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Miyamoto Mache
Amazing sculpture of the legendary swordsman made from recycled newspaper.
Watch the youtube video of this sculpture Here:
Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1584 – June 13, 1645), was Japan’s greatest swordsman. Many in the west know of him through his book on strategy called The Book of Five Rings. What many do not know is that Musashi was also an artist.
He was the classic example of someone that could apply the principles of one art, in his case swordsmanship, to all others. In his book on strategy he wrote; “When I apply the principle of strategy to the ways of different arts and crafts, I no longer have need for a teacher in any domain.”
Indeed, in addition to being Japan’s most famous swordsman, he was also widely recognized as a master painter in the Sumi-e style, a brilliant philosopher and strategist, and a skilled carpenter and carver.
The posture is based on Musashi’s own writings in which he describes the ‘Heaven and Earth’ position of his famous two sword style of fighting. One sword ready to strike from overhead, the other aimed directly at the opponent’s face.
The sculpture is made entirely from discarded newspapers and brown paper shopping bags making it from recycled materials.
Musashi Mache Dimensions: 32” X 20” X 48” Tall Medium: Paper Year: 2012
The Flintstones In Ventura
I was recently commissioned to create four cartoon characters for an up-coming trade show display. Below is a tutorial on how I carved them and what techniques I used.
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- I started out with one 3′ X 4′ X 8′ slab of 1lb density Styrofoam. Since I didn’t have a 4′ saw, I cut a line around all four sides and then used nylon twine like a wire saw to cut the slab in half. I then cut the half block into four smaller blocks.
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- After first measuring off the one 1′ X 1′ seat, I then sketched out a rough profile of each character.
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- I then cut a silhouette through the entire block with a hand saw.
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- To carve the rest I experimented with different carving tools including a machete and a hot knife, but because of the size of the project and the amount of material that needed to be removed ( 30 large bags of Styrofoam chips) I found the most efficient tool was a large serrated kitchen carving knife. I then started carving the silhouette at right angles to rough shape the figure.
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- The carving knife got about 80% of the job done but to begin to refine the shape I found the best tool was a large rasp. The rounded side was useful for carving inner curves and the flat side good for smoothing out planes and surfaces. With any complex three dimensional shape you are going to find places that are almost impossible to get at with any kind of sander, but a neat trick I read about and used with modest success is to hot glue sandpaper to paint stirring sticks. I also hot glued sandpaper to 1/2″ and 1″ diameter doweling which was useful for sanding small inside curves. With these sticks you could reach in and sand places your hand could never fit through.
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- Once the foam figures were carved and sanded the next stage is the coating.I settled on a gypsum based plaster call Durham’s Water Putty which was fairly cheap, easy to mix, and dried much harder than plaster.
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- My solution to the coating problem was to glue several layers of tissue paper over the gypsum plaster creating a kind of laminate. This resulted in a vinyl-like coating that was flexible
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- I finished the figures with acrylic paints and a final hard shell high gloss acrylic varnish.
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- What trip to Ventura would be complete without a visit to the Ventura beach!
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- And here they are in their car, currently parked in the lobby of Van der Graff’s offices in Brampton