Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to form in three
dimensions. That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most
difficult of all arts; certainly it is more difficult than the arts which
involve appreciation of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. Many more
people are 'form-blind' than colour-blind. The child learning to see, first
distinguishes only two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances, depths.
Later, for its personal safety and practical needs, it has to develop (partly
by means of touch) the ability to judge roughly three-dimensonal distances.
But having satisfied the requirements of practical necessity, most people go
no further. Though they may attain considerable accuracy in the perception of
flat form, they do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort
needed to comprehend form in its full spatial existence.#
This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and
use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it
were, inside his head-he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were
holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally
visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at
one side what the other side is like, he identifies himself with its centre of
gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the
shape displaces in the air.#
And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply
as shape, not as description or reminiscence. He must, for example, perceive
an egg as a simple single solid shape, quite apart from its significance as
food, or from the literary idea that it will become a bird. And so with solids
such as a shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, a mountain
peak, a kidney, a carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a
bulrush, a bone. From these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms or
combinations of several forms.&