Art and Emotions in Contemporary Sculpture

Themes in Art

• Emotion, feeling, and romance are common themes in painting, with darkness and chaos representing anxiety and despair, and energy and visual representation of natural elements representing joy and celebration.
• Romanticism is used to convey personal feelings, especially related to love.

Sculpture Techniques

• Modeling involves building a form using a soft and malleable material with an armature.
• Carving involves cutting or chipping away a shape from a hard material like stone, wood, or metal.

Materials for Sculpture

Wood

• Mabolo tree wood is suitable for carvings, furniture, and tool handles due to its dark wood.
• Palmwood, a hardwood substitute, is known as "coconut lumber" and has a fibrous grain with a range of color tones from dark brown to light gold.
• Coconut shells can also be used to create artworks.

Other Materials

• Alabaster is a fine-grained, translucent form of gypsum used for carving beautiful artworks.
• Clay is an earthly material composed of minerals rich in alumina, silica, and water, often used for sculpture and pottery.
• Cement is a powdery substance made with calcite lime and clay, mixed with water to form mortar or concrete.
• Glass is a hard, brittle, transparent, and translucent substance made by fusing sand, soda lime, and other ingredients.
• Sand is composed of very fine, loose particles of rock, used in mortar, glass, abrasive, foundry molds, and sand sculptures.
• Food can be used as a medium in contemporary art, with local fruits and vegetables used as means of artistic expression.

Metal

• Steel, an alloy of iron and 1% carbon, is popular in contemporary art due to its corrosion resistance and lack of rust or stain in water.
• Bronze, an alloy of copper with tin and other metals, is often used in sculptures.
• Brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, is more malleable than bronze and has a lower melting point.