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 too 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-dimensional 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, ad if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally
visualized 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 center of gravity, its mad, its weight; he realized
its volume, as the space that tte shape displays 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. Form these he
can go on to appreciate more complex forms or combinations of several forms