“Psyches” 2015, hand-cut aluminium sheets, dimensions variable.
When you visit an art museum, what do you prefer to see first– paintings or sculptures? Your answer will tell whether your eyes are most content in two dimensions or three. A fundamental difference of approach exists between these two forms of art. Having both sculpted and painted, I find sculpting more complicated, more challenging. Imagine, for example, the difference between solving a 3D puzzle rather than a 2D puzzle.
My focus is on the purely constructive and technical parts of these two categories of art. I’m intentionally avoiding the psychological and imaginative effect both mediums have on the viewer. To do this, we must discuss dimensions again.
In painting, you have a plane (canvas, paper, any type of surface) which is your two-dimensional space where you are allowed to create. And this space has borders. The artist can create an illusional depth in various ways. For example, the artist can create “hidden” geometric diagonal axes that the eye perceives as “movement”. The illusion of space can be produced by using shadows, foreground and background, and blurring and sharpening various painting elements. The artist can create volume with colour and the movement of brushstrokes. This is evident in the drawings of grandmasters such as Michelangelo, Bronzino, and Da Vinci. They create volume with lines.
With sculpting, however, the plane is limitless. The entire room/area/landscape is your canvas. Hence you have more freedom to create and position your elements. This freedom also increases the complexity and number of variables. Depending on where the viewer is located, the work changes both in shape and volume. Shadows, both foreground and background, exist per se and can be accentuated—or diminished—by the positioning and lighting of the work. Also, fluidity in sculpture is harder to attain since there is no analogue to diluting colours with solvents.
Ultimately, each form of art enchants the viewer with its own “visual language”. The end result is the same, only the process differs. Maybe it is for this reason that I enjoy artworks that have simultaneously painterly and sculptural qualities.
To an artist, what matters is appealing to our hearts, not fixating on the technical difficulty of creation, whether in two dimensions or three.
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