Sculpting a Legacy with Benjamin Victor

Yeah.

Now, when you're actually building the sculpture, so you obviously have to use technology to, you know, make a template from a picture, I'm assuming.

But where does the actual bronze come in and how does one get bronze? Does it come in bricks? How do you measure? How do you get bronze?

Yeah, it does.

It's actually it comes in ingots.

So they look like a gold brick.

But obviously they're not worth as much as a gold brick would be.

But bronze is very expensive.

And so it's an expensive media to work in, but it's very permanent and very beautiful.

And it has a big history behind it in sculpture.

And so it's a wonderful media for art and for sculpture.

And I got into it, like I said, doing the clay Samson in college.

And then I eventually was able to sell that.

And it got so much attention in the local area that I could afford to bronze it because I was just a student at the time.

I couldn't even afford the bronze fees.

So once I had done that bronze process for my clays, I was like, this is fantastic because it makes them permanent.

These clays are in here in the studio, but they're fragile and they're soft.

And so it's it's a permanent material once it's in bronze.

And then I've learned over the years that you can do many, many things with the bronze that you can't even do with the clay.

Like you'll see on a lot of these clays armature coming out of the piece like steel that holds up the clay because the clay won't even hold its own weight.

But

then bronze, you don't need that armature.

So you can have a piece like Buffett where he's standing on one foot.

And the metal is strong enough to hold itself, where in clay, of course, it could never do that.