As a professional speed sculptor, people often ask me how fast I sculpt. When I tell them that I can sculpt a person’s likeness in 20 minutes, they typically give a look of surprise and intrigue. The follow-up question is often, “How do you do that?” My answer is: I trust myself to sculpt without the use of language.
What it means to me to sculpt without the use of language is: I shut down the internal dialogue, the voice in my head, that voice each of us has in our head. Then I allow myself to sculpt through a different level of connection that does not involve language. The experience, from my perspective, is like being sort of a superhero with a special power that enables me to freeze everyone nearby still in time and space while I remain active in real-time.
I get my work done, and then when I’m finished, ‘snap’ everyone is in motion again. What my body and mind feel like has been an hour of work has actually only been minutes in real-time for everyone else. I’m connecting with my sculpture on an intuitive level which doesn’t require analytical thought or language. In fact, when I find myself ‘thinking’ while I sculpt, I slow down dramatically and perform less accurately.
Of course, language allows humanity to create amazing accomplishments through communication and collaboration. As our gift as humans, language generates culture, art, music, and technology.
At the same time, we all have a persistent, judgmental chatty internal dialogue telling us what is right, what’s wrong, and how our circumstances occur for us. That very self-limiting internal dialogue is based on the past and fear.
How would life be without living according to that language-based internal dialogue? Answering and living by this question is what I have discovered is the key to my success as an artist and an individual.
Not thinking with words or analytical know-how dramatically improves my accuracy and speed when performing as a sculptor. This doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking. It simply means that I’m taking language out of my thinking.
A few years back, I was sculpting a cake of my father for his birthday. I asked him for several photos and had them printed out 8×10, and then I hung them around the kitchen. I carefully studied his face. I analyzed every nook and cranny. I took in everything I could from an analytical standpoint. Once I began to sculpt, I continued to reference the photos to determine his proportions and get his likeness “perfect.”
I felt frustrated again and again because the sculpture just wasn’t “looking like my Dad.” The added pressure of the sculpture being a likeness of my own father and having all my friends and family around was also getting to me: My inner dialogue was running rampant.
Then I reminded myself of how long I have known my Dad, how many times I have seen him in-person. Literally 10,000 times or more! I realized that the reference photos were not needed, and more than that, they are slowing me down and reducing my accuracy! I told myself, “Stop thinking so much, stop looking at the photos, just sculpt my Dad! I know exactly what my father looks like.” On a dime, I went from struggling to performing with a beautiful fluidity and accuracy.
I am also reminded of another occasion where thinking from language did not serve me well, and as a matter of fact, thinking from other than language actually better served me. A man from Gujarat, India called me on the phone to inquiry about private sculpting classes. For me, his accent was thick and his words were very challenging for me to distinguish. My first reaction was to think harder and listen very carefully to each word. This wasn’t working. The more focused I was, the more frustrated I became. Then I pondered, was it the thinking and the analyzing that was creating my lack of understanding of his communication? I decided to listen to his words with no internal dialog on my part, no analytical thought from me, and merely be with each of his words just like I do when I am sculpting. His words went from being unintelligible to easy to understand. It was as if I had flipped a switch from off to on.
My experience with accuracy and speed is different from “being in the zone” as some may say. Being in the zone is when everything is coming to you with perfect ease and being totally present to the work with no distraction from the outside. People say, when they are in the zone, time goes by very quickly for them. That description is exactly the opposite of what I experience when sculpting. For me, it is about trusting language and traditional thought will hinder me, and I give up the urge to think analytically. In doing so, I gain access to a powerful way of being whereby I express myself, be empathic and connect with everything around me. This gives me the ability to accomplish things and connect with my surroundings on levels I previously never imagined.
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