As a painting major I never really took my sculpture classes very seriously. And even if I had worked harder in sculpture, at the time at USC and UCLA the in thing was all concept- and material-driven sculpture, and I don't know if I would have learned much in the figurative tradition.
So when I decided on a whim one day that I wanted to try making a face out of FIMO® (a German-brand polymer clay), I knew I would have to learn by doing. And it was not easy -- the first one took me three days to make(!).
A little background info seems appropriate here. At that time I was living in a shopfront on La Brea Avenue in Inglewood, between a Calypso musician and a drug dealer. I'm not kidding about the drug dealer -- Walter was his name, and he got himself in trouble one time because allegedly he'd pointed a gun at his wife and cops were called -- eight squad cars' worth of 'em, shotguns at the ready. He was nice to me though -- he gave me a bootleg copy of 'Boyz 'n the Hood'. He moved out after somebody took a shot at him in the alley; a couple of times after that I had surprise visits from his former clients looking to connect.
I well remember the night I finally finished First Face (actually a whole head; unfortunately now broken); that night about 1:00 AM there was a commotion just up the block. Someone had smashed the display window of one of the shops there and made off with some stuff. A squad car came and two cops went about checking out the scene; I offered them coffee in papercups but they politely declined.
But anyway, the point is that even though it took so much work to make that one little face, I did enjoy the process sufficiently that I was encouraged to do more. The second one 'only' took one day, so I knew I was on the way^. With each new one I got better at it and before long I had ten little faces staring back at me. Here is a pair from that first group of ten:
By then I was confident enough to set myself a real goal; I'd never thought of myself as a person with a lot of patience or willpower, so this was an excellent chance to truly challenge myself and prove that I had what it takes.
Well, as it turned out, my first goal of fifty faces was laughably easy to achieve -- I guess enjoying your work really makes a big difference -- so of course I had to re-set the goalposts, this time to one hundred. Here's a pair from that second set of fifty.
And after that number was reached, I set myself a really serious new challenge -- five hundred little faces of polymer clay.
That was a truly ambitious project, and it did take a lot of determination and time; periodically I would tire of the labor, stop for a time and wait until the energy returned. Sometimes the breaks lasted a long time and I was afraid I would just sputter out, but I somehow managed to start again each time. I guess I just didn't want to disappoint myself.
Later I moved out of the storefront studio and into a duplex, and I had the faces laid out on the living room floor. Once a repairman came in and started to stomp his booted way right through them before my scream stopped him; how a man can fail to notice hundreds of little faces staring up from the floor, I'll never know.
Anyway, finally the time came to make number five hundred, and I wanted to mark the occasion with a grand gesture. I had a bunch of rhinestones from when I worked for a company that made costume jewelry, so I decided it would be a sparkly jewel face. The photo at the top shows the result.
And of course, a recount revealed I had seriously miscounted; 500 had actually been passed some time before.
EDIT: Senior moment alert -- I forgot I uploaded No. 500 back in September! Oh well, this is a fuller account.
And I guess this means some day I'll have to write about the second 500.
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