| Work
continues while fundraising heats up for Vigil sculpture
By Jack Kintner
Blaine’s
Pacific Arts Association hopes to install the Bob McDermott
sculpture known as the Vigil next September on the plaza
at the H Street end of the boardwalk. While fundraising
continues, McDermott is overseeing the complex process
that will produce a 1,200-pound life size bronze version
of his original 23-inch clay statue of three people waiting
on shore for fishermen to return to port.
The
sculpture will be enlarged and then cast in bronze using
a lost wax process that takes both time and travel. “We
put a little over 4,300 miles on the car going to Los
Angeles just to get the original enlarged,” said
McDermott’s
wife Joan, “with a side trip to a gallery Bob wanted
to see in Phoenix.”
The
actual sculpting and casting process is expensive, prompting
sculptors like McDermott to refine their original ideas
before working the clay even if it takes years. In this
case he noticed some years ago that none of the fishermen’s
memorials he’d seen say anything about the families
left behind. It gave him some ideas, and he considered
several variations before settling on the basic plan
for the Vigil.
“At
first I had more people in it but decided it would be
too big, so I ended up with a small boy of five or six
and two women, one who could be his mother and another
who could be his grandmother, although not necessarily.
In my drawings the boy was too short for people to see
all three faces at once, so he got older and taller.
That made him too old for a toy boat so we went with
a small dog. You have to have something that’s
believable,” McDermott
said.
It’s
said people occasionally are seen talking to one of McDermott’s
earlier bronze creations, the statue of Dirty Dan Harris
in Fairhaven that was erected in 2003. “That’s
right,” McDermott
laughed, “but
the trick isn’t to be accurate so much as
it is to be believable. For example, there are
visible tool marks on that sculpture, but I found
that if you take them away then the work is more
perfect but less alive, less believable. I think
it has something to do with suggesting something
that involves people’s
imagination being more effective than something
that’s
clinically accurate but leaves no room for the
viewer to imagine.”
McDermott
said that for a piece to work it takes collaboration
between the artist and the viewer. “It depends
on the artist’s vision, the work itself and
whether or not people relate to it,” he
said, “because
people look at these things out of their entire
life history. Hopefully, this will effectively
show a moment that was shared by many people
in the past, when Blaine’s
fishing fleet was large and active. It’s
also a reminder of those moments of separation
and anticipation we all experience.”
When
he had the configuration he wanted for this
latest project, McDermott looked for models. He found
Blaine native Jan Hrutfiord while making a presentation
at a local Icelandic function, and Blaine sixth grader
Andrew Dahl at the local Summer-Aire art show last
July. For the dog McDermott borrowed Barbara Schugt’s small dog
named Harmonies.
Wendy
Dahl, Andrew’s mother, told him recently
that because of the statue a part of him would always be 11.
There are ancient bronze artifacts thousands
of years old that were made by essentially the same lost wax process
that McDermott is using, so the Vigil promises
to be around for a very long time.
McDermott
said his approach in sculpting the figures is to go from
the inside out, to “put
muscles on the bones, cover that with the skin, then
put on the clothes.” The
original version, called a maquette, French
for model, was taken to Daniel’s Enlarging in
Los Angeles, a place that specializes in making digital
foam replicas and enlargements based on laser generated
measurements.
“That
saved time,” McDermott
said, “over
the traditional enlarging process based
on making countless measurements by hand.” The
laser measurements are made in a three-dimensional
grid, scaled up to life-size and carved into several
styrofoam blocks by a computer-guided machine. McDermott
brought the blocks back to Blaine to re-assemble
and cover with clay into which he’ll
sculpt the life-sized version himself
for a second time, minus the heads and hands. For
greater accuracy he sculpted the heads and hands
separately over the past several months and has already
made the wax copies. He will also add such details
as buttons and shoelaces at that time.
The
finished life-size version, along with the unattached
heads and hands, then goes to a foundry in Tacoma for
casting. The main part of the sculpture is covered with
a liquid silicone rubber that hardens in place, and
that is in turn covered with a plaster support
shell. The mold is cut into 25 to 30 sections in such
a way that they can be easily removed from
the clay sculpture when dry and will yield
an individual piece of the sculpture that will
be less than two feet square for ease in handling.
Each of the pieces will be dealt with separately
from this point on until the final assembly
when the bronze pieces are welded together.
Molten wax is then poured into the molds or painted into
the flatter pieces in a process that McDermott
says is, “done
like a lot of these steps, by one guy
who’s been
doing it over and over for years.” The
technician, called an artisan, pours
wax into the mold and then empties
it out over and over again, each succeeding
time cooling the wax slightly so it
will adhere to the previous layer,
until he builds up about a quarter
inch thickness.
The
wax is allowed to cool to room temperature and solidify,
and when the support shell and rubber
mold are peeled away what’s
left is a solid wax replica of the
original. This is the point that
has been reached with the heads and
hands.
The
next step is called “chasing” the
wax in which imperfections from
the wax molding process are sculpted
out of the replica so it resembles
as closely as possible what the
artist intended, although this part is also
done by a skilled artisan and not
the artist himself.
Each
piece is fitted with a system of wax bars and a funnel
shaped addition called “sprues and gates” that
will become channels for the
molten bronze to flow through the casting.
In
one of the high-tech innovations in casting the Vigil,
the foundry will make the casting, or ceramic shell,
by dipping each wax piece repeatedly
into a mixture of silica, maintained
in a colloidal suspension in constantly
rotating drums large enough to receive
each piece.
When
each piece is covered with a sufficiently thick layer
of silica, it’s allowed to
dry at least 24 hours before being
heated to 1,500 degrees, a process in which
the wax is “lost,” or melts
away, leaving a ceramic shell of the
original that is the same thickness
of the wax replica.
Ingots
of bronze casting alloy (95 percent copper, four
percent silicon and one percent manganese)
are then heated to over 2,000 degrees
Fahrenheit, and the shell is also
heated until it glows orange. The
bronze is poured into the shell,
filling the void left behind by
the “lost
wax,” which is where
the process gets its name.
The
lost wax method has been used for thousands
of years, but the recent
introduction of silica-based
casting in place of plaster
has eliminated the problem
of the bronze leaving voids
in some of the smaller
spaces, as unlike plaster
the silica, or ceramic,
is not air-tight. Bronze
also, like water, expands slightly when
it freezes, helping to get the metal
well seated in the casting.
When
the casting and the metal have cooled, the glass-like
casting is removed by simply hitting it with a hammer.
The bronze pieces are then welded together using a tungsten
inert gas process that uses a welding rod made out of
silicon bronze, the same material used for the casting.
The statue is finished by a re-sculpting process in which
the beads between each piece left by the welding are
tooled to match the surrounding area and, in effect,
disappear.
Internal
stainless steel reinforcement is installed during the
welding process. Stainless steel rods will protrude from
the feet and eventually anchor the sculpture in a solid
cement base that will be a part of the 10 by 14-foot
two step pedestal that will be an integral part of the
H Street boardwalk plaza. Support is being raised by
selling individual bricks at $50 to paving stones for
$10,000 that will be set into the plaza itself.
For
more information, go to www.pacificartsassoc.org and
follow the links to the Vigil sculpture. |
