Day 054 / Line Sculpture

The past eight or nine days have been some of the hardest days of this creative-thing-a-day project.  Mainly, because my work has been so amped up for me lately.  I have been working some all nighters and tonight is no different.  I had thought that maybe I’d run dry of office ideas for this blog and then this little baby came together almost effortlessly.

It’s funny too because I almost decided upon doing a completely different idea for todays post.  It was a pretty windy day today and as I was leaving the office to pick up some dinner I saw a little mini-tornado of leaves.  I quickly ran inside and fished out a plastic bag from the trashcan and ran back in the hopes to recreate the famous plastic bag scene from American Beauty.  The post was going to be titled “The Most Beautiful Thing in the World…NOT!”  Thankfully the wind died down about the time I threw the plastic bag in.

Later, after dinner, I suddenly had the idea that I’d persue.  It stems from an interview I’d seen a long time ago with a famous old school Disney animator named Milt Kahl.  Milt Kahl was known for his strong lines.  Much to his chagrin at times, he was regularly given the human characters to animate because he was such a skilled draughtsman.  After he retired, he picked up this method of sculpture where he would bend metal wire into the outline of one of his characters.  They were kind of like an Al Hirschfeld caricature where he would create a form with a lot of personality but using only the least amount of lines possible.

Anyways, I thought about this and I decided I was going to make something out of paper clips.  Bending them around as I edited.  Unfortunately, paper clips are extremely short and I would’ve had to connect a bunch of them together to make anything really substantial.  Then, in my search for a styrofoam pedestal for my sculpture I found a small spindle of metal wire.  It was a great stroke of luck because it was very easy to bend and it was one very long piece.  It was surprisingly easy to work with and believe it or not, within twenty minutes or so I had what you see in the pictures above.  I love it when an idea comes at you suddenly like this one did.  And when it turns out as you’d hoped it would it’s all the more satisfying.