Normal for Norfolk

I have spent the last week or two making a baby's arm - in plaster.

This sort of figurative sculpture comes naturally to some people, but not me. I can do it alright, but it requires a level of concentration which - having a butterfly mind - I find difficult to maintain.

In theory, you could model and carve a baby's arm in about twice the time it takes the plaster to go off, but you have to know exactly what you are doing right from the start. If this was not a restoration job which involves copying someone else's style and technique, all the thought processes which determine decision-making would have been done before the finished thing was begun, usually in clay. I also have to fit the new arm to the mother's face and the baby's stump, which is time-consuming in itself.

The other thing is that I am not that experienced in classical human figures, so am constantly having to remind myself what a human body looks like. After I left art school I didn't usually spend more than a minute or so staring at naked women. I didn't have the time.

Years ago I worked for a well-known sculptor on a series of classical figures in a French limestone in the 18th century style (some of you know this story, so skip it now). It was the three you can see on the pediment of the house in the picture above.

I was carving the right hand of the one in the middle, and this involved lying on my back and working upside-down, because the drapery she is holding runs through the first finger and thumb, obscuring the others below.

As I was chipping away, getting showered in the face and eyes by the bits of stone I was knocking off, the sculptor leant down and examined my work.

"Yes, that's good, but why have you given her six fingers?"

He turned to his regular assistant and said, "Tom tends to be a little too generous with fingers..."