Autumn

I know. It isn't quite fall yet. Autumn is a little over three weeks away, but I can feel it coming nonetheless. The seasons are subtle things in So Cal. Fall doesn't announce itself with flaming red and yellow trees, and frost in the early morning. It leans in with the yellowing angle of the sun, and hints of a certain heaviness in the afternoon breeze. A whisper, a sigh, and a slow turning awareness that summer is old, and getting weary. So it has been these last few days. 

It conjurs up memories, of course. The school year starting meant getting off the day shift after the hard work of summer cleaning, and going back to pushing broom on swing shift, so I could get up early and surf in the morning. September swells at Huntington Beach, and that 7' 5" diamond tail Dyno. It was such a sweet and easy board to ride. Weed harvest in Mexico, and soon enough you could get a fat lid for ten bucks. Or some years later, going back in as teacher, getting lesson plans together for the Cholos in East LA. Looking back through the haze, it was all pretty damn sweet. Best of all, I knew it. I have always been acutely aware of the good in good times.

I don't write about politics, current events, or even social trends here on the blog. It's not because I don't pay attention, or care about this kind of stuff. Indeed, I pay altogether too damn much attention to it, much to the detriment of my happiness, and even my mental health. Overall, it looks like the nation, and even the greater West, civilization as we have come to know it, is unravelling. I see kids in their twenties who by rights should be  in the wild and unruly phase of life, masked up, wearing safety helmets as they ride e-scooters, and constantly hypnotized by the cellphone. I find this horrifying. I don't have a television, but if I go into J's Grill to get a taco I see the TV on, and it seems like something from a bad dystopian satire. I could go on here, but I won't. You get the idea. 

I'm an old man, seventy two by the last birthday some days back.  I remain acutely aware of the good, in good times. I can count my blessings, and I do so regularly. God has been far better to me than I deserve. I have a lovely wife, a beautiful and comfortable home.  The greatest cat in the world (so he tells me) sits under the window, atop the bookcase near the desk. We have food on the table. We have good friends. We don't owe any money to anyone. These are all incredible blessings in this age and time.

I have the stonework, and the Lost Canyon Project to keep me very busy, and lend some meaning to these late days. It is good to have a task to accomplish, and the energy and desire to accomplish it. Daylight arrives in a few minutes, and I'll get busy with the tasks of the hour. So it is, this cloudy early morning late in August. 

So, anyway, let's have a look at the orange stone. Unlike most of my projects, this is a simple, uncomplicated form. There won't be any fancy though-cuts, or figure-within a figure stuff.

 One arm will twist forward, and the other will bend behind it, but other than that, it's a fairly simple shape. I've been working toward pushing the leaning faces back so they'll turn around the forward face on the other side. It's pretty basic stuff, but slow going. Notice that the bottom two pics represent a day's progress from the ones nearer to the top of the page.

 Here is where using power tools would greatly speed up the process. These cuts have taken three days to get to this point, advancing with a line scored with an ancient bone saw, some delicate application of the small point chisels, and a lot of  careful excavation with the rasp. This would all take less than half an hour with the angle grinder, but the faster the cut, the more likely to make an error, and once the stone is ground or cut away it can't be undone. So I prefer slow, and safe to fast and final. I can be patient if patience is called for.

 The Orange Stone

I know. It looks like a giant pot roast, but this thing is forty eight pounds of translucent orange alabaster. It came from The Compleat Sculptor, which is in, of all places, New York City. The stone itself came from either Colorado, or most likely, Utah. I haven't seen this stuff on the market since the late 1990's, and as soon as I saw it on-line, I jumped at the chance to get some. It wasn't cheap. This chunk of rock cost me a little over four hundred bucks. When they find the orange translucent it is most often in narrow layers along with other stone. This piece is a healthy four inches thick, so there's a lot of potential. It had to wait while I finished up the last piece that broke in two. Hope I don't have bad luck again.

The first part of the job is deciding how the stone is going to sit, and then finding a point of balance. It didn't take long at all.  The next step is to make a nice flat foot for the stone to sit on. That part went quickly as well. The stone already had even flat faces, so it took only two days find the right attitude, create the foot, and sand the faces smooth so I could draw on the rock with a pencil.

 It often takes many days of staring at the stone before an idea comes to me. But this piece had only two planes, rather than 360 degrees of differing faces. The outline of the basic shape of the rock, plus the intense vibrant color suggested flames, so the plan practically drew itself.

Wait a minute.

Flames?

Isn't that kind of cornball?

Maybe so. But the drawing looked cool, and I liked it. So here we are:

 This is the result of two days of work on the basic outline:

The long upper tearddrop will be opened up. The smaller one near the base will be a window to let the light shine through. The rest of the stuff? We'll see.

But I'm not going to leave this thing to stand on such a small foot, however well balanced. A lot of sculptors mount their carvings on tiny feet, the stone on tiptoe, and held vertical with steel pins drilled into the base. I can't say it doesn't look cool as hell. But I have my own aesthetic with my stone. Stone wants to sit, firmly anchored to the earth. It doesn't like to dance of fly. I have a very cool plan for a base, but that'll happen in the future. There are many days of hard work ahead before I get there.

 Negligence, and the Remnant

I suppose I should at least complete the tale of the May Stone project. 

I've been negligent about the blog, here. It's a self perpetuating thing, you know? Very few people stop by here, so I don't have a lot of incentive to post, which means nobody has a reason to stop by. I see the stats on The Lost Era, and Lost Canyon Project blogs, and most of the visitors are from overseas, mainly China or Singapore. Nobody from either place could possibly have any interest in that stuff unless it's to steal images, or harvest them for AI. If I could, I'd treat them to same uncivil  responses I give to phone scammers. But you can't say Go Fuck Yourself to a machine, or some anonymous trolling bot.

Oh well.

So, anyway, let's have a look at where we were with this tall slender stone, and how it finally turned out.

I alawys joke about having the Pee Wee Herman option at hand when creating an abstract figure. No matter how bad you mess up, or if the stone just breaks, you can always take on that snotty voice, and say, I meant to do that, so there. But in all the projects I've done over the years I never had to actually employ the Pee Wee option. 

Until this one.

Here is where we left off in early July:

(I didn't get any pictures through the next couple of phases.)

That center section was going to pass into the globe from the top, and form a sort of tongue protruding into a bowl. The 'wings' on either side were going to curl around it. But when I went to open the globe at the bottom, I overdrilled and spoiled what would have been the center section. Embarrassing. So I had to change course. I went ahead and drilled all the way through the globe. Then, I went to drill again to separate those 'wings,' and once again missed with the drill. Humiliating.

So I fell back on the Pee Wee option. The center section became a sort of swan's neck with the big teardrop at the top. Success! This was actually a better design than I had originally planned, It would have been a prize winner. But:

I was finishing, wet sanding at 400 grit, which is getting quite close to the polishing stage, and the stone literally came apart in my hands. I didn't drop it, or bump it, or chisel on it. It just quietly came apart.

Bummer. So. 

Sometimes you just do the best with what you have, and what I had was two separate chunks of rock. No, it couldn't be drilled and pegged, or glued back together. And here's what came of the remnant:

All things considered, it's not too bad. Certainly not what I had planned, but, you know- What're ya gona' do?

Anyway, tomorrow is Monday, and tomorrow I'm going to begin on this:

48 pounds of translucent orange alabaster. I haven't seen this stuff since the early 1990's. It'll be quite a while before I put a tool to this gem. The most important part of the job is to stare at the stone until it speaks to you. I'm going to listen very, very closely.

 Slow Progress Beats No Progress

One whole week was entirely taken up with preparations for the Solstice party we threw on Saturday, the 22nd. Cleaning the house, and grounds used to be a one day affair, two if stuff was unusually messy. We're slowing down. Mary will say, "Well, we're getting old..." 

There ain't no more gettin' about it. We're there.

But the gather was a great success. (I like to noun-ify the verb, the way Anne McCaffery did in her Pern novels.) We had our gang of friends as always, but this time we extended the invitation to the members of Whittier Art Association, and La Habra Arts as well. We had a good sized crowd, everyone loved the BBQ, and the day went off with only one small hitch. I had been cooking on the grill for a couple hours, and my glasses were all foggy from the greasy smoke. I was taking a bowl of potato salad out to the yard, and walked through the patio screen door, fell down the step, and ended up on all fours on the patio. Somehow I pulled this stunt off without spilling the potato salad, or sustaining any serious injury, but I'm still sore, and a little emabarrassed. My pal John Hill is coming over later this afternoon to help me re-screen the sliding door. 

Luz Spanks, the new president at La Habra, has been a great ally in promoting The Lost Era film. She arranged a showing at the Fullerton Museum Center on July 14. Somehow, I have a feeling that this show will be important. We'll see.

 So here is where the new stone stands. I'm working the middle section into a globe. I'll rough out the base section next, and count on some sort of inspiration to show up, and tell me where the long top section is going to go.

The process always goes like this: work a little, plan the next step. Get stuck. Stare... I've tried to begin with a sketch, and a plan. After all, that's how yer s'possed to do it: draw a picture, create a maquette, then do the real one with the maquette as a guide. I can't do much of anything with pencil and paper. The boulder has no flat surfaces; no two faces are the same. No symmetry at all. I can definitely see the advantages of working with a perfect cube of stone. But a perfect cube doesn't speak to me. A boulder has its own unique shape. I can always see some form in the irregular faces  and use that as a start. Like the last piece I did. I couldn't come up with anything until I started. Once I start I can see some thing that I like, work toward that thing, and before long I can see a way forward. So it is here.

7/2/24

Well, inconsistency is better than incontinence, but it's not a good way to create and keep a following for the blog, here. Every time I start a project I promise myself to do weekly updates, and then...

I don't. 

I see guys on instagram posting these sped up videos of doing projects, and I'll have to admit they usually hold my interest long enough to see how the stuff is going to turn out. But, too, those are all cell phone videos, and I still do not have a cell phone. I notice that it becomes increasingly inconvenient to do without one. All that does is kick in my crusty old man stubborn streak. Screw you guys, I ain't gonna get one. I am increasingly horrified by the sight of everyone and their dog running around with faces stuffed into that nasty little screen. It reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 So anyway, let's have a look at how the May Stone Project is coming along.

 We left off here:

This is another plan-as-I-go endeavor. I had a notion of what to do with the lower half of the stone, but the upper part had to wait for an idea to show up. Well, as per always, I reach a point where I'm not sure how to proceed. The solution comes during the process of taking care of what I know I'll have to do, anyway.

Here's the next step:

And the next:

Which brings us here:

I had planned on leaving some of the "natural" shape and texture in the stuff atop the globe, but  I changed my mind on that. I retained much of the raw form on the last project, but that won't work here. This is where working from a boulder is a challenge. The sides are uneven; the front and back don't match, and it's hard to take measurements. The key I've found is to scribe north/south, and east/west lines on the bottom of the base, turn those into vertical centerlines on the stone, and measure everything out from the center. Bit by bit I nudge the natural form toward symmetry.

So I'll close today's post with a preview. Check this baby:

That is not a Texas sized steak. It's 48 pounds of translucent orange alabaster. ('spensive stuff!) I'll get around to posting again, when I've made more progress on the May stone. It's going to be hard not to jam through it so I can get my hands on Big Orange. Patience...

 Back to the Rock

It looks like July will  be eventful. I have three Lost Era shows at the Whittier Museum, and one pending in Fullerton. Later this month, Mary and I are planning an open house here around solstice. Maybe it'll turn into a big party. That has happened before, and it's fun when it does. But it's work, and lots of it, to throw a real party. 

As always, I'm in two minds about the whole thang. Of course, it is great fun to have a gathering. Mary and I are good at it, and we've earned a fair reputation for being good hosts. On the other hand, we are both feeling the years more and more. Get-to-do becomes have-to-do rather quickly. Our energy reserves are shallower than once they were. Everything seems like a bigger deal than it used to be. Welcome to post-middle-age.

We'll pull it off. Always have.

So, let's take a look at the rock. We left off here:

Unlike the last stone, this wasn't too heavy to lift, so the next step was  what I call take-down. I got out the angle grinder, and made a dusty mess out of the back yard.

The stone had a pretty clean bottom cut to begin with, but when I stood it up, it seemed a little bit off, leaning ever so slightly to one side.

I stuck a wedge under the base, and nudged it in until it looked right. It was off vertical by just around a half inch. (note precise measurement) It has to look "right" but this isn't machine shop. As long as the eye is pleased it passes QC. So here we are with a new bottom:

I started sketching out a plan, and even committed to it far enough that I scribed it into the rock face.

But I changed my mind. We were going to begin with a loop-the-loop at the base, and continue with an "S" curve, but...

No. I don't want to do another loop-the-loop right now. The "S" curve will stay. We'll see where it goes from here.