Sculpture Technique Research Articles

The Family Mapping Method

The article presents the author’s analytical method for qualitative family mapping which was created by bringing together elements of psychology and sociology. Although created inductively, this method has two sources: Kvebaek’s sculpture technique and Jorgenson’s research into young families with children. The family mapping method is based on an open concept of the family, the ‘definition of situation’ and is associated with the interpretive tradition in sociology and symbolic interactionism. The gathering of the data includes three steps: listing, mapping and in-depth interviewing. Four characteristics of the method can be distinguished: visualisation of individual conceptualisations, the gathering of verbal and non-verbal information, triangulation within the method and the active (creative) participation of an individual. Examples from empirical data show that the method is contemporary and offers innovative tools for social research. However, the method’s advantages have implications both for the researcher and for research ethics.

Edgar Degas sculpture

As an artist, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) defies easy description. Allied with the French impressionists through his commitment to portraying modern life, he also took an independent course, preferring line over color and the visible brushstroke, and working in a studio instead of out-of-doors. He is perhaps best known as a painter, but his most widely known work is a sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Executed in wax, near life-sized, dressed in a ballerina's tutu, with real ballet slippers and real hair, the sculpture caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1881. It is the only sculpture Degas ever showed publicly, though more than one hundred--of dancers, horses, and bathers--were found in his studio after he died, all dusty, some fallen apart. For almost forty years after his death, these works were known only through the bronzes his heirs had cast from the originals.Then, in 1955, the waxes themselves appeared on the art market. Thanks to the discernment and generosity of Paul Mellon, the majority are now preserved at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, most on permanent display. This groundbreaking volume honors this extraordinary gift by linking art and science. It brings together the insights of a distinguished art historian of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture and the specialized knowledge of National Gallery conservators and scientists who have published pioneering technical studies. Including essays on Degas' life and work, his sculptural technique and materials, and the story of the sculptures after his death, it features art-historical and technical discussions of every work in the collection as well as indispensable concordances and bibliography. The richly illustrated text is intended for both art lover and specialist. Was Degas the sculptor technically inept or unusually inventive? How do we understand his sculpture in light of his paintings, prints, and photographs? These questions and many others are explored with originality and depth, adding immeasurably to our understanding of the artistic avant-garde in the late nineteenth century and to our appreciation of this controversial artist.

Plastic Pleasures: Reconsidering the Practice of Modeling through Manuals of Sculpture Technique, c.1880–1933

Around the turn of the last century, a dozen manuals on sculpture technique were published. These texts, written by leading sculptors of the day, offer a valuable glimpse into technical processes and the daily routine of the sculptor's studio. This article reconsiders “How To” publications as a genre and their potential as an art historical source. It then presents a composite guide to modeling technique based on a detailed rereading of manuals published c.1880–1933. In looking again at the sculptor's craft in the decades surrounding the emergence of modernism, this article also considers how far modeling was renewed and reinvented or became a moribund art as argued by hostile critics.

Self‐Assembly of Ligand‐Free PbS Nanocrystals into Nanorods and Their Nanosculpturing by Electron‐Beam Irradiation

Oleic acid is removed from the surface of PbS nanocrystals, leading to the formation of densely packed nanorods. The nanorods are sculptured using focused electron-beam irradiation to control the shape, size, and tip morphology. This sculpturing technique has the potential for the production of tailored tips for scanning tunneling microscopy, break junctions for molecular transport measurements, and conductive supports for electric contacts.

彫刻技法「星取り法」の造形的特性

彫刻の古典的模刻技法に「星取り法」と呼ばれる方法がある.古代ギリシャに原理的な起源を持ち, 複雑な人物像を, 大理石から精確に彫り出すために発達した, 機械的転写の技法である.だが, 彫刻とは単純に外形に還元できるものではなく, 転写の過程には形以外の質的なものが彫り込まれなくてはならない.彫刻家の創意はここに働き, この技法を用いながらも, 複製には尽くされない同形のオリジナル作品を作り出すことが出来る.したがって, この技法による造形的な現象の解明は, 芸術作品の複製とオリジナルという問題の構造を明らかにする手掛かりとなる.その際有効なのが, 一切の機械的手法に依らない「直彫り法」との対比であり, 感覚と形態の問に介在するラインの感覚の考察である.「星取り法」による形状の固定作用を図の固定的性格から説明し, 作品のオリジナル性については, 「直彫り法」に見られるラインの感覚のダイナミズムに根拠を求めてみた.また本論末尾では, 星取り法を用いた創造的な取組の実例として, ロダンに言及する.

Modified Tip Grafts and Tip Punch Devices

Nasal tip aesthetics depend on the graceful synergism between soft tissue and the underlying frame. Nasal projection and the nasal tip width are the two most important components of nasal aesthetics. The cartilage graft, which has a predictable ability to affect several of the anatomical components contributing to nasal tip aesthetics, is one of the most versatile tools used to modify nasal projection. The fundamental shortcoming of the current graft sculpturing technique, namely, the requirement of time to create an optimal tip graft, prompted the design of a tool for the precise and rapid sculpturing of cartilage used for nasal tip onlay and shield grafts. This report describes a modified design of the Peck and Sheen grafts and introduces a new instrument, the tip graft punch. The unique features of the tip graft punch that facilitate the production of a symmetric, precisely proportioned cartilage grafts are highlighted. The tip graft punch has been successfully used on 49 patients over the past 2 years. The authors report a modification of nasal tip grafts and a simple and useful device for harvesting these grafts. This modification produces more natural and aesthetically pleasing results. The device saves surgery time, and provides a symmetric and anatomical graft design.

A Sculpture Technique for Rendering Complex Impossible Objects

A Sculpture Technique for Rendering Complex Impossible Objects

Perceptions of Family: Complexities Introduced by Foster Care Part 1: Childhood Perspectives⋆

This article is the first of two drawn from the same study and describes two sets of data on perceptions of family: (a) those held by 43 children who were in long-term family foster care at the time of the study, and (b) retrospective recollections of perceptions of childhood family held by 39 adults who had been in foster care as children. Children completed a representation of current and ideal family using the Kvebaek Family Sculpture Technique (KFST). The adults provided a representation of childhood, current, and ideal family, and information following an indepth interview. Comments by the participants show that relationships were complex and options need to be kept open to enable children in foster care to maximise opportunities for connection with either foster or biological family. The fact that the two data sets were shown to be remarkably similar, both quantitatively and qualitatively, strengthens the credibility of the representation of childhood by the adults, despite its retrospective nature.

Breaking the Mould: Pliny’s Natural History 34.52 and Sculptural Technique

Les études sur ce passage ont tenté de rattacher le terme ars à un style artistique, mais n’ont réussi à expliquer ni la formule « abandon-puisrenaissance », présente dans l’extrait en question, ni la nature des styles artistiques hellénistiques. L’examen du passage montre qu’il renvoie plutôt à un processus technique. Ce processus peut être associé à un type de moulage du bronze qui passa de mode mais revint à l’honneur quand les exigences romaines firent revivre l’intérêt d’une méthode rapide de coulage. De nombreux concepts philosophiques, comme la mimesis et la symétrie, contribuent à une « théorie sculpturale » qui sous-tend ce processus.

Emotional Intimacy and Children's Adjustment: A comparison between single-parent divorced and intact families

The present investigation studies the levels of emotional intimacy within nonclinical single-parent families and intact families, and how these may relate to children's academic, social and emotional adjustments. Participants were 94 children of divorced families, 95 children of intact families, and their mothers (60 married and 58 divorced). The inventory of family feelings (IFF) and Kvebaek family sculpture technique (KFST) were used to examine subjects' emotional relationships with their family members. The results show significant differences between the divorced and intact groups on several measures of intimacy and adjustment. Most of these differences, however, are found to be small (as reflected by their small size effect). The only exception is with regard to the children's feeling of intimacy with their divorced noncustodial father. The quality of this dyad relationship also has a predictive power for the children's psychological, social and academic levels of functioning. These results are discussed in the context of divorced families' emotional boundaries and concerns over the long-term effects of parental divorce on children.

Family Distance Matters

In child psychiatric work strategies for engaging the family in strengthening the child’s coping should be included as part of the treatment plan. As family members experience the reality of the family differently, information from each family member provides a broader picture of the family. Clinicians can help the family achieve insights into relationships and roles by using a figure placement technique, the Kvebaek Family Sculpture Technique (KFST). We examined distances in KFST figure placements made by mothers, fathers and adolescents in order to explore closeness and distance, or family cohesion. We found that families often perceived changes in the perception of distance between family members following family therapy. Assessments by family members, as well as by clinicians, are needed to catch the complexity of family cohesion. A dialogue with the family about the various perspectives presented by family members contributes to a new understanding of family interaction.

On the Sculptural Technique of Antonio Candva and His Plaster Casts

On the Sculptural Technique of Antonio Candva and His Plaster Casts

Style/Ecriture. On the classical ethos, women’s sculptural practice and pre‐First‐World‐War feminism

Appropriating the dichotomy Roland Barthes introduced between style and écriture to sculptural studies, my article reassesses the position of women sculptors in post‐Rodin modernity. In contrast to received analyses, I use the archives to offer an account of sculptural practice and the classical ethos in terms of pre‐First World War feminism. My article addresses an issue in methodology and the need to re‐examine the relation between aesthetics and politics. I analyse the ethos of the craftsmanship of style as it sustained the practice of French sculptor Jane Poupelet and informed the writing of her female audience. Comparing Poupelet’s sculptural technique to modes of writing deployed in the same period by Gide and Proust, I argue that what deeply concerned Poupelet and her female audience falls under Barthes’s concept of écriture. This involved an act of historical solidarity: the choice of the ethos through which the social function and destination of artistic practice became manifest.

Structural Boundaries of Single-Parent Families and Children's Adjustment

The present study investigates the structural boundaries of the divorced single-parent family system and subsystems and the relationships between these and children's emotional, social, and academic functioning. The subjects were 189 children (95 of intact and 94 of divorced families) and their mothers (60 married and 58 divorced). Three tests were used to assess family boundaries: Boundary Ambiguity Scale (BAS), Kvebaek Family Sculpture Technique (KFST); and Family Drawing Test (FDT). California Test of Personality (CTP) was used to assess the children's levels of emotional and social adjustment. Their academic achievements were evaluated by the children's grades in English, Hebrew, and mathematics. The results show that the majority of children of divorced families and about half of their mothers still include their fathers in their family systems. The results also reveal that both these children and their mothers perceive their family subsystems as less hierarchically distinguished than do the corresponding groups from intact families. In addition, the findings show that neither the mothers' characteristics nor the subjects' perceptions of their family boundaries predict the emotional, social, and academic functioning of the children. These and the other results are discussed in relation to their implications for family system theory and the cybernetic model.

Laser-assisted columelloplasty

The nasal base is a very complex district because of the dynamic relationships between skin, subcutaneous tissue, underlying muscle, and cartilaginous structures. The nostril in particular is the air gate of the nasal fossa in which small deformities may severely impair the dynamic of nasal air flow. The anatomy, function, morphology of the structures, and the importance of the columella in the reduction of nasal air flow are discussed. A new method for columellar refinement, laser-assisted columelloplasty (LACP) is described. The new laser technique has numerous advantages—it can be performed under local anesthesia, it has high surgical accuracy, there is minimal bleeding with no need for postoperative nasal packing, and the recovery time is quick, all with respect to improving nasal anatomy and physiology. This article emphasizes the value of the surgical nasal sculpturing technique and the achievement of an improved functional as well as aesthetic result.

External-beam PIXE analysis of small sculptures

Non-destructive analysis of precious art objects is an important tool to solve provenance problems or to facilitate restoration. External beam PIXE analysis is one of the most powerful and popular methods used in this respect. The paper summarises the external beam PIXE set-up at the Accelerator Laboratory in Budapest, and two selected applications are described. Different parts of a small Cambodian metal sculpture probably made in the 11th century were analysed. It was observed that the sculpture was composed of an iron core and an outer bronze shell. This sculptural technique was well known in the Middle-East but no indication has been found about its use in the Far-East, yet. Before its restoration paint traces on a wooden relief of St. Jerome made by an unknown artist in about 1600 were analysed. Different white and red paints were distinguished at selected points and the presence of titanium on a certain part of the relief was attributed to a repainting in modern times.

Limewood, Chiromancy and Narratives of Making. Writing about the materials and processes of sculpture

Since its publication in 1980 Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany has attracted the attention of art‐historians through its re‐thinking of approaches to Northern art, as well as both a case study in the use of descriptive terms about art and as a model for a cultural history of art. This essay deals with a far less widely appreciated feature of the book: its innovatory mode of writing about the materials and processes of sculpture. The first section is concerned with the responses to Limewood Sculptors and argues that the concern with sculptural technique that runs throughout the book deserves more attention. The second section examines various more familiar conventions for writing about sculptural process, ranging from materials‐based descriptive accounts to archivally‐grounded narratives of the commissioning and making of specific works. The third section considers Baxandall’s adoption of Paracelsus’ notion of chiromancy –‘the art of reading the inner character of a person or thing from its external character’– for an understanding of limewood sculpture. This interpretive strategy opens up the possibility of questions of material and process being treated not as a discrete subject but instead being allowed to inform and inflect the discussion of many other issues throughout the book. In particular, an awareness of materials and making is seen as important for our understanding of a sculpture's reception and viewing. In the final section the implications of Baxandall’s writing about sculptural process for other periods and cultures are explored through a discussion of eighteenth‐century sculptural practice and the extent to which materials and process were registered by contemporary viewers. Taking as a case study the ways in which the drawings and models for Roubiliac’s Argyll monument might be interpreted, the essay argues that Baxandall’s writing about sculpture and its making has a methodological resonance far beyond the field of South German Renaissance sculpture.

Looking at Italian Renaissance sculpture

1. Introduction Sarah Blake McHam 2. The materials and techniques of Italian Renaissance sculpture G. M. Helms 3. The revival of antiquity in early Renaissance sculpture H. W. Janson 4. On the sources and meaning of the Renaissance portrait bust Irving Lavin 5. Familiar objects: sculptural types in the collections of the early Medici John T. Paoletti 6. Holy dolls: play and piety in Florence in the Quattrocento Christiane Klapisch-Zuber 7. The virtue of littleness: small-scale sculptures of the Italian Renaissance Joy Kenseth 8. Public sculpture in Renaissance Florence Sarah Blake McHam 9. Looking at Renaissance sculpture with Vasari Paul Barolsky 10. A week in the life of Michelangelo William E. Wallace 11. Michelangelo: sculpture, sex, and gender James M. Saslow 12. Gendered nature and its representation in sixteenth-century garden sculpture Claudia Lazzaro Selected bibliography.

Relations in families with a mentally retarded child from the perspective of the siblings.

Nowadays most handicapped children in Sweden live with their families. In this study some of the consequences of the normalisation of their lives are analysed, focusing on young siblings of mentally retarded children. Sixteen siblings, aged 5-11, were tested with the Family Relations Test and Kvebaek Family Sculpture Technique, as were siblings in a control group in which each child was chosen to match a sibling in the target group with respect to age and family constellation. The results show few differences between the two groups. According to the Family Relations Test, however, the emotional involvement in the eldest non-retarded sibling differs statistically significant from that of the corresponding child in the control group and especially so with respect to negative incoming feelings. Young siblings also show a tendency to unconsciously place the mentally retarded child at larger distances from themselves than they place the other siblings with respect to the Kvebaek Family Sculpture Technique. The results indicate that siblings of mentally retarded children have another frame of reference when judging family relations compared with that of the children in the control group. Thus siblings of mentally retarded children seem to adapt to change in the family because of the mentally retarded child and qualitatively alter their thinking in relation to the family members.

Clinical study of alar anatomy and surgery of the alar base.

To analyze and quantify specific aspects of alar base anatomy and to identify anatomic configurations that may be correlated with specific surgical manipulations. Analysis in a population of patients presenting for aesthetic nasal surgery. Facial plastic surgery practice. The photographic slides of 120 white patients who presented for consultation were reviewed. On the base view of photographic slides, observations were made on the width of the alar base, recurvature of the alar base, thickness of the alar lobule, thickness of the alar wall, and flare of the alar wall. On the lateral view, observations were made on the vertical insertion of the ala on the face (cephalic, normal, or caudal), contour of alar rim in profile (gentle S-shape or straight), size of alar lobule (small, normal, or large), and alar-columellar relationship, with special attention to the presence of alar hooding. A spreadsheet program was used to analyze the incidence of each configuration and any association between various features of the alar base. Anatomic diversity exists that requires a careful individual analysis for each patient. A planned surgical intervention must fit the patient's unique anatomy. Distinctive configurations of recurvature, vertical insertion, and other aspects of the alar base were observed, with special implications for the surgeon's approach. Anatomic diversity requires a thorough preoperative examination followed by selection of an approach that addresses the specific anatomic findings. The choice of the best alar reduction and sculpture technique ultimately relies on a precise analysis of the anatomic configuration of the patient's alar base.