Bronze Sculpture by Howard Hitchcock - Lanning Gallery [Sedona]

"Violetta"
Bronze Sculpture
17" x 5" x 4"

For more than a generation, Howard Hitchcock has been a sculptor and university professor of art, devoting decades to perfecting the art of ceramic shell casting. As the artist noted in the preface to his instructional book, Out of the Fiery Furnace (William Kaufmann, Inc. 1985), “Ceramic shell casting is the most spectacular art process imaginable, particularly at the crescendo of a night pour when the glowing, golden stream of liquid bronze flows into the red-hot shell, bringing it to neon incandescence in the dark.”

To help us better understand this exciting process, the preface begins: “Lost-wax casting is truly an ancient and venerable art that has been practiced in diverse cultures and continents over thousands of years. The most modern approach to that ancient process, dating from only the mid-point of the twentieth century, is ceramic shell casting. Instead of being encased in the traditional solid-block mold that weakens in the heat of burnout, the wax model is thinly coated with a ceramic material that is fired by the burnout into a hard, lightweight shell for receiving the molten bronze. In both cases, whatever was wax becomes bronze.”

Hitchcock’s artistic vision belies the seriousness of his skills and intellect: Every remarkable bronze he creates is infused with a sophisticated sense of humor that challenges viewers to work out its cleverness. In the artist’s bronze sculptures stylized human forms blend into the structure of objects both imagined and ordinary as the artist uses human forms to form the spokes of wheels, to push over-sized envelopes or to perch atop a blade in a piece entitled, “On the Cutting Edge.”

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"Sextet"
Bronze Sculpture
18" x 6" x 3"

"Tower of Four Winds"
Bronze Sculpture
30" x 7" x 6"

"Reclining Figure"
Bronze Sculpture
13" x 24" x 14"

"Sonatina"
Bronze Sculpture
19" x 6" x 3"

"Highstrung"
Bronze Sculpture
19" x 5" x 3"

"Look, No Hands" - Bronze Sculpture by Howard Hitchcock

"Look, No Hands"
Bronze Sculpture
20" x 20" x 10"

"On the Cutting Edge" - Bronze Sculpture by Howard Hitchcock

"On the Cutting Edge"
Bronze Sculpture
14" x 7" x 5"

Artist's prices beginning at $395.

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