Busty, bronzed women aren't exclusive to Renaissance paintings and Baywatch. Barbara Chen's studio is bursting with them. Chen uses a 5,000-year-old method called the lost-wax process to cast her trademark figures: graceful, curvaceous and very round ladies. The Hillsborough, Calif., artist is distinctive in both her choice of media—her sculptures begin as clay, morphing to hot wax and them molten bronze—and her choice of subject. "My ladies are jouous not because they are fat," says Chen, an econ major who's rather slight herself, "but because their forms are so inherently wonderful and beautiful."
Courtesy Barbara Chen
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