Commission work 2

I think I'm getting close with Andrea's commission. Check it out. It's designed to match the other two pieces she bought (see earlier post), but I wanted a slight "Andrea" touch to it. While in Sonoma over Thanksgiving, I found two very cool old film reels at a thrift shop with my Aunt. Using a beautiful piece of hickory stair tread, naturally black-and-white (or dark brown and light, light brown) as the base I'm embellishing it with vintage 1960s movie stars and models from an Italian fashion magazine. I'm ready to start finalizing and gluing it up. What a great way to finish up a great year in art.

Kipling series

A few weeks ago, I started several pieces bringing together images from some cool East Indian comic books and pieces of Rudyard Kipling. I took the comic books into my office and asked an Indian friend of mine about them. When she saw them, she practically shreiked with delight. "These are great comic books from my childhood. They are all about Indian folk heroes, mystics, gurus, and saints. Imagine comic books about George Washington and Martin Luther King" she said. They are used the help Indian school children learn about their history. She remarked "they are awfully violent though." I have four of them, all circa 1977 or so. The illustrations are done with rich, bold colors - warm golden yellows, deep purples, and blues that range from cyan to cobalt. I've paired them with scraps of Rudyard Kipling's writings from an old text titled "Maugham's Choice of Kipling's Best." It's a collection of Kipling wirtings as selected by Somerset Maugham. Using base pieces of oak and walnut stair treads, I've built up from there. This is the first piece. I'm not sure whether I really like it or not... it still feels like it's missing something. What do you think?

Commission work

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The Coast (top) and Indochine (bottom)

This is perhaps the most difficult work I've found so far, not because the artwork itself is hard to create, but more difficult because I have the end buyer and all of her wonderful style in my head. My friend Andrea recently purchased two of my pieces and requested a third to match the style of those she bought. Easy enough, right? (The two pieces - sold - are pictured here.) To match these two base will be a third piece of rejected stair tread. With the Indochine piece incorporating a rich yellow bamboo for the base and The Coast piece using a darker hickory base, I've selected an odd piece of hickory that was rejected because it has both strong yellow and dark brown hues in it. The base piece is the easy part, it's like choosing which canvas to paint on, now the hard part.

Andrea lives in Washington DC, one of my favorite cities. While there recently, I had lunch with Andrea and then stopped in at the National Portrait Gallery. If you go to DC, this place is a must-see. This is where the famous portraits of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln are showcased. Those portraits - pieces of our American history - are amazing, but the lower levels of the gallery host some amazing exhibits of American Art that inspire in a whole different way. On this trip I found an amazing folk art exhibit, the center piece of which is the James Hampton piece titled "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly." James Hampton was a janitor. Go to Wikipedia and look him up, if you can't get to DC to see the exhibit. The photos on Wikipedia don't do his work justice. It's really a wonderful example of folk art inspired by a greater sense of the spirit that moves artists. I'm using James Hampton as a partof Andrea's piece, in part because of the spirit that it captures, in part because Mr. Hampton was moved by what he called a divine inspiration, and most importantly, because Andrea inspires something greater in me, personally. So, Mr. Hampton's inspriation in Andrea's piece is really a "thank you" to Andrea for her faith and inspiration.

With wire

Yesterday, I coated the decoupaged bases of the candle holders with two coats of polyurethane. Late today, I gently rubbed the dried bases with steel wool. This takes away any bumps or imperfections in the polyurethane coat and makes it smooth to the touch. Tonight, I just couldn't stop. I measured out several ten-inch long pieces of black wire and adhered them to the upper part of the candle holders. I purposely left them long on the base to draw from the mathematical artwork up to the candles themselves... like thick crazy, non-linear lines creeping out of a seaof math formulas and order. These pictures don't do them justice, but it gives you an idea of what they are shaping up to be.

I'll do the write-up and photography for the Esty posting later this week and get these out there. I have about four other pieces coming along, but my next series of blog posts will cover a commission piece requested by my friend Andrea.

Math and more math

The candlesticks are coming together, despite a crazy month with work travel and an urgent family matter. I've cut dozen of pieces out of the geometry book and have three of the sides done and the fourth is in progress. Tomorrow I'll start with the wire. At some point in the craziness of the last three weeks I dreamt up how to fasten the wire to the base. I think I'll use an interesting black steel wire, six pieces vertically and three anchoring them horizonally. Tough to describe. Here's a picture of the math work going on.

From to simple raw beauty to more complex art

I had two candle holders on my site for months (pictured) and while they had gotten more than 229 views and had a few "favorites," they just weren't selling. When items are listed on Etsy, they have an expiration date. You can easily re-list the items and I had re-listed these twice, the cost is minimal. But, with these candle holders something just bothered me. I personally thought they were just too plain, and honestly, kind of boring. So, when they expired this time, I pulled them out completely.

Today I started to really look at them and found a cool way to embellish them a little, to really make them more "art" and less "houseware" type pieces. I've decided to cover the bases with some wonderful little scraps of paper from a vintage geometry book, titled "Practical Mathematics, Part III, Geometry" circa 1912. The book has wonderful little drawings and formulas through out it. I'm designing a collage of miscellaneous math to cover cover the bases of the candle holders. Above that, I'll take some great black wire that I recently acquired and embellish the upper, curvy, portion of the holder. The wire will come up above the top and somewhat encase the candles themselves. Can you see it? It's going to be cool.

More product

Funny thing - this morning I made a connection in my head between selling my artwork and the work I do with my team at the office. By day, I work for a consulting engineering company - they design and construction roads, bridges, light rail lines, pipelines, restored streams and wetlands, etc. - I help them sell their services and win work. (It's a great job and I work with wonderful people.) At home, in my down time I design and sell artwork on an Etsy site. http://www.redwingblackbird.etsy.com/

In both instances, the classic seller-doer model is in play. You have to sell and do at the same time. At work, for the past 16 years, I've worked only in the seller mode as a marketer. I've watched my engineer and environmental scientist friends struggle with balancing selling (talking to and convincing their clients to use their expertise) and doing (once, sold - designing the project). I never really grasped why its so difficult for them to do both.

Today, my Etsy site is down to a bare minimum of "product," only 9 pieces when I usually strive to have a good 15 - 20 pieces on display. I was so foucsed on selling, that I stopped doing all together. This same thing happens in the office. I find it really hard to be creative, when I'm focused on being a seller. Does selling shut down the creative side? It shouldn't and in fact, it really cannot.

Besides a whole new appreciation for what I'm asking my cohorts to do every day, I have to wonder if there isn't a better way. Bringing a sense of creativity into selling and a sense of selling into the creativity is real the challenge, both in my studio and in my job. Any ideas?

Material inspiration

Caught a fantastic estate sale today and walked away with several very cool pieces of inspiration. My favorite piece is a book titled "The House of Chan Cookbook" by Sou Chan (Doubleday, 1952). It's a wonderful little book of recipes for Chinese-American cuisine. The paper it's printed on will be perfect for decoupage and the recipes are spaced perfectly on the page to allow for interesting paste-ups on the wood pieces. I'm super excited.

Also found some wonderful turn-of-the-last-century maps from old Europe and Africa, a cool book of quotations and proverbs, some great old comic books, and several "Flower and Garden" magazines from the late 50s/early 60s. Really great ads in the old mags, beautiful colors on the old maps, and really fun artwork in the comic books. My exacto knife will be busy over the next few days!

Finishing up, posting and moving on

Yesterday I photographed the frames. This sounds like an easy part of the process, but it's tricky. I built a simple lightbox from instructions on the web. This time I had abundant natural sunlight to light up most of the box, so the pictures turned out a little different. I usually snap about 25 or 30 pictures per piece, in order to get five good shots that I can use on the Etsy site.

Once the pictures are taken, there is a little photoshop enhancement involved. Mostly that's cropping, resizing and adjusting colors, but sometimes it's completely re-doing the shot. With five good images, I move on to writing the descriptions. In these two cases, I went with simple descriptive sentences and a little fun.

Posting items on Etsy is incredibly easy. Each item gets about 28 words worth of "tags" that help people find the art. Some are materials and some tags are just simply key word tags. I've found that the more creative the tags, the easier it is for other Etsy retailers to find my pieces for Etsy treasuries.

With these two new frames posted, and two pieces of art sold today, I'm turning my attention back to the headboard, mirror and one custom ordered piece. It will be a fun summer. :)

Progress

Well, two things finally got me off my butt and back to work on these frames. First, I had a buyer give me some amazing and glowing praise for some work. It is amazing how kind words can really motivate you, isn't it? Second, I made a check list and this is the last thing on the list "finish nat park frames and post them." I'm headed out of town for a conference next week and my studio is a mess. I need to complete at least one project before I head out, these frames are it. The picture shows them coated with polyurethane and drying nicely on my picnic table.

I've also started a quick additional series of frames with some old vintage dominos, playing cards and some vintage Vegas postcards. So much for a tidier studio next week. :)

Stalled

June is always a crazy month for me - my birthday, my garden, my job, my life... it all collides. I think it has something to do with sunny days and warm weather. I have several pieces of frames that I have every intention of completing today. Tomorrow, my "Obbligato" piece will be showcased on Etsy's Art Showcase and I need to add to my stock before then.

On the list of "excuses for why art has stalled" I can add the fact that my miter saw is broken. Well, the all important safety mechanism is broken. The parts to repair it cost nearly as much as a replacement saw. That really bothers me. The old saw was bought for projects around the house and probably wasn't meant for the volume of work I've put it through. I'm thinking that I need to invest in a more industrial miter saw.

Watch for more posts later today.

Picture holders 2

Stumbling on the notion that the face of the stair tread could be covered in printed material instead of leaving the natural wood exposed was an interesting twist. I started sorting through the collection of vintage print material I've stockpiled. I came across an atlas of the United States compiled by National Geographic and copyrighted, 1960. Towards the back were a couple of pages of wonderful maps of our National Parks. The maps have a beautiful lemon yellow color to them. (I've been drawn to this shade of yellow a lot lately. I bought two shirts in this same hue last weekend. I think it's a classic June color and it probably reflects my ache for more sunlight. We've had 20 consecutive days of rain in Portland - very wet, even for the Pacific Northwest.)

Using maps from Grand Teton and Yellowstone as the base, I started building the collage in a little more intentional/less random way than usual. On the Teton frame, I found the words "adventurer" and "such" from my old dictionary and stuck a little string of music between them. Using "adventurer" is an obvious choice for this amazing landscape, but the phrase "Of a quality that has been or is to be specified" in the definition of "such" really struck me as a personal note, a piece of one's own interpretation, on their experience in Grand Teton. As a bow to randomness, I slipped in the music and a small vintage postage stamp on the larger bottom rail. On the Yellowstone frame, I went with an intentional international flair. Yellowstone National Park is arguably the most well-known national park in America, second only to Yosemite perhaps. I've layered a series of colorful international stamps on the righthand side of the map and dropped the word "find" on the lower rail. I'm hesitating on gluing this one together for some reason and I think it's the lack of randomness in the layout. When this gut instinct kicks in, I tend to trust it and leave the piece on my drawing board for a day or two... until the mood or muse finds me.

Picture holders 1

On Monday, we finally got a stretch of warm sunny weather and I ripped apart sseveral pieces of stair treads to create some new picture holders. Several buyers have requested larger picture holders than what I'd had recently sold on my site, so I put the Romeo & Juliet headboard on the back burner for a day and started these frames/holders. (And yes, I still got a lot done on the headboard!)

The picture holders begin with large stair treads (the big wooden piece that you actually step on in a staircase) that were rejected for any number of reasons, but most often because the unusual grain pattern in one doesn't match the other 14 in the package. I have A LOT of pieces of treads in all sorts of wood; everything from red and white oak to fir, brazilian cherry, and something from South America called ipe (pronounced e-pay). The process begins with a template for a photo. People asked for larger frames, so I found a wonderful vintage picture of my Grandfather and Grandmother from January 1965.  I like using this picture of my grandparents, I like to think my Grandfather's spirit (he was carpenter) is a part of the process. Oddly, my grandfather is my current age in this picture. The photo measures 3.5 inches square. I made a little paper template that size.

I took the paper template to my wood pile and pulled out about 20 pieces of tread. Since I'm working on the Shakespeare pieces, I sort of cheated and went the easiest route. I picked pieces of tread that would need minimal trimming and sanding. That narrowed my pile down to about 12 good pieces. I pulled out my table saw and miter box. The table saw is used to rip the larger pieces into managable smaller pieces. The miter box trims the managable pieces into nice square or rectangular shapes. This shaping process narrowed my pile down to a select 8 pieces.

Finally, I selected the rails for the frames. The rails are the little beveled wood pieces that actually hold the picture to the tread. Again, I had A LOT of strips of interesting wood to pick from - these strips of wood are usually scrap pieces of flooring used to separate and protect finer-grade molding in shipment. I eye-balled several little strips and chopped them down with the miter box. I chose some larger strips to decoupage with images and some finer wood to leave is more natural state.

Pictured are some initial layouts. This week I will determine what images to cover which pieces. I'm thinking about changing it up a little this time and decoupaging the tread, while leaving the rails natural. I have some wonderful vintage materials to use including a driving guide to France from 1955 (also used in the Indochine artwork), a great map of San Francisco from the 70s, a wonderful book in German with cool illustrations, a zillion odd old stamps, and a great old book of music. More coming soon...

The process

I've started this blog because several friends have asked me about the creative process. How do you get from a simple piece of lumber to a complete and finished piece of art? The answer is a bit of a mystery to me. I'm hoping that by posting my thoughts and images here, I'll figure it out. I have a gut feeling that people's creativity processes are like snowflakes... no two are identical.

I'll start with shot of my creative space, as it is. Every post will begin with a snap shot from the studio/loft or garage/workshop. It's a bit of organized chaos.

Beyond the space, I'll try to post pictures of the pieces I'm working on. We'll see how this goes. :)