Dallas, TX. Madame Jehan Sadat at the Boehm Gallery with the Great Gold Mask in porcelain by Boehm.
Bangkok, Thailand. Queen Sirikit of Thailand at the Dusit Palace for a Boehm private exibition.
Washington, DC. President Anwar Sadat and Ambassador Ghorbal of Egypt prior to Camp David Talks.
Dallas, TX. President Aquino of Philippines.
A porcelain sculpture begins its life on paper, in sketch form. Then the sculptor-artist determines its size, structure, and floral complements and fashions a rough model in plasteline (modeling clay).
In this initial stage the artist must examine the model and envision it through all stages of the process. This is the time when the practical problems must be solved, for the sculpture must be technically feasible as well as artistic to succeed in the porcelain venture.
Once the sculpture is finalized, moldmakers proceed to carefully cut it into parts that fit together. The direction and number of dissections are determined by the intricacy of the model.
Moldmaking is an exacting and time-consuming science. It is not uncommon to devote more than a year to the molding of an important sculpture.
Each plasteline model part must have a mold built around it. The first set of rough waste molds serves only to cast duplicate model parts in plaster, a hard medium capable of being carved in much more detail than is possible in the soft medium of plasteline. After refining and keying all plaster parts so they fit together, the process of moldmaking continues.
The refined plaster parts must now be molded as the original plasteline parts were. These master or block molds bear the exact finished detail of the refined parts, but are not to be used for casting. If they were, their eventual deterioration from use would force going back to the plaster model for re-molding, a procedure that is not easily repeated. Instead, the master molds are used only to make a positive set which, in turn, will be used to make another negative set exactly like the master. The positive set is called the case. The final negative molds are the replica or working molds in which casting of the model parts is done.