I finished the rubber portion of the nurse mold. I’ll be working on this today. Now that the mold is finished, I cast the first test cast and it looks good, even better is the fact I removed the mold from the original still moist clay model without any damage to the model, so at some point I can kiln fire her. >

I have the preliminary work done, the scale drawing printed out, and my wood form cut and ready to assemble last night. I found documents showing the building was built in 1930 by James W. O’connor, an architect who had quite a portfolio of work on Long Island estates and other buildings. There’s documents and photos in the Historic American Building Survey on the Library of Congress site from 1980. I decided to do an experiment to take up some space with styrofoam to use less clay, as it was I wound up using about 120# of clay, here’s the start of it: Video Pt 1 of 3 from today’s…

I decided on the size for her- roughly 27″ wide, 19″ high, since the design is recessed, removing the surrounding area doesn’t work well, so I decided to retain a bit of the flat surface as a border, leaving the left without the border to wrap the design around the side which makes it more interesting. I’ll probably be setting this up over the weekend if not earlier, meanwhile the 2 gallons of mold rubber which was just shy of $200 that I ordered came today for the nurse model

I am pleased to say the model is now finished and I have  just ordered the materials required to make the rubber mold. The first public cast has already been sold- interestingly enough to a nurse in Texas who was a former student of St Vincent’s, she related how she used to walk under the nurse sculpture every day going in and out of the building over ten years! It is very nice to think  some of my work brings back fond memories for someone who recognizes the design. And now a last picture before laying the model on the work bench: Laid now on the work bench over some…

The main building around 1979   Another view, looking South from West 12th St, the 2nd building down from the tall corner building was the Leon Lowenstein clinic, an Art Deco era building that was demolished around 1980         Entrance to Leon Lowenstein, carved limestone figures flank the window, I had managed to buy the one on the left from the demolition people for $100 but unknown to me was just how large that piece of stone she was on actually was! It was about six feet wide, three feet tall and at least ten inches thick, the block of stone weighed in excess of 2000 pounds…

Ancon A bracket or console, as one supporting part of a cornice.

I need to let the clay firm up a little more before I work on her more, other than overall cleaning up and refining which needs to be done on firmer clay, she’s basically finished. I hollowed her out from the back today, removing 25# of clay, that will help get the model drying enough to get firmer. These round models unlike the straight sided models can’t simply be stood up vertically to hollow the back out, so the way I did it before on round models was laying it flat on the back suspended over a couple of boards with enough space netween them I can get my hand…

Ok now I have all the molding roughed in and a little general overall cleaning up, I decided to try “cross hatching” the texture in the background to see how it’s effects might look. I also replaced one of my 150 watt CFL bulbs with one LED spotlight and the change in lighting while slightly less bright really changed how the images come out now to much better definition with shadows:

After I started laying out 4 or 5 of the egg & dart molding repeats I realized I made an error with the calculator. I had divided each quadrant into 3 sections instead of 4, so there would have been 4 fewer repeats as a result if I continued. After fixing that error by starting the border design over from scratch I now have a little more than half of the repeating designs roughed out, here’s a progress shot from a little while ago. I still need to transision the sides of her face, but I’m pretty happy with the face, the face might get tweeked a little more yet,…

I only managed to work on this for about a half hour tonight, so I mainly did some refining to her lips, chin and hair.