Painting and Sculpture Combined

A look at some of the recent theories on ancient Greek and Roman sculpture will soon reveal that there’s a school of thought which favors a much more colorful model of antiquity than that presented in art museums and movies we see today.  While much of ancient stone sculpture unearthed and otherwise discovered in our day reveals itself in hues of gray or white, modern studies suggest that a great number of these creations were originally painted, possibly in brilliant, even garish, colors.  At least in part, it would seem the works were certainly painted, though the degree to which they were may still be contested.  In any event, the discovery of evidence favoring a brilliant and colorful classical era challenges our common acceptance of whitewashed sculpture as an ideal presentation of three dimensional ideas.

Personally, of late, I’ve been thinking about these concepts myself, even in my own work.  With the recent exhibition of Grimm’s Fairy tale artwork this past October, I’d been preparing a pair of sculptures for the show which, for the first time in my professional career, I decided to paint in full color.  Both anciently and recently, this is by no means a unique idea among artists in general – the concept of full color sculpture.  But, in my work, sculpture had previously been a matter of pure form, devoid of any descriptive color, except perhaps an overall patina or other generalized color applied to the whole thing.  While there’s always been crossover between painting and sculpture as far as the creative process is concerned, when it came to the role of color in a finished work, for me, painting and sculpture traditionally occupied separate worlds.

In creating the two artworks, entitled “Hans and the Griffin” and “The Frog Prince,” all of that changed.  The sculptures themselves were made with considerable attention to detail.  Yet the acrylic painting over the top seemed to me like an artistic creation in and of itself.  Yes, in essence, I suppose the paint job serves as an adornment to what already stood previously as finished sculptural work.  However, in my imagination, I was creating acrylic paintings in three dimensions, rather than simply tinting the finished objects.  I was producing each of the pieces as two artworks in one – both a sculpture and a painting.  This impression especially comes to bear in areas of blended paint colors, such as flesh tones and other delicate color transitions.

Getting back to the exquisitely carved statues and architectural adornments of the Greeks and Romans, it is truly disturbing seeing recreations of these masterworks sporting the purported cartoon colors which once adorned them.  On my fantasy sculptures for the Grimm Show, I chose to incorporate blending techniques in those areas where I thought it would add subtlety and realism to to the paint layer.  This is common technique for using most any paint medium in representational art.  We know that the Greeks and Romans were not only sculptors of renown but also painters in the traditional sense, adept at achieving blending and subtlety in their paintings.  Now I realize that research may suggest otherwise, but I find it hard to believe that their exquisite sculpture, if painted, was treated with such mechanical and garish coloration as that which assails us in modern reconstructions of what the works may have originally looked like. I believe, if one of these consummately realistic sculptures were painted at all, it would have been painted employing an equally accomplished and realistic technique, however colorful.  This would mean an antiquity filled not only with eye-catching color, but stunningly realistic transitions of color, achieving a similar level of realism in hue to that which had been achieved in hewn stone. Wouldn’t that make sense?  But perhaps it’s just me.  Research is research and I indeed admire the discovery of a more colorful classical world than what we’d previously imagined.  However, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it were, in fact, a world far more spectacular still than the simplified color patterns which have been suggested to have covered those ancient carvings.