new layout, here is the url for it;
Randall on September 27th 2010 in .
I decided this fall to model a full sized full bodied sculpture after this pair of winged lions outside the Merchants bank. One of the lions was smashed twice by being pulled over, and subsequently repaired. It was never installed right to prevent that in the first place, that it happened AGAIN in 2008 after being “restored” a few years earlier, is inexcusable.
The other lion had some cracks in it and was removed, it was said both were going to either be repaired, or I assume replaced, almost certainly with cheap (to me) replicas made of fiberglass or concrete.
The lions are at sidewalk level, and they measure 48″ tall from back paws to the wing tips, he sits on a 2″ thick square base measuring about 24″ x 24″, so these are quite large! “Boxed” to measure them, they would be about 24″ x 24″ x 50″.
Back paws to his mouth is 36″, so while the photo does not illustrate the sheer scale of this compared to a person standing next to him, the measurements should give the reader the idea.
It is my belief that after a master model was made, the terra cotta company made their plaster mold of it in more than one section, by that I mean I believe the shield was made in one mold, the forelegs and paws were made in 2 molds, the wongs made in 2 molds. They would have pressed clay in each of the resulting 6 plaster molds, and then attached the 5 pieces to the lion’s hollow body.
The base was probably just slab rolled and attached.
The lions would have been stood up on a steel cart and when dry, rolled into the room-sized kiln and fired in there standing up.
The lions appear identical (which shows they were made in molds) but for their foreleg positions. The lion shown has his left foreleg and paw lower than his right, in order to keep symetry, the mirrored opposite lion would have had his forelegs and paws reversed so that his left would be the same height as the one shown.
That was a small detail most would never notice, but it shows they paid attention to that little detail!
Now coming to my modelling of this, there are some technical details I need to work out yet, such as; this could not be cast in either concrete or cast-stone except in multiple sections and then being solid it would weigh a considerable amount, I’d estimate well over 1,000#. So that leaves 2 other materials; resin and terra cotta.
Resin is very expensive, about $80 for a gallon kit, one can imagine how many gallons it would take to make something like this even hollow, so the cost pretty much puts resin off the table for consideration.
That leaves terra cotta, either pressed in or slip cast, either method would work. Like my theory on the originals, it would take 6 molds, the shield, forelegs/paws, wings.
All the pieces would have to be made so that either they are attached and fired, or they are all fired and the pieces cemented in place, both have advantages and disavantages which I need not detail here at the moment.
Another issue is this would take a large kiln, preferably one that allows the lion to stand inside it rather than being laid down, the weight I estimate would be about 600# and that’s a lot of weight on very soft green clay details if laid on it’s side or something in a horizontal low-depth style kiln, not to mention the difficulty of wrestling that much very fragile weight up, over and into a kiln of that style.
Those are some of the details to be worked out before even starting.
WIth the economy the way it is, and will be for some time to come, I don’t foresee a market for general sales on this, so chances are he will sit as unfired greenware on a dolly in my studio for quite some time before I do anything with it, but it’s a project I just have to do!
This will be the largest, heaviest, most involved model I’ve done yet, it will require a lot of special techniques, new-to-me techniques and processes, creative solutions and much more.
If per chance there’s anyone out there even remotely interested in one of these, you’ll want to bookmark this blog and also drop me a note.
I don’t know what kind of price I would put on a terra cotta cast of this, but it would have to be mostly hand finished and with a lot of time involved, it would no doubt be quite expensive.
Randall on September 21st 2010 in .
I bought an 1872 cast iron corinthian capital which I just found in Chicago. It was part of the C. Holden building which is still extant but being gutted. The capital came from the interior columns and like my small one from Nashville it has the individually riveted-on leaves.
Having always been interested in geology, fossils, as well as space, I also acquired a couple of specimens of the Canyon Diablo meteorite in Arizona which were something I have seen around for sale but hadn’t gotten around to buying. So now I have a couple of chunks, the larger one is 215 gms, about 2″ across, mostly iron and nickel.
Really awe inspiring to imagine that iron-nickel meterite 50,000 years ago coming in at they estimate about 9 miles per second, and about 80 feet across slamming into the desert in Arizona to blast out that 1.2 km crater about 700 feet deep!
The explosion mostly vaporized the meteorite, but quite a lot of fragments of the metal were blown all over as far as about 6 miles away.
According to studies on the melted and shocked each rocks in the crater, the impact force was around 50 GPa, which is to say in more familiar terms, about 7.2 million psi (pounds per square inch) or 1 billion 36 million pounds per square foot!
Of course no one knows where it came from, likely the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and probably once the molten core of a planet that might have been there. In any case, it was circling around and around for eons till it crashed in Arizona 50,000 years ago!
I was surprised to read a family bought the land the crater is on and this is privately owned! I thought it was part of the national park system or something of that sort, but no, it looks like this family bought the land around the 1900 intending to MINE it for what they thought would be a million tons of iron. Now it’s locked up as private property and no searching for meteorites is allowed. It’s become a tourist trap you have to pay $15 or $20 to even go in and look at from the top- they don’t allow anyone down on the crater floor.
I guess it’s a good thing the US Govt didn’t sell the Grand Canyon land or Yellowstone to private people, or these too would be locked up, fenced in private property with tourist trap buildings and pay-to-look deals.
Randall on September 1st 2010 in .