Anatomical dissection of Herbert West

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to practise my dissection skills on a real human head. Here you can see the video before and after dissection.

Just kidding. The “dissected head” was just carved in stone, in Portland stone to be more precise. I went through the trouble of carving a complete head of a deceased man, only to then carve half of his head out. I could have simply carved the right side of his face only and save me the trouble but I wanted this to look and feel like a proper dissection.

But that was not the main challenge of this piece. For years I’ve studied how to make a face look as much alive as I could and I had to forget all of that and relearn how to carve a dead man. A cadaver is not as easy to carve as you think it is. You have to forget about how a familiar face would look like in your stone. The expression, the muscles, the eyes are incredibly difficult to portrait, let alone carved in a stone.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Some of you have probably noticed that Herbert West comes across as a familiar name (along side other references such as Arkham and the Miskatonic river). It comes from the short novel Herbert West the reanimator from Lovecraft. It was a small tribute to the great author of the cosmic horror. I’ve also put a reference to the preservation technique known as petrification. This practice was very common in the nineteenth century and allowed the soft tissues of a corpse to be preserved for decades. One of the masters of this technique was Efisio Marini. Google his name and you will find a lot of his experiments still preserved to this day.