Two pairs of hands at work in the studio over the last few days.  Always a joy.  This is Dickie helping me chainsaw a bit of 'found' wood into some kind of 'gallery-fit' state.  I found the piece itself about two years ago when walking with a friend.  We came across a young man with a chain saw dismantling a fallen tree in a field of the farmer he works for.  My rather mad request for him to saw off a huge chunk and get it back to his yard was met with equanimity based, I think, on a shared love of wood.  The bottle of wine offered can surely not have been enough for the effort he had to make.  Dickie, in the picture above, then heroically risked the suspension on his van to get it back to my studio where it stood in a corner for the best part of 18 months.  The idea for a small man to rest on the very peak then came to me, which I made in wax and then looked at for a couple of months.  Later this week I will pick that same figure up from the foundry but transformed into bronze.  In the meantime Dickie and I have been carving off bits at the back to make the piece manageable in terms of weight, stabilising the bottom, and generally tweaking this old giant. I must go out to the studio later and grey down a small damaged area.  There is a tiny bit of filling to do on the back.  Later in the week I will no doubt have to fiddle around to get the bronze man to settle properly in his resting place.  At some point soon my photographer friend Colin Hawkins and I will spend time trying to get a decent photograph of it.  What all this is leading to is.....how hard it is to answer whenever anyone asks one how long a piece of sculpture took to make.....