[al:新概念英语（四）] [ar:MP3 同步字幕版（英音）] [ti:The Sculptor Speaks] [by:更多学习内容，请到chazidian.com搜索“新概念”] [00:01.54]Lesson 31 [00:03.44]The sculptor speaks [00:11.55]What do you have to be able to do to appreciate sculpture? [00:18.13]Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to form in 3 dimensions. [00:24.76]That is perhaps why sculpture has been described as the most difficult of all arts; [00:31.05]certainly it is more difficult than the arts which involve appreciation of flat forms, shape in only two dimensions. [00:40.75]Many more people are 'form-blind' than colour-blind. [00:45.61]The child learning to see, first distinguishes only two-dimensional shape; it cannot judge distances, depths. [00:56.17]Later, for its personal safety and practical needs, it has to develop (partly by means of touch) the ability to judge roughly 3-dimensonal distances. [01:08.40]But having satisfied the requirements of practical necessity, most people go no further. [01:14.67]Though they may attain considerable accuracy in the perception of flat form, [01:20.19]they do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial existence. [01:29.45]This is what the sculptor must do. [01:32.23]He must strive continually to think of and use, form in its full spatial completeness. [01:39.55]He gets the solid shape as it were, inside his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. [01:51.31]He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; [01:57.29]he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its mass, its weight; [02:08.22]he realizes its volume as the space that the shape displaces in the air. [02:15.81]And the sensitive observer of sculpture must also learn to feel shape simply as shape, not as description or reminiscence. [02:25.95]He must, for example, perceive an egg as a simple single solid shape quite apart from its significance as food, [02:34.36]or from the literary idea that it will become a bird. [02:39.38]And so with solids such as a shell, a nut, a plum, a pear, a tadpole, a mushroom, [02:48.68]a mountain peak, a kidney, a carrot, a tree-trunk, a bird, a bud, a lark, a ladybird, a bulrush, a bone. [03:02.58]From these he can go on to appreciate more complex forms or combinations of several forms.