The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts: Part I - Body Image, Our Thoughts, and the Art of Sculpting
Fall on the Mountain by Anne Rule-Thompson I recently visited my friend Anne, who is a figurative sculptor. When I arrived at her studio, she was in the process of sculpting the upper portion of a human figure. She was working on the clavicle, the long bone that runs from the shoulder blade to the sternum. “I hope I am not interrupting your flow,” I said. She responded, “No. Not at all.” She went on to say that my arrival was helpful, because she was really needing to step away from her piece for a moment…that she had been so focused on the clavicle, it was starting to look like part of a bicycle to her. She then stepped back to take a look at her entire creation. “That is the difficult thing about sculpting,” she said. “Sometimes you can get so over-focused on the details that you lose sight of the big picture. As I was sculpting, I kept thinking that this clavicle is really just looking like a bicycle part, but after I stepped back for a minute and looked at t