[00:00.49]Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to form in there dimension.
[00:06.89]That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most difficult of all arts;
[00:12.84]certainly it is more difficult than the arts which involve appreciation of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions.
[00:21.82]Many more people are 'form-blind' than colour-blind.
[00:26.55]The child learning to see, first distinguishes only two-dimensional shape;
[00:32.67]it cannot judge distances, depths. Later, for its personal safety and practical needs, it has to develop (partly by means of touch) the ability to judge roughly three-dimensonal distances.
[00:48.58]But having satisfied the requirements of practical necessity, most people go no further.
[00:54.65]Though they may attain considerable accuracy in the perception of flat form,
[01:00.21]they do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial existence.
[01:08.53]This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness.
[01:18.27]He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head-he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand.
[01:29.76]He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself;
[01:35.21]he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like,
[01:39.60]he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight;
[01:45.84]he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air.
[01:51.66]And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as shape, not as description or reminiscence.
[02:01.24]He must, for example, perceive an egg as a simple single solid shape, quite apart from its significance as food, or from the literary idea that it will become a bird.
[02:14.22]And so with solids such as a shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, a mountain peak, a kidney, a carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a bulrush, a bone.
[02:36.75]From these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms of combinations of several forms.
