Jose Miguel Pino Turing Scrap Metal Into Art Sculptures
I love representing animals, especially wild ones. My style is realistic and synthetic. I like that the spectator’s eye fills in the gap and so his mind draws the rest. The synthesis achieved at first artistic representations of cavemen, has always fascinated me, for whom the animal was the main artistic motif.
My creative process begins with an inspiration. I love the Mountain Bike and it’s precisely in those lost places, away from the madding crowd, where I find it. From that intuition, I carry out a detailed study of the animal that I wish to represent. I would like to captures its essence, converting intangible into form.
With every sculpture that I make I learn a lot about the physiology of the animal that I´m going to represent since I spend several days studying in-depth its proportions and anatomy (bone and muscular level). It helps me later to find those determining lines to be able to execute a nice synthesis. I also study proportions and during this process, I make annotations and sketches with decisive data that cannot be ignored at the time of execution.
The last step before starting sculpting is a carefully observe of its movements to find the moment, a very short period of time in its way of moving and I try to capture it. It is often in full swing so I work to overcome the laws of gravity. During this phase, I make small sculptural representations in wire or clay to decide the final position and the material that I’m going to use.
Although I make sculptures in any type of material (resin, ceramic, wood, stone), I especially enjoy making them in metal. It’s a hard work (as hard as the material itself) and although the process is slow, painstaking and laborious, the result especially comforts me. Maybe it’s because shaping metal involves a fight between him and me. Metal refuses to come to life!
When I’m working on it, I feel uneasy, because of the tension that comes from having an idea in mind and feeling the urgent need to capture it. This feeling is disappearing as my work progresses and so it becomes peaceful. I am not a very good speaker and I have realised that it´s easier for me to express myself through my hands than through my words.
I have a High Degree in Arts (Bachelor of Fine Art) by the University of Granada in Spain and also hold the title of Sculpture technician, specialist in forging, whose end-of-degree project, “Chrysaetos” (forged eagle), was awarded the First Price by Robles Pozo Foundation. This piece has a commemorative space at the Granada School of Art since then. ~ Jose Miguel Pino
