Stepping out 2

 Sometimes life gets in the way and the best laid plan go south. These three pieces have sat on my latout table for at least three weeks. They're not quite finished (unglued, untied, still need touching up) but the gray, dry Portland sky this morning was perfectly filtered for a little photography on the deck between my studio and the house. Check 'em out.





Ahab





Aye aye



Sailing





Stepping out from behind the e-curtain

I'm working on a series of art pieces to display at the coffee shop down the street from my office. This will be the first time I've displayed my artwork for sale "live" in public and not behind the Etsy curtain. I'm slightly terrified, and ...slightly exhilarated.

Looking at the space in the shop, I think a series of 4 or 5 good sized pieces (12" x 12") and another 3 or 4 smaller pieces (4" x 6") might fit. The shop is called Bean & Tree (find them on Facebook here) and it located at Riverplace. It sits on the west bank of the Willamette River and it has a very busy marina right in front of it. Looking through my library of materials, I've found some cool old maps, an interesting Currier & Ives looking nautical print, and an illustrated children's adaptation of Herman Melville's classic "Moby Dick." The kids book has wonderful turquoise colored drawings of the whaling adventure and I think that shade of blue will contrast perfectly with the rich browns of the wood I'm planning to use.

I'm focused on the art and excited to pull it all together... displaying out there, in front of the world... well, we'll see.

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.