For example, hunched shoulders signify insecurity. Straightening up the figure conveys its power, and so on. The standing figure is to Bolhuis what the reclining figure was to Henry Moore: a space to which perpetually return to, full of mysteries that a lifetime of practice can’t hope to unlock. That’s what Bolhuis likes most about creating art—the beginning stage when the sculpture is just an idea and not yet a physical object.
“When I finished art school, I thought I was going to do monumental sculpture, big works, and I did for a while,” he said. “But what I started loving the most—actually always loved the most—was the start, where you figure out what you want to say.”
It’s the mysterious quality of creation that keeps Bolhuis coming back to the studio. His sculptures don’t begin with a roadmap, but take shape between his fingers as he sculpts. He stuck with smaller works so that he “could stay inside the creative process.”
“I was always jealous of painters because they could take a piece of paper and just start,” he said. “As a sculptor, I had to collect all these materials, make a mold, make a casting, and so on.” That is, until he found polymer clay. “At the beginning, I thought maybe polymer was too silly or too cheap, but eventually it became this beautiful adventure,” he said. Plus, polymer clay gave him what now defines his work: color.
“Color is one of the main things I do now,” he said. “It’s quite an adventure, though—it’s not easy to bring color into sculpture and that’s why you don’t see it much.”
Bolhuis finds himself guided largely by his own intuition. Polymer clay is a forgiving medium. It bakes up in under a half hour in a home oven and it fosters Bolhuis’ sense of playfulness and exploration. “I just try things,” he says. “And it’s very much about intuition, which is my main love.” With polymer, he says he “never knows what’s going to happen.”
Bolhuis begins with a small armature of metal before he layers on clay and watches as “the figure happens between my hands.” He never uses a model. Rather, the “face just happens, the clothes just happen, the posture just happens.” It’s all about finding the right composition. Bolhuis continuously asks himself as he’s making a sculpture: “Does it feel good?”
Bolhuis works somewhat like a novelist. He has a vague idea in mind of what the work will be, but as he’s crafting it, the character seems to take on a life of its own, as if by magic. His sculptures, he says, “want to live their own lives.”
When I finished art school, I thought I was going to do monumental sculpture, big works, and I did for a while…But what I started loving the most—actually always loved the most—was the start, where you figure out what you want to say.”
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