Thursday Salute to Originals: The Blob
Beware of the Blob! It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides across the floor. — from The Blob, a 1958 American horror film.
In the hands of Spanish sculptor José Manuel Castro López, hard stone is a soft, bendable, and pliable medium. In a series of organic-form sculptures, López has taken chunks of granite and quartz and morphed them into blobs with a range of strange textures.
Starting with a plain block of stone, each piece is manipulated into stitches, clamps and stretched-out forms that appear to have been molded like clay — one piece looks almost like a peeled potato!
The sculptures are small and figureless, but they each showcase a masterful study of stone. López carving techniques are transformative, manipulating the hard, solid materials into something that looks soft or even squishy to touch.
The final pieces are each either odd, amusing, or even graceful.
This Thursday, we’re saluting José Manuel Castro López and his exploration of quartz and granite carving. Check out more of the artist’s creative work on his public Facebook Timeline.
Sources: Jose Manuel Castro Lopez, This is Colossal