Hermaphrodite. Work in progress.

I haven't featured so many drawings of late as much of my time has been taken up with a renewed interest in sculpture. This is hardly surprising considering the number of trips I have made to Cyprus over the last few years. The Cypriots are, if nothing else, sculptors par excellence. Every autumn there is and exhibition in Larnaka of the Pancyprian Ceramics Festival by some of Cyprus's finest ceramicists. What they show is not merely pottery but sculpture in the fine art sense of the word. By extension this skill extends to stone carving and other sculptural forms. Considering Cyprus' Hellenic past this is hardly surprising.

The influence has "rubbed off" on me and my interest has been somewhat revived. Primarily I work in wood. The material is fairly readily available, driftwood or off-cuts from building site skips. Usually if I ask the foreman at the site he lets me take what I need. But partly limited by studio size and more by the size of the timber pieces my work tends to be rather small.

The two pictures above give some idea what I've been up to lately. The watercolour drawing/painting was done from a sketch taken from a photograph of the statue of Hermaphrodite in a museum in Rome. I made a few maquettes from Plasticine to get some idea as to how this may look in the round before carving the 35 cm long sculpture from a piece of 7.5 x 7.5 cm square timber. At the moment the work is unfinished. The basic carving and primary polishing has been done as shown in the black and white picture. I spent much of today sandpapering the surface and removing some of the more prominent tooling marks. This evening it was given a coating of beeswax and left overnight to let it soak in. Tomorrow I do the final polish. Hopefully I'll show the finished article later.