Eugene Parnell

Every time I produce a new piece, I try to document the process– perhaps it’s just vanity, or perhaps I am worried I will forget how something is done, or, most probably, I just want people to know how time consuming and complicated the process is.

When I was in school I had no interest at all in representative or figurative work– I was a hard-core postmodern conceptualist, and I really rolled my eyes a lot when we had to do things like make armatures and scale maquettes. So I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, and have had to re-learn a lot of things on my own. But the process is not so different now than it was a hundred years ago. We start with a maquette (which is an impressive French word for a model).

Armature for maquette with Owen's 19th Century study of gorilla and human skeletons

After reading hundreds of accounts of Bigfoot sightings online, and all of the speculation on its origins from various cryptozoologists, I have come down to rendering one as mixture of human and ape proportions. Fortunately British Naturalist Richard Owen produced a handy diagram elucidating these differences well over a hundred years ago. It’s been widely reproduced; my copy appears in The Great Naturalists by Robert Huxley.

I start by making an armature of twisted 1/8″ aluminum wire and 1/4″ threaded rod, to the scale of 1/6 life size, which for me will be about 8 feet, yielding a maquette 16″ high (if it were standing upright). I lay out the proportions on a sheet of paper gridded to scale up a tracing of Owen’s drawing of a gorilla skeleton.

Second view of posable maquette.

The wire armature is held together with bits of epoxy putty, which I have come to rely on for so many things in my work, despite it being a serious allergen. The armature is flexible enough to be posed at will, and sturdy enough to support the clay which will be layered over it.

The maquette in process

It goes through a sort of Alberto Giacometti phase as I apply clay to the structure.

Starting to take on volume

The clay is added in little bits, a pinch at a time, as opposed to trying to push large blobs together; this allows the volume  to be built up gradually all over the figure, rather than concentrating too long on any one part. This is essential to maintaining proportion; once you focus too much on a specific part, you lose a sense of its relationship to the whole and it always ends up out of proportion.

Finished maquette.

Above, the finished maquette. Notice I have gridded off the base so that I can place and pose the full size piece, as much as possible, on a scaled up grid to help lock in the proportions. There is little detail at this point, because I am mostly concerned with pose, volume, and proportion.

Next, on to the big piece.