I recently got on a hand sculpting kick. I chose that subject because hands are notoriously difficult to draw and even more so to sculpt. They are complex and have a lot of little details that need to be included like fingernails, muscles that move the fingers, the little folds at joints beween the phalanges the little bones that form the fingers. I have a distant relative that worked for  James Cameron, the movie mogul, who told me that before Jim hires an artist that works on his now iconic Avatar series, he gives them a hand-drawing test, and if the hand does not look like a human hand, they are not hired. A lot of artists will avoid doing hands and hide them in clever ways so as not to have to demonstrate their lack of knowing how to do hands. I want you to see some of my “handy work”.

I started with a famous pair of hands that go back a few hundred years, done by the German contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer. He did this as a study for a larger painting commissioned from him for a cathedral, which he did. Unfortunately, the church burned down along with the painting. All we have left now is the study that preceded the drawing seen above. This is what inspired me, and I used it as a model for the sculpture above. You may note the veins on the back of the hand and the detail of the fingernails. The sculpture was made in a clay-like material called Sculpey, a polymer clay that behaves much like regular clay but is cleaner and doesn’t need to be kept wet while you’re creating it; it is then cast in bronze to achieve the effect you see below. And if the house burns down that sculpting shall survive. 

The next sculpture is a composition that tells a story: the creation of Mozart’s last Opera, which he personally produced and conducted on September 30, 1791. The Magic Flute. He died December 5, 1791.

    In the sculpture, the hands play the flute and rest on sheet music from that Opera in Mozart’s handwritten composition, which I got from the internet and aged with tea and red wine to look like it came from 1791. My youngest grandchild, Chelsea, posed the hands.  P.S. In Mozart’s time, the flute was vertical. The modern flute is a transverse flute that evolved from the simpler vertical Renaissance flute.    The modern flute is very different from what it was in the past. It was not until 1847, long after Mozart’s death, that the flute became more playable thanks to the work of Theobald Böhm. He was a musician, composer, and renowned flutist. His father was a well-known goldsmith who helped with the redesign of the instrument. 

The company that does my casting, Masters in Metals in Oxnard, California, told me they also couldn’t cast a feather, which is what Mozart used to write. So I sculpted a feather, which was quite a feat to make it look like a real feather.

If you liked this essay, give it a like, and I will publish more handy work. I have a couple more that just did not fit into this essay.