Figurative sculptor Amelia Rowcroft lives in the lovely Sussex town of Lewes near the South Coast, which dates back to 961AD.
She was kind enough to invite us into her studio in a building that once housed a brewery in the 1600s, and that’s where we recorded this episode of BWBoR.
Amelia has been sculpting practically, working in clay for over 20 years, creating primarily fine art portraits and figurative sculptures, though she has also worked within the film industry and for the world’s leading wax figure museums including Madame Tussaud’s – we talked about it all.
She studied at Central St Martins, and the Florence Academy in Florence, Italy, and interestingly enough, was also a student at Wimbledon School of Art where Stuart attended, though a few years behind him.
As fate would have it, another of our upcoming podcast guest artists, ZBrush Master Madeleine Scott Spencer, also studied at the Florence Academy and remembers Amelia, but we’ll save that for later.
To listen to the podcast, you can stream or download from here, or simply subscribe through your favourite podcast app – we are on many, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, IHeartRADIO , STITCHER , Luminary and Google Podcasts.
We chatted for a good hour and a half and covered a variety of sculpture-related topics, such as why isn’t there a Museum of Crap Renaissance Sculpture so we can see the failures of the Masters – because there had to be some – and creating a likeness sculpture vs. creating a caricature of a subject. We also chatted about sculpting digitally vs. pushing actual clay around.
Amelia was kind enough – incredibly generous is more like it – to allow us to explore her online sculpture course, and it is jaw-dropping in content and ‘lightbulb’ moments. We urge you to at least look at the sample video lessons on Amelia’s website www.sculptingmasterclass.com/collections. We suspect you’ll want to enrol to take advantage of the instruction offered by this incredible sculptor. Whether you sculpt practically or digitally, this information is invaluable and transferable between mediums.
Check out the free course previews to whet your appetite.
You can follow Amelia and see more of her work on Instagram @ameliarowcroftsculpture and her fantastic website with a full folio of her work.
We mentioned a sculptor called (Franz Xaver) Messerschmidt (1736 – 1783). Check him out if you are not familiar with his expressive face sculptures and character studies here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Xaver_Messerschmidt.
Many thanks, as always, for your time checking the stuff out. You can email us directly at stuartandtodd@gmail.com or leave us a voice message on our site.
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–Stuart & Todd
To listen to the podcast, you can stream or download from here, or simply subscribe through your favourite podcast app – we are on many, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, IHeartRADIO , STITCHER , Luminary and Google Podcasts.