Text Box: ~  Above: Vince & his father, Victor, at Yosemite.  ~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box: ~  Top, right: Vince's wife, Roberta, & Vince cruising through Glacier Bay, Alaska. ~

 

 

Text Box: Whenever I click on the ‘about the artist’ page of other sites, I usually come away disappointed because what I really wanted to see is not there.  Usually what you will find is any formal art instruction the artist may have had, awards they may have won, and projects they may have contributed to or completed.  But what I have always wanted to know is, who is the person behind the art.  I want to know what motivates that person, what kind of person are they, why do they create the art that they create, etc.  In high school I read, The Agony and the Ecstasy, and I was fascinated by Michelangelo and his life, and I guess that’s what I want to know…the juicy details.  So with that in mind, I will attempt to write an about the artist page that I would like to read.  I’m going to give you the agony and the ecstasy of my life and what motivates me to create my art.  When I’m sculpting, my mind is very focused on what I am doing.  I am so focused that hours will slip by in what seems like moments.  My focus becomes so intense that I won’t hear the phone ringing or someone knocking at the front door.  When I am focused on my art, external distractions melt away.  It’s a little scary because I wonder, if the house was burning down around me, would I even know?  I might be sculpting to the very end, completely engrossed in my work and oblivious to my own destruction.  I had that kind of focus as a teenager too, when I was working on my art.  I might start drawing in the afternoon, look up at the clock, and suddenly it’s 3 am!  But I got in a lot of good drawing practice that way.  Back then, a buddy of mine and I would get together and draw for hours.  Sometimes we would head down to the local library and I would get out the classical art books and study the paintings or sculptures and draw from them, which is where I was first introduced to classical art.  Since my high school was too poor to have an art department my freshman and sophomore year, my art education was up to me.  So one day in the school library, I happened upon two books that helped change the way I conceived the human figure: Artistic Anatomy by Dr. Paul Richer and Anatomy for the Artist by Jeno Barcsay.  I studied these books intensely, and my figure drawings improved.  It wasn’t difficult for my parents to recognize how much art was coming to mean to me, and so when the opportunity arose that a realistic oil painter in town was offering painting lessons, my parents signed me up.  My teacher, Sharon Shands, was an outstanding still life painter.  She also did some figurative painting, but not too much that I saw.  She was a very patient, kind person, always constructive in her criticisms.  But I don’t think she understood how important the human figure was to me.  It was the only thing I wanted to draw or paint.  Unfortunately, I never got to paint the human figure; I was painting landscapes.  Everyday I’d ask her, “So when can I start painting people?”  And she’d always say, when you can paint that lighthouse, or that tree, or bush, etc.  The other frustrating thing about working with oils was the time factor.  She painted in layers, which creates very realistic, beautiful work, but for me it was just that much more time I had to spend painting things other than people.  So eventually I became bored, missed a couple of classes and ended up quitting.  My junior year in high school we got an art teacher who I really enjoyed.  Unfortunately for me, figurative art did not seem to be his specialty either.  The few samples of his work that I saw were impressionistic pastel landscapes.  It was very nice, but my heroes were Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto.  He was able to give me some guidance though, and I started to dream about college and having a ‘real’ art teacher, someone that could help me take my figurative drawing to the next level.  So what happens when I finally get into college and take my first drawing class?  I’m stuck drawing baskets, plants, bottles, cars, etc.  And on top of this, my art instructor seems more intent on social commentary than art instruction, and he’s continually prancing from one end of the room to next, gesticulating wildly and rambling a hundred miles a minute.  So many times, my fellow classmates would look at each other incredulously because of the bizarre things that he would say.  On one day in particular, he seemed to be in a particularly foul mood and was ranting about the worthlessness of my generation and how we have no spine.  At the end of his tirade, he says, “Right?” and expects us to agree with him.  To my shock, everybody is sitting there nodding their heads, agreeing yes, they are worthless and spineless.  Everyone except me.   Out of maybe forty students, I was the only one that didn’t nod my head.  When he demanded to know why, I drew up every ounce of courage I could find in my trembling body and replied in a very small voice, “Because this has nothing to do with art.”  He literally shouted at the top of his lungs, “NOD YOUR HEAD!!!” And when I didn’t nod my head, he yelled, “GET OUT OF MY CLASS!!!”  And that was the end of my aspirations to one day be a ‘real’ artist…almost.  One of my school counselors suggested a night drawing class taught by another teacher, but the thought of repeating such a negative experience kept me away.  My counselor told me he felt very badly about what had happened to me, and that I shouldn’t give up art because of it, but in the end he couldn’t convince me to take another drawing class.  How about a sculpting class then, he suggested.  The sculpting teacher was a very nice person and someone he knew personally.  I decided to give it a try.  And he was a very nice man, and sculpting class was fun.  I made a clay bust of myself, an alabaster breast, and a wax torso with head, which I cast into bronze.  And that was it.  When the class was over I changed my major from art to business.  For ten years, I created very little graphic art.  Instead, my attention turned to literature.  Instead of hours drawing, it was hours reading books, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to go through two to three books a week.  In 1995, I started reading Greek mythology and classical poetry and began writing poetry myself.  Then in 1997, I met my wife, Roberta, and she helped me to get my poems into book form and we self-published in 1999.  During the process of making the book, we looked at other local poets who had self- published and noticed many of them had illustrated their books, so my wife suggested I do the same…and that’s how I started drawing again.  One of the drawings won second place at the local county fair, while another won third.  But the real surprise was the bronze torso I had cast ten years earlier, which my wife begged me to enter, won first place.  But except for a couple false starts with wax, I still didn’t sculpt.  The primary reason discouraging me was that I didn’t want to take another art class.  Instead, I purchased my own copies of Artistic Anatomy and Anatomy for the Artist, as well as Grey’s Anatomy and Frank Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy.  I also found a couple interesting sculpture books, Sculpture Principles and Practice by Louis Slobodkin and Figure Sculpture in wax and plaster by Richard McDermott Miller.  Then I started to sculpt in January of 2001.  I read that plastilene was the medium of choice for professional sculptors, so I figured, ‘if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.’ Almost immediately my first figure, Awakening, based loosely on the anatomy charts I had been studying, began to come together.  When I was finished, I was very satisfied with my first completed sculpture in 13 years.  I eagerly jumped into my next project, a life size female bust of an imaginary person.  That too seemed to go well, although I was not completely pleased with my surfacing technique.  My next figure sculpture did not go so well, in large part due to my poor armature construction, which was very weak and wobbly.  I decided I would not sculpt another figure until I had come up with a more effective armature.  Six months of frustrating experimentation passed before I discovered the book, From Clay to Bronze by Tuck Langland, which outlined how to make a good armature.  After further experimentation with various materials and some improvisation, I built my first really good armature and was ready to start my next sculptural piece, Vision.  Since I am working from my imagination instead of an actual person, I sometimes feel as if I am ‘searching’ for the form.  In the case of Vision, I remember three quarters of the way through the project, ‘feeling’ something about it just was not right.  Sometimes I would just place it in front of me and stare at it, thinking….  On one such occasion as I was sitting in the backyard, studying Vision, my neighbor started playing some really loud music that strangely inspired me.  I remember feeling the rhythm and beat of the music as I contemplated the clay figure before me, and then suddenly I picked up one of my sculpting tools and started ripping into it, carving away with fearless brave strokes, changing it for the better.  I learned a good lesson that day: sometimes the rationale mind is like a beast, and music lulls that beast to sleep, allowing deeper forces within to instinctually guide a sculptors hand.  With my next sculpture, Male Nude, I attempted to refine my aesthetic feeling for the male figure, while experimenting with various sculpting techniques.  Everything seemed to go well and without too much difficulty, but I was conscious of a few points: first, I wanted more realism; second, I wanted more fluidity of form and some movement too; and third, I needed some sort of hand armature to create a more complicated piece.  With my next sculpture, which is currently untitled and simply referred to as ‘Clay Figure’, I was able to create a more fluid, dynamic pose.  Unfortunately, I was not happy with Langland’s hand armature solution, so it took some experimentation before I was satisfied.  I was also able to refine my surfacing technique which allowed me to create more surface detail, such as finger and toe nails, wrinkles on the fingers, and veins, thus increasing the level of realism.  And that’s where I am today.  Clay Figure remains in clay while I have a detached room from the house converted into an artist’s studio.  I’ve just started my next piece, a dancing female figure, and my sculpting speed appears to be increasing steadily as my understanding of anatomy improves. With most of my armature and material problems solved, I should be able to concentrate on improving my speed, technique, and anatomy, while developing a more dynamic feel for the human form.  Practice makes perfect.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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