(gentle upbeat music) (upbeat piano music) (upbeat jazz music) - I've done art for most of my life.

I'm now 85.

I think about it constantly.

I dream about it.

I wake up, I'm thinking about it.

I have a notepad by the bed and I mark down things as they occur, and they occur all the time.

It's a full-time job.

It's not just nine to five, God knows.

The time that I put in is probably half of what I put in mentally.

The process is quite meticulous.

The most difficult part of any sculpture and any artwork, I think, is the beginning idea.

What are you going to reproduce?

Once you know what you want to produce, everything else falls in its place.

(upbeat jazz music) I would bet we've been on it for six weeks, and the body has been altered a number of times.

I think the body's looking pretty good now.

The problem, of course, is we've got her leaning back and we needed a support to keep her, quite frankly, from falling on her derriere.

We've had numbers of suggestions.

I try to get suggestions from everybody in the gallery.

We've tried at least a dozen different ideas as to how to support her.

We finally came up with the idea of the ring, and the ring will be a thicker material than what you see here.

This is merely a sample in order to determine whether the the idea is correct for us.

I like her form.

I like the way she is turning.

Although we've done probably a dozen nudes, her body is exposed more than some of these others.

It takes on a little bit of an abstraction by having the circle behind her.

So if we ever get a feeling from a photograph, the photograph is only a basic idea and then we ad lib, because I demand of myself the quality that I think I must do.

It's the way I live and the way I want to make my art.

- I am working on some wax ballerinas.

So she started in clay, and she was specifically made so that we could do a mold of her and then change her position.

So these will, when they go to the foundry, they'll be going right as wax, and then they can get cast immediately.

I even did her, you know, I did her tutu separately also, I made a mold of that.

With the wax, you just heat it up and move it around.

We're going through different kinds of poses.

Like here's when she'll be tying her shoe, and we're just sort of making it up as we go along.

I enjoy the figurative.

You know, Richard and I sort of a lot of times go through our ideas together, and it's a little different all the time.

You never know exactly what you're gonna do.

But Richard really likes to work on detail, so that's my style too because I'm working with him.

- Everything that I do is figurative work and is tight work, I would call it.

I'm not an artist who does things loosely.

My technique to do something as exact as I can be.

Very few people, I think, do sculpture the way I do it.

(upbeat jazz music) (upbeat music) I work like a dog, but it's my life, and I love it, and I hope it shows up in my work.

I try to make it so.

And yeah.

(upbeat music) I love looking at the work that I've completed, and I rarely, but on occasion, look at something that I've created 10 years ago, and it motivates me to make the work that I'm making currently better.

So it's not that I'm infallible by any means, but I constantly strive to better my craft.

If you've done the right job, the best job you can, you'll look at it and get joy from it, and that goes on until the day you die.

And I'm sure that happens with the painters as well.

They look at their work and they get joy out of it.

And if you don't get joy out of the work that you complete, even though you may make a dollar out of it and you keep the lights burning in your home and food on the table, if you don't love it, it's work.

And I don't consider this work.

This is joy.

I did this around 10 or 12 years ago.

I'm not sure exactly when.

The colors of Moulin Rouge originally were black and red, and although it works for the Moulin Rouge background in France, in those days, it looked like hell on her.

So we change the colors.

We can do that on any bronze.

We could put acrylic paints on, but outdoors they don't weather as well as the standard chemical patinas that color it.

(upbeat music) (gentle music) I still have more to give.

I love it.

If I didn't love it, I wouldn't do it.

If I can't sculpt, I would be very unhappy.

I'd probably start painting, and if my hands got too bad, I'd probably put a paintbrush between my teeth and paint.

I guess I am obsessed by it.

(gentle music)