Love is the Healing Power within us

Love and Healing. Love is integral in healing which is why I created this figure with hearts all over herself, for it is the love within our hearts, not the love from others that I am referring to.

This figure took an amazing four days to complete.
Day 1: On my way to NYC to check my mail and deliver a butterfly panel in Long Island City… she was formed during the ride over and simple body shapes were created.
Day 2: I decided the figure would be “understanding” while strolling around the mountain with Luis and discussing everything from relationships to art, I actually made her face as a sort of tutorial to show my friend how to make a face from scratch. This day I also kept working on her in a restaurant.
Day 3: Woke up early and began getting serious with her creation, I had a finite amount of brown clay in her tone so she had to be made a bit thinner than I had planned. The ideas turned from understanding to healing which is on the forefront of my mind these days. Healing takes place when we love ourselves, truly love ourselves, plain and simple. The hair was painstakingly lovingly rolled out piece by piece and curled around a needle before being placed on her head, so that she has curls instead of twists. The hearts were also placed, they came as a bit of a surprise to me as my inspiration told me not to fear Valentines connotations and just go with what makes sense to me. I put the sign in her hand on purpose. The Affirmations will have it spelled out clearly what they are about, no more reading into the postures or colors of a piece, they speak for themselves and its written all over them.
I kept the monochromatic scheme because I knew red/pink hearts would distract, so would an eye which I was going to paint on… the sign in its starkness now is the focal point, it reads, “Love is the Healing Power within us,” and that’s the real value.
Day 4: baked, photographed, and blogged!

SO again, love and healing, hand in hand. Love is a warm inner power that we all have and its easy to use, just open up and let the love flow out all over you or those you love, visualizing this can transform your life for the better, there is nothing wrong with loving yourself healthily.

Why did it take a year and six months for me to follow my heart?

Why did it take a year and six months for me to follow my heart?

I just read the BLOG posted in 2008 about how I was changing my art and my figures into what I wanted them to be which was affirmations.  I want my figures to reflect something innate, something beautiful, something human, but also something positive.  I used to have fear.  Fears of the way they might be received.  Art that is provoking and moves us emotionally is usually art that is either conceptual, or if figurative, depicted violence or pain or suffering or any of the other negative emotions of the world.  I have always been on the positive side and fought with myself to create beings in anguish.  Though I am human and go through hard times as well, I always try and see the good that comes out of them.  The life lessons.  I just read through all my etsy feeback and also the old blog and realized that I have been postponing this for too long.  Last night I checked and saw that I still owned AffirmationFigures.com, this is the name my website and blog will have from now on, why?  Because affirmations are a great way to keep our inner mind dialogue on the positive and keep it there.  Affirmations are paths which lead us to what we want, they set us free.  I have totally let go of the self-doubt, fear, and self-imposed restrictions, I know if I truly love and believe in myself as well as my art, that it can only be met with success!  People do not want to see the fallen, the downtrodden starving artist, they want to cheer you on as you become a success at what you do.  The Butterfly People/Affirmation Figures/Polymer Clay aspects, or whatever physical name you want to bestow upon them are and have always been physical incarnations of my spiritual journey.  They are still, and they evolve because I evolve as a person.  Now is an extremely important time for me to heal, get in touch with the inner self and work on myself as a person.  I have developed  some negative behaviors, and have much forgiving to bestow upon those that have been a part of my life, this done releases me and allows me to fly free. The art will follow, every step of the way.

Marvelous

This figure is Marvelous. 
Marvelous is a standing figure whose face I made by taking a mold of one of my bronze sculptures.
I used a wire spine to keep her standing and a small clay base which was covered by her draping garments. 
She loves and accepts everything about herself and so is a marvel, her life becomes marvelous. 

Health

Now is a time for healing and for maintaining overall health.  Good health is one of the most important things in life.  Eating right is an extremely important aspect, but it is only one facet of the mind, body, spirit health which encompasses overall health.  I have recently discovered that asking for help or affirming it is not enough.  My beliefs are that the power of thought influences life, even dictates it… so how could bad health come if one does not ask for it?  Internal anguish.  Horrible things like fear, anger, resentment, guilt, they must be eradicated for great health to flourish.  So now begins a journey into my wake up call, what it means for me and how I will deal with it, going inside and visiting all the ghosts that I must evacuate from my being, its all about acceptance, forgiveness, empathy, patience, tolerance, and most importantly of all, letting go.

 

The medicine man here was made recently to cement the beginning of my journey. More healers to come!

Freedom

Harlequins creation

This blog is to explain the events that led up to and during the creation of this significant work of art, the harlequin.  She is significant not only due to her humble beginnings, borne out of sheer inspiration in a moment I just happened to be video taping, my butt was freezing from a frozen bench near Central Park close to Columbus Circle.  I saw these lottery tickets and decided to personify disappointment, the figure eventually turned out to be less of such a deity, but definitely wears ruminants of the pattern on the scratch-off ticket. 

And so I began, I knew I wanted a few things right off the bat, they were to have a completely hand-made figure which means no face molds or hand molds (commonly used not due to talentlessness, but due to the time consuming work of making faces and hands from scratch) so that she would be one of a kind forever;  I wanted her smiling;  I wanted her to have breasts a certain way, hard to explain but I wanted them to point outward and be somewhat sagging, or hanging lower than usual... not idealized and more oval than round; and I wanted her to have a protruding stomach, I do not like flat tummies in my figures, i feel they are board-like and I hate them, roundness is safe and flowing.

Beginning with the face, I created a very simple face by just putting pieces of clay on where i wanted the mouth to protrude, the nose to come out, and the cheeks (since she is smiling) to be.






Blending in the clay and shaping the mouth with a needle tool, I then gave her some large flaring nostrils.


As for the body, besides what I already mentioned, I also wanted long limbs, I love elongated figures limbs for the human norm does not work well for me with my sculptures, making them seem too stubby... looking back on my figures from the past, many were bulky and stubby, I choose to have very long legs and arms, it gives the figures a flow, the large hands give gesture where there once was none.

Just the belly and breasts I wanted.

Sometimes I contort the figures, I have learned that this keeps the static forced poses at bay, and delivers motion. 


Baked, blue, and lots of hair!  Corkscrew is my favorite, some critics recently complained to me about it, stating that not everyone has this type of hair, but its all about texture, for without it the interesting shadows and roughness would go flat.
I began painting on the diamonds, altered forms of the squares on the scratch-offs seen in the photos.


Becoming somewhat scale-like, the figures pattern flows down and over, I stopped when I felt enough was covered aesthetically, i could have completely covered the figure or hardly at all.

The finished work of at, she took a lot of time, ideas, thinking and brainstorming, but was well worth the wait, she is only one of what will become a series of harlequins. 

Harlequin

You know I just cant get over, I will never be able to get over, just how amazing the human mind is, how an idea, can be made into physical reality.  We can do this in many aspects of our lives through visualizations, but literally making these figures from thoughts of my own boggles the mind.
All around us are the thoughts of all of mankind for these thoughts have become things.

Here are photos of the harlequin, jester, disappointed? figure that I completed tonight.  I will do a seperate blog narrating the entire process from block-o-clay to beautiful blue sculpture.