Thomas W. Brown, installation at Art Students' League, 2008, photo by Fred Hatt
Thomas William Brown is an art therapist and a stone carver. Many of his works, like those seen above in a detail from an installation of sculptures shown in an exhibit last year at the gallery of the Art Students’ Leage of New York, are based on architectural motifs. When he talks about his process, Tom speaks of finding forms through carving that already reside within the stone. Tom gave me one of his pieces, an abstract shape evocative of a female torso in brown alabaster. Recently I used this sculpture as a photographic model, to experiment with lighting.
One way of seeing a three dimensional form is to look at it from different angles. In fact this is the way sculptors work, and observational figurative sculptors even have rotating platforms for their models and for their work in progress. Artists working in two dimensions, with drawing or painting, rely on light and shadow to perceive and depict the three dimensional form of a figure or object.
I studied filmmaking in college, and we spent considerable time learning about the qualities of light and how to use lighting to reveal form and create moods. Artists that draw and paint study light by observation, but rarely is it part of their learning practice to place, manipulate, and modify sources of light. For anyone interested in learning about light from this hands-on perspective, Ross Lowell’s book, Matters of Light and Depth, is an excellent, simple yet thorough, introduction.
To see how changing the lighting changes the appearance of Tom’s sculpture, all these photos are taken from the same angle. Here is the piece with a strong light from up high and to the right:
Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #1
This lighting certainly highlights the sculpture’s resemblance to a female torso with a contrapposto tilt. The highlights and shadows seem to convey the familiar forms of breasts and a belly. The light here is from a bare bulb, giving crisp, sharply defined shadows. In the next version, the light is in the same place, but it is diffused through a large white umbrella:
Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #2
The light striking the sculpture is coming not from a small point but from a broad area. It’s a bit like the difference between the light on a sunny day and the light on an overcast day. Highlights and shadows are softened, with smooth gradual transitions between light and dark areas. The softer light seems to bring out the beautiful subtleties in the color of the stone. Next, a hard light from the right:
Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #3
Every change in the angle of the light reveals different aspects of the shape of the sculpture, just as looking at if from different points of view would do. Here, the protrusions that we saw as belly and hip bone could be seen as the back of a head with longish hair and a shoulder of another figure with its back turned to us.
Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #6
The shot above has the light high and to the left side of the sculpture. In this lighting, what I originally saw as a breast now appears as a rather feline face, while the upper bulge of the belly becomes the feline figure’s shoulder. The curve on the left, that we initially saw as the transition from ribs to hip, becomes the neck and chest of this newly discovered creature.
Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #7
In the version above, the light source is reflected from a white surface on the floor beneath the platform where the sculpture rests. The diffuse nature of the light, and its unconventional low angle nearly eliminate the kind of form-revealing shadow cues seen in the first photos of the piece. Here I am struck by the color variations we can see in the stone. There are veins of deep red, warm pink and cool gray. With the form flattened, the color can almost be seen as a painting.
Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009 #9
In the final example I’ve chosen to show here, there are two light sources, one on either side of the sculpture and slightly behind it. This lighting allows the front of the piece, which might naturally dominate our attention, to be shadowy, while the edges are shown with great clarity.
To conclude this post, here’s a Photoshop experiment. The versions above labeled as #1, #3, and #6 were converted to grayscale, and then each one was used as one of the color channels for a RGB image using Photoshop’s “merge channels” function. Don’t worry if you don’t understand that. The effect is essentially the same as if the sculpture were lit by three different colored lights, a green one from the right, a blue one from the left, and a red one from up high and slightly to the right.
Thomas W. Brown, Alabaster, 2004, photo by Fred Hatt, 2009, merge channels version
I thank Tom for letting me experiment with his work this way. It’s good work that seems initially simple, but reveals hidden aspects when explored in more depth!
