First Bronze

The first bronze I ever made was this female torso, whose back is made of desert cholla skeleton, and interestingly enough, lacks a right breast.  Eda rented a foundry for this pour.  The group took turns cranking up the temperature in the gas heated brick kiln we had built.  I had the midnight shift, an eerie time to be by oneself in industrial San Jose with the roar of gas jets ones only company.  Our pieces were in large plaster investments which took long hours to burn out.  But the bronze pour the next morning was an exciting event and I was hooked. That pour predicted many fruitful hours I would spend in future years, working with lost wax process.  But perhaps "Sitting Female" also predicted the loss of my own right breast to cancer some twenty years later.