Clay is the medium
Clay is the equivalent of pen and paper. Ideas can be sketched out quickly in clay, so it can capture ideas as they form. However, I find it to be like a flower. When it is in bloom it is fantastically beautiful, but over time it loses its appeal as it decays. It can be dried and fired to preserve it, but it loses the life it had regardless.
I have done thousands of works in clay that are now lost and that were never recorded.
Lost works
I did many works like this that existed for a few hours and then were discarded. I could do 30 portraits like this in clay in the time it takes to carve one in stone. I find that that was good training for engineering products where extensive prototyping is necessary to distill the essential elements of anything that is timeless.
Distilling notions
Clay is a great medium to distill notions to the essential elements which communicate clearly what you want to say. Today I mostly design in a computer program called SolidWorks. I find it to be a medium similar to clay in that there is visual feedback that guides the process of creation.
Studying the enduring masters
This relief sculpture is a realization of one of the Ignudi from the Sistine Chapel. I did many studies using the drawings and paintings of old masters. Everything we do is in a context, and in order to communicate effectively it is imperative to understand the context.
The relief below is taken from a Rembrandt etching.