Thanksgiving Weekend

And here this is, finally. It's always a bit of a let down finishing something. Even if it turns out well (and I suppose I will admit that this one is well enough), there are always things I wish I had done differently. The blue background looks nice (nicer even than in this photo) but still...
And here this is, still so much potential. I'm nearing the outer ring. I won't set myself a date but it surely would be nice to be done with this before Christmas.

More on...The Thing

Here this is, black frame finished (both the wooden frame that will support this on the wall and the lights that go behind it and the black, glass mosaicked frame around the picture). I've also begun on the background, which I'm doing with "architecture glass" which is frosted glass that lets in light but obscures whatever is on the other side (which, in this case, will be wiring and a wall).
Here is a closeup. The glue I am using, Weldbond, takes a really long time (2 weeks) to become completely clear so you can see how much work I do at any given time by how wide the various bands of drying glue are. The 3 inch wide thick white glue band was done two days ago. Underneath The Thing is a big sheet of kraft paper, about 3' x 4', onto which I drew out concentric circles to use as guides for placing the glass. I thought I was being very clever by using a nail in the middle, tying a piece of string to it and, at the other end, a pencil. Then, or so the plan was, I would spin the pencil around the nail, letting out ever increasing lengths of string so that I would get ever larger, perfect circles. Except that the string went around the nail and so got shorter, and so my circles spiral. In could be a good effect if it was noticable, but it will be broken up with the Hulk and Thing bodies. So will it look like perfect circles, slightly wobbly circles or an ever increasing (vertigo inducing) spiral? Or just a big slab of indistinctly broken glass?

Getting Somewhere?

Here is one thing I have been working on. After a sputtering start (doing and then undoing the tentacles) I am finally back to work on this. The shell is done (I keep reminding myself that, although it looks too intensely bright now, the grout always flattens the colors out a bit) and so are the tentacles (barely visible now in a sea of sketch lines and gobs of old glue) and am starting to work on the background--always the hardest part.
The eye looked really big when it was the only thing done, but now it is sort of lost in the activity. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Fiber Show, Flint MI

People with more energy than I can imagine are organizing a local Fiber Show in downtown Flint for sometime next week (or sometime soon--I can't remember the dates of anything except the upcoming semester that starts in 136.5 hours and counting). I was asked if I wanted to enter anything. Here is a huge piece of felt I made last winter during the felting frenzy of Christmas Break 2008. I didn't have a plan for it then and couldn't come up with anything too imaginative, so it is a shawl--at least for purposes of displaying it in the fiber show. (That weird little circle is just light reflected from something in one of our trees. It looks strange but it isn't part of the wool. No really, it isn't.)

Here is a close-up with a bit of glass being used as a pin to keep it together and on the hanger. Mainly what I want to do is write up a narrative about what a mad scientific experiment felting is.

Haven't Forgotten The Thing

Just to show that I haven't completely forgotten about my promise to finish this before some Christmas or other, here is evidence that I actually do work on this piece once in a while. Here is the border SLOWLY getting done. I realized as I worked on this that I had to leave spaces for where the screws would attach to the wooden frame. BUT since I didn't know which screws to use, I didn't know what size space to leave so I was leaving huge spaces but didn't have the pieces for them... the whole thing was quickly dissolving into a mass of doubts and speculations. So I decided to get to work on the frame and then I could just get the damn black glass border done in a night or two.

Here is the black frame. This is just shy of being 4' by 4' (remember the broken corner business of over a year ago--still angry about that). Once I get enough layers of black paint on and it is COMPLETLY DRY (unfortunately I have a history of being a bit slip shod about these sorts of things--hanging pictures on walls before the paint is completely dry, that sort of thing) I will attach the frame to the plexiglass backing.

And here is one of the little holes I have drilled into the plexiglass so I can attach it to the wooden frame. I also have a dozen or so bits of wood that I am going to artfully scatter about within the frame to support the weight of the plexiglass and glass while I work until it is grouted. THEN I will finish the glass border and begin filling in the middle. Making the frame is tedious business and the black paint is really slow to dry (of course it has been raining every day for weeks, that might have something to do with it). But the end seems to actually be in sight...

Clay Nautilus

Just for the sheer perversity of it, I decided to make a nautilus sculpture in my most recent clay class. Since the class was only 6 weeks long and in summer (while it was really muggy and the clay most difficult to work with) I see in hindsight that I was being foolish and deluded to attempt this. While I won't relive the whole experience, the nadir was when I came to class one day and, because the moisture in the clay had moved around [no really, it does that: if clay is almost dry in one part of the sculpture but very moist in another, the water will relocate more evenly throughout the whole of the sculture--unless you wrap up the different sections of the sculpture differently--which I didn't do...but now I would...] and so sections that I needed to be dry and strong became wet and weak. And so I found it at the start of one class after a long holiday weekend collapsed into a big, 30-odd pound blob. I was rather dissapointed. But, unlike most things in life, unfired clay can be forgiving and Addie, my genius teacher, helped me stuff it with newspaper and we got it back on track, more or less. I still see sections in the walls that are bumpier now than they were before the disaster. Here is it, post-disaster, and almost dry. The plastic vegetable bag wrapping on the edge is there to keep the very thinnest part from drying out too quickly and cracking (which is what happened with my 3 story house, see earlier post). So what have I learned about working with clay? The real artistry lies in knowing how to wrap clay in plastic to control wandering water.
Here it is after surviving its first trip through the kiln. Guy, the kiln man at the FIA, said it needed to be in an especially slow fire otherwise it would have exploded (I must confess that I like hearing that my pieces make the lives of others difficult--what is the point of making something insignificant and unremarkable?) so it not only needed to be alone in the kiln but had to be fired for almost 48 hours. Since the semester had long ended, I didn't have time to glaze it yet, so it is actually rather fragile right now. Here it sits, on one of my grandmother's towels that I remember using when staying at her house more than 30 years ago, in our basement on my work table. Once the next semester starts I will get it back to the FIA and glaze it. [I HATE glazing. It's hard work.]

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.