Matthew Melton

Blog Post Final Project Artist Statement

I really have no clue of why I made this sculpture all I wanted to do was something other than a drawing. I thought drawing would be kind of boring sense we do it all the time, so I changed what I had originally thought of doing. I decided to make a sculpture because a lot of the art work I see at home and on the websites related to African works of art showed a lot of sculpture. So I thought I would give it a stab to see if I could do work that looked a lot like African art work. I really don’t think I put any value into the sculpture other than to see if I had skills that could generate something that was different from my usual artwork. I think using markings and color reflected in some African works the level of ranking within the tribes, so I tried to add a little bit of that heritage to my sculpture; of course I don’t know what ranking within my tribe the marking on my sculpture would place me but the thought was I would be a great warrior.

The color palettes that was used was analogous to the sculpture or mask I have seen. I used various colors to give an authenticity to the work and to emulate the artwork that I used as inspiration. I found that I really enjoyed adding my own touch of contours, shapes and colors. I was even able to see how molding the face gave me other ideas of what I wanted to see.

The only reason I made this project was because I wanted to try something new. The other thing was that I just wanted to do it for the fun of it. My eyes guided my element choices by looking at the different dimension that I could add to the sculpture. There was some efforts toward balancing what I wanted to show in the sculpture versus what the diagram show. I also had to figure out how to make the mold symmetrical and balance the features of the face so that no particular part over shadowed the rest. I hope I gave it balance. I think my sculpture was two-dimensional, because the art work attempts to show the depth of the features in the sculpture’s face. My sculpture did not utilize lines to show a pattern. I used brown as the primary color since I wanted it to be African artwork related to my own skin color. I also complemented the primary color with other shades of color as I have seen in other paintings and sculptures of African warriors and hunters.

I kind of like making the sculpture because it was fun molding the clay into different shapes and using different implements to make depressions or trying to mold a cheek or make lips and eyes look realistic or not so realistic. When it came to adding color to my sculpture I used paints that I already had at home. It was somewhat difficult to give the sculpture an even smooth skin tone plus the shades were a little off for what I wanted. I think next time I’ll play around with more ways to make different shapes or try to make it more realistic, maybe even do a mold of myself.