As I worked on my piece called Birth I had the idea for this piece I called Mother. It was another piece I sculpted in Styrofoam and cast directly in resin bonded sand.

This is the first of three pieces in a series so far with the same spiral shaped stomach. I have completed two more and I have ideas for several others, but I am not sure if I will continue to make them. Three seems enough.

Mother has a hollowed out stomach area in sort of a negative pinwheel design. She has a small child in her stomach that is removable. She leans backward on her knees as she looks toward the heavens. I left it for the viewer to decide if she is praising God, if she is extremely joyful, or if she is deeply in pain. The piece can be viewed as representing each of these emotions and from my perspective they are all truly part of the piece. It was important for me as an artist to give the viewer several things to ponder even though the figure is simplified.

When I first looked at the piece from the back I saw a bear not a human form. That idea also became part of my thought process in viewing the piece. Human mothers can become very dangerous and will rise up and protect their young when they are threatened. So the image of the bear seemed fitting to me even though it was certainly not a planned addition to the piece.

Because I wanted the strength of metal but not necessarily the weight of bronze I decided to cast it in aluminum instead of bronze this time. I had planned from the beginning to give it a wrap patina since I enjoyed it so much on my piece called Birth. Wrap patinas cover up the metal entirely it was not important for me to cast Mother in Bronze because it the metal would not be seen.

I did use a wrap patina on Mother. However, it seemed to have too much texture and it detracted from the simplified form this time I thought. I really had to sit back and think about how I was going to achieve the look I saw in my mind. This is what I finally decided to do. I covered the wrap patina with a good coat of Mod Podge. That smoothed out the texture but it still let the color of the patina show through. The colors in a wrap patina are hard to predict just because of the process and this time the colors seemed to be too spotty. I decided to use a crackle finish over the entire piece to unify the colors on the piece so the shape of the piece would be the main focus again. I antiqued the crackle with a warm brown so the crackle lines could be seen. The brown helped to tone down the colors a bit. I sprayed it with flat sealer, and while the sealer was still wet I dusted it with a fine dust I found in the bottom of my vacuum cleaner bag to give it an antique look.

Once again I ended up with the look I had envisioned before I started the piece. But this time it was an effort to figure out how to make my vision become reality. The effort was worth it though in the end and I am pleased with the finished patina.