Fraga Magna Rotabilia was commissioned by Triangle Arts and Culture League as a gift to The City of Williamsburg Virginia, and is located in Bicentennial Park in Historic Colonial Williamsburg, near The College of William and Mary Law School.
The sculpture is cast and polished bronze with polychromed finish.
The image above shows part of the sculpture cooling after we poured the bronze for the the bird on the head of the figure.
The sculpture was cast using the lost wax method of bronze casting. The lost wax method dates back approximately 6500 years. Ancient methods are very similar to today’s methods in that a fireproof mold was created around a wax object. The wax was evacuated from the mold using fire and molten metal was poured into the hollow mold. Technology has made it easier to achieve high quality castings for today’s foundry men and women, but the process remains basically the same.
For the purposes of this sculpture, I carved the forms out of blocks of foam and coated them with oil clay. The sculpture started as a maquette, so I was able to enlarge the piece by making a 3D template basically by hand, using a mathematical ratio for enlargement.