A Few of My Favorite Things...

I am taking a photography class at the FIA. I took photography classes MANY YEARS AGO when I was in highschool and I got very comfortable with my Pentax k1000--the classic photography student's first camera: relatively cheap, reliable, heavy and virtually indestructable. (I dropped that camera into the Yellowstone river and then later on a cement pathway in East Berlin and it still took great pictures!) But the world has moved on and now I have a digital camera (a Nikon--eee!!!!) that is light as a feather and can do ANYTHING (or so the manual tells me) but I can't figure the damn thing out. So I am in a class, with other people that really belong in an Agatha Christie murder mystery: there's the guy who only "shoots raw," the woman who wonders whether or not her memory card will be in b/w or color, another woman who "LOVES taking picture of children--ANY CHILDREN," and the guy who claims that "all photography is prevarication." So far I have learned a little more about how to used my camera (and a lot about what it could do if I only knew how to do it). Here are a few of my first photos:

This is late afternoon, looking up through our grape vines. I spend quite a lot of time in our backyard but never really noticed how many bugs there were until I really got up close and personal to everything.
Most of our yard is surrounded by hedges (which I refuse to trim too rigorously because it is unnatural but the result is that we can barely fit the cars down the driveway as they close in on us more every year) which get covered in tiny flowers (I think I am allergic to the pollen) which attacts THOUSANDS of bees.

This taro used to be 3 feet tall but suffered from poor care while spending the winter in my office. The plant died back to the ground and I thought it was all over, but after a series of amazing thunderstorms, these signs of life appeared.

More bugs enjoying themselves. I think these are fireflies.

We have an enormous tree stump in our backyard which is an ecosystem all of its own. Sometimes as I head to the compost pile it hides I can hear buzzing and scratching coming from within it. It had bark when we moved here 10 years ago, but most has fallen off. A few days ago several hundred mushrooms appeared during the night.

Delphi Adventures!

Wednesday Thomas and I headed for glass paradise--though you wouldn't know it by the sign.

I'll have to take their word for it. There certainly was a lot of glass to look at. A good location to set a murder mystery... spend a lot of money. I didn't go hog wild but I did finally get the glass I needed to fill in the background of The Thing. Now I will do the black border and away I will go. Maybe I will even finish it before next Christmas! (Interestingly, Thomas didn't think this place was all that great. What's wrong with kids today?)

The Thing and more

I was putting off chipping off the tentacles for months because it just seemed too depressing to undo 30-odd hours of work. But, today seemed like a good day for destruction and I went at it. I expected it to be slow and tedious but, as the saying goes, with the right tool any job is easy. And for this job, the right tool was a big ass screwdriver. I chipped off the glass pieces in about five minutes. This left me sitting amongst several hundred glass shards but the art process cannot be tamed! I finished the ground (brown and black glass) in just a few hours and here it is. I'm actually toying with the idea of not including any impact lines--gasp!!!--but just finished with a frame in black glass and the frosted shattered glass for the background. The idea is frighteningly tempting because it would save dozens of hours of work.

The Thing Update

I haven't given an update on The Thing mosaic in a long time. I had a burst of energy in January and got quite a bit done but then, halfway through the second speech bubble, I stalled. The letters (most seemed to be round and very small) were really frustrating and I just couldn't face it. Simon started to despair of ever getting his Christmas present. Then, inexplicably, about three weeks ago I had a burst of enthusiasm and started working on this once again for several hours a day. The second speech bubble was done in under an hour and it seemed to take no time at all the finish up The Thing's second leg and second arm. Here he is:
Notice I extended the B of the BUH out past the frame. The idea is that the content of the picture is bursting out of the frame--not hard to figure out but I thought I would be explicit. This was Simon's idea many months ago and I don't know why I resisted for so long--perhaps simply a habitual response to all his suggestions that I have acquired in the past twenty odd years of living with him. He now has no memory of suggesting the B extension and thinks it was my bright idea--I certainly came out ahead on that one! Next I will work on the ground with brown and black glass and after that the "impact lines" which frame the image. I'm not sure how I am going to break up the glass for the impact lines--if they are too even, it will look static. Thin lines look like motion but thin, squared-off pieces of glass do not. Glass shattered (like a broken windscreen) would convey motion but it would be hard to pack that into the spaces. I could double the width of each line (and so have half as many) and therefore would have more room to arrange the pieces...Hmm. Not sure. Have to think about this more. Anyway, here you can see the ground The Hulk is standing on and the impact lines on the bottom half of the picture.
The other issue that haunts me is the moment of shifting this mighty construction onto the wooden frame that will house the lighting. Should I grout first (adding 20 odd pounds of weight to something that will already weigh at least 20 pounds) and then shift it hoping the grout will keep the billions of glass pieces in place OR should I shift it before I grout and risk the plexiglass bowing and billions of glass bits popping loose? Working through this problem is keeping me up nights.

Flint Institute of Art Art Show--June 2 to June 30

Here is the finished version, (tentatively) titled: Broken Glass Inside. I just finished it and schlepped it up into our bedroom to be used as a clothes horse (what ARE you supposed to do with clothes that have been worn once and so should not be rehung in the closet but that do not actually qualify as dirty and therefore needing to be put in the hamper?) when I got the word that it was wanted for an art show at the FIA. The show is featuring "The Figure" and, although this was never intended to have a human form, most people think it is a female human abdomen (indeed while I was working on it several women leaned into it and caressed it--longing for those long ago but not forgotten "baby bumps", perhaps?). Works for me! So off it went, back down the stairs, back into the car (strapped in, of course) and back to the FIA. The reception is on June 9th. (When I asked Simon if he wanted to attend with me, his only question was, "Will there be snacks?" Yes. "Then I'll be there.")