Ganesh – by Richard Higgins
I
was recently approached by a landscape gardener and asked
if I could carve a `Ganesh` for a Thai style garden he was asked to
design, to
which I replied, “what’s a Ganesh”?
After some brief explanation and further research I took on the commission and set about to produce a maquette (i) to show the customer what I was proposing to carve, I would also use this maquette to produce plans using my digital camera which I enlarged to fit the block of wood at ½ metre high.
i) Pictures of the clay maquette which stands around 18cm tall. The reason for the screws, is to represent holding something, later to be decided.
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After
getting the, `go ahead` from showing the customer the
maquette, I took photos from all the angles I considered to be relevant
and
enlarged them using my my digital camera and computer.
Below
is the block of wood (Jelutong)
laminated together approx` ½ metre square ready to transfer
the plans on to.
I can now go about removing the bulk of the wood around the drawings
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As you can imagine this took some time and it was quite difficult to move the carving around due the size and sheer weight of it! After many hours of chipping away, the shape was beginning to come through and as you can see in one of the pictures below, I keep referring to the small maquette to help with the visualisation.
The next thing I had to
address was carving the hands. Now does a four armed, elephant headed,
seated deity
have hands or pad like hands/feet? I thought about this for a while and
decided
this one was going to have hands which would enable me to easily carve
them to
the shapes I required.
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After deciding where to carve the eyes, (which might I add, wasn’t as straight forward as you may think) it was a case of making those finishing cuts to curves and then start sanding down with different grades of grit.
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| Maquette of Ganesh - 18cm tall | Carving of Ganesh – 500 cm tall |
