Blog · On the craft
There's an idea I repeat to everyone who walks into the studio wanting to learn: carving isn't adding, it's removing. Painting is built up, layer over layer. Sculpture in wood or stone does the opposite — it works by subtraction. You don't put anything onto the block; you take away everything that isn't the form. Once you understand that, you stop fighting the material and start listening to what was already inside it.
The problem is that lesson, learned on fine hardwood, is expensive. You don't learn to see on a hundred-year-old rescued júcaro log. That's why, when I teach beginners, I start them on a material almost nobody associates with art: rigid polyurethane foam.
It isn't a shortcut or a cheap substitute. It's the maquette — the three-dimensional sketch real sculptors use before committing to the final material. Foam has no grain, so the beginner isn't fighting the fiber: they're fighting only the form, which is the only thing that matters at the start. It cuts with little force, sands to a silky finish, and with a coat of gesso and paint it can look like stone or bronze. The student sees a dignified result on day one, and that's what hooks them.
And there's something else, almost philosophical: foam teaches exactly the gesture of wood. Remove. Reveal. Look at the piece from every angle and ask what's excess. Once that way of looking is already formed, wood stops being frightening.
I don't start students on birds or faces. I start with the fundamental shapes of modern sculpture — the alphabet almost all abstract work of the last century is made of. They're simple to state and deep to execute:
The egg. A continuous surface, without a single point of rest. It's the first and the most demanding: there's no detail to hide a mistake behind, only the naked form.
A river stone. It has no "correct" shape, so it's impossible to get wrong — everything is surface and weight in the hand. The freest form for loosening the touch.
A volume pierced by a hollow. Here the student discovers negative space: that air is also part of the sculpture, and sometimes the void is the protagonist.
A pointed ovoid, run through by a single seam. It teaches the axis and the line that organizes the whole piece — the discipline of a clear decision.
Two volumes leaning on each other; or several stacked vertically. This is the leap into composition: the relationship between masses, balance, rhythm. The totem, in its vertical column, also carries the African and Cuban memory that's never far from my work.
None of this is my invention. It's the language of Brâncuși, of Arp, of Noguchi — and, much closer to home, of Agustín Cárdenas, the sculptor from Matanzas who carried Cuban abstraction to the world. When a beginner carves their first ovoid, they aren't doing a craft exercise: they're entering, through the humble door, a hundred-year-old conversation.
The route is always the same. You study the form in foam, as many times as it takes, without rushing and without waste. And the day your hand already knows, you honor that form in a wood that already had a life — a fallen log, an old branch, a mahogany that finished its cycle. Foam was the notebook; wood is the poem.
If you want to start, the first shape is waiting for you.
The first project in the series, step by step and in foam. The purest form for learning to see.
See the tutorial