CHAPTER I

FOUNDATIONS IN FORM

MASTER

STUDIES

Art begins in reverence.

To forge new forms, one must stand before the giants, study their language, and learn how they shaped the human body into myth. This chapter marks the beginning of my sculptural path — a disciplined return to the origins of Western form. Each study is a dialogue with history, a training ground for my hand, my eye, and my understanding of structure, weight, and heroic proportion. Master studies are not copies. They are rites of passage. They are the first stones laid in the architecture of a sculptor’s identity.

CHAPTER NARRATIVE

Why Master Studies?

Sculpture is a lineage. Every sculptor who ever left a mark on marble began by studying those who came before — absorbing the logic of their planes, the clarity of their anatomy, and the intelligence beneath their forms. This chapter exists as the necessary foundation for everything that will follow. Here, I engage directly with the ancient and Renaissance masters: Michelangelo, Giambologna, Bernini, the Hellenistic carvers whose identities are lost but whose genius remains in stone.

Through clay, I reconstruct their insights — the weight of a torso, the spiral of a contrapposto, the tension of a heroic back, the pause between struggle and triumph. Each work here is both discipline and devotion. A sharpening of the hand. A deepening of the eye. A calibration of the mind toward form. These master studies are the groundwork for the sculptures that will define my own voice. This is the chapter of preparation — the quiet forging before the outbreak of originals.