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!