Hauntingly Beautiful Marble Sculptures By Barry X Ball



In the world of fine art there's always someone trying to radically change the game with their artwork. While this can lead to some  innovative and interesting pieces, it can also occasionally turn things into one big mess, and forced innovation sometimes causes artists to lose sight of how important traditionalism can be to maintaining artistic integrity.

Enter Barry X Ball, a sculptor who's decided to take it back to the old school by sculpting portraits and figures out of marble. He crafts these incredible works of art while paying attention to fine details, such as the natural flow of the veins in the marble and the retention of natural edges and form whenever possible.

You can check out a selection of Barry's marble works at the link below, works which somehow manage to be traditionally beautiful and utterly surreal at the same time.

Link  --via Beautiful Decay

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I can't follow the process, but if I understand the photos, some work seems cast from live molds, and there appears to be some stereo photography for shape acquisition and computerized machine milling going on too.
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Excellent machinist; i'm a bit more reserved with the word 'sculptor' when digitization and computerized lathes/milling gets into the mix.

it's like calling a digital photograph equivalent to a Renoir. Direct artist involvement with the material, start to finish is at least one of my personal criteria for distinguishing art from craft from industry. this is more craft.

Of course, if you are pleased with a google sketchup approach to art and just want your printout in stone, this guy is your man.

to put it in internet terms... your cousin who builds you a new gamer pc isn't on the same level as the engineer who designed the multi-core processor at its heart, or for that matter, the fellows who wrote the printer driver. different life forms.
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@edward...

perhaps it's because you haven't spent a long time perfecting method?

not denying the results are nice, but they aren't michaelangelo or houdon or bernini... they are microsoft.

do you know any of those artists i mentioned? in particular, peek at bernini. there are grades of mastery, and method counts.
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I saw some in Venezia.
I'm not convinced : he takes classic sculptures, and scans them, and then a machine operates.
He really plays with the marble quality : veins, holes, stains that could not exist on the original works, where marble had been chosen with care for its whiteness and purity ; he sometimes operates with some digital tools (stretching, condensing, twisting the sculpture)
Then what ?
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