Off With His Head!

This is a summer of statue sketching in both Schloss Seehof in Memmelsdorf and the Rococo garden in Veitshöchheim, what do both have in common …. about 800 figures by the rococo sculptor Ferdinand Tietz. Much as I love statuary, Rococo and Barock figurative sculptures are a challenge! Full of movement and drapery, the figures seldom follow our ideas and ''rules'' of proportion. Small heads, bulging calves and biceps in both women and men, necks that have goitres, heavy lidded eyes and wobbly tummies and buttocks. Generally not our aesthetic ideas at all, and this poses a problem when sketching, the finished drawings look odd to say the least. Observation and drawing what you see is the order of the day then, until you really look and see this! Hmmmm, what is going on? Had Ferdinand Tietz a bit of an off day or did some restoration expert have an extra head lying around and thought OK, lets plop it onto this damaged Perseus nobody'll notice? Whoa, this is really bad, I'm hoping it wasn’t the attempt of a sculptor trying to restore this sculpture to its former glory because he is as way off as the lovely Spanish grandmother and her ''potato Jesus''. A sketch of this would automatically lead to questions about the artists sense of proportion, heads fit into bodies 5 or 6 times roughly, here we’re pushed to get in 3! 

Once you see it you can’t ignore it, so the decision was to sketch a different figure.

Here I was sitting below the statue peering up, a different perspective again and my go to method is a few loose lines and circles and then go with the shadows, your shadows make the statue. It has taken a lot of trial and error to get this far because I always started by drawing lips, eyes, nose and then going for shading, the results for me personally were meh! And yes, I still have to remind myself every time not to start like this. 

I still feel very sorry for Ferdinand Tietz, when I think of his mastery and then that horror in the photo, I'm sure he is turning in his grave (at the local church in Memmelsdorf, where he also created 12 figures, and which I also sketched last summer). As for the creator of the Perseus Frankenstein, ''Off with his head!''