There’s a 1,000-pound gorilla in the Bogucki family’s basement. Hunkered down on all fours, massive, hulking, his broad brow and nostrils barely emerging from the blank stare of abstraction, the gorilla holds everyone’s
“This sort of work gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘family.’ A married artist dovetails marriage into the art. We have a house, but basically it’s a studio we live in.”
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Then a worker from a foundry near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the bronze will be cast, will spend a few days coating the clay with liquid silicon rubber. The rubber will cure and be covered with plaster that will hold it firm. Then the rubber/plaster shell, with its exact reverse imprint of every detail of fur, skin, and expression, will be taken off in pieces: head, legs, torso.
The Boguckis will drive the molds from their woodland home to the foundry. Nonstop, of course, in 24 hours. There the insides of the rubber “negatives” will be coated with liquid wax that when hard will form positive reproductions of the pieces of the clay sculpture. The rubber will be removed. A network of wax sprues will be built projecting outward from each piece; they will become the channels through which molten bronze will pour evenly into the molds and air will escape.
Shirley remembers racing toward that particular deadline, finishing up the life-size clay horses and riders in the foundry. “It would be two, three, four in the morning, and we couldn’t get him to leave.”
From an early age, too, Bogucki wanted to be an artist. His parents took a dim view of the idea. “They thought art was good as a hobby,” he says. “My father wanted me to be an engineer, and my mother wanted me to work in a factory. And I am doing engineering all the time, figuring out leg supports and pounds per square inch. All the time I’m thinking of time, motion, acceleration, but it’s all intuitive. The tail has to go behind the horse at the same speed the horse is traveling. Many sculptors make bucking horses that look like the rider is being blown out with dynamite–it doesn’t hold together. It’s got to be realistic, believable.”
Sculptors generally prefer to work through the enlarging process from a bronze version of the maquette. But there’s no time for that now. Instead a number of bronzes will be made from the maquette this spring. The sculptor will keep one, the zoo will keep one, and others will be sold to donors who contribute to the life-size version. If the fund-raising is successful, the zoo may even commission other gorillas in the future, giving Samson a bronze family of his own.
