Done...

I'll have a note or two posted later

On the Home Stretch

 On the Home Stretch

It has been a while. And I won't try to beg off by writing about how busy I am. Somehow I find plenty of time to sit around getting angry about stuff I see on the internet. Almost all of the stuff out there is pretty depressing. That's why I don't write about it here.

Here. Home. My daily life with Mary here at the Suburban Hermitage. Within this small sphere I have much to be grateful for. Got more blessings than fingers and toes to count them on. I've managed to get back to my old routine, and the days are taken up with working on the stone, riding the bike, and keeping up with the the small details of domestic life.

But it doesn't take much to interrupt the illusion of peace and serenity. An afternoon trip to the store can do the job just fine. The grocery stores are all within a couple of miles of the house, but day to day traffic on the surface streets is so bad that if I need to pick something up at the market, I spend more time waiting at stop lights than driving to the store. When I get there I'm horrified at how little my money is worth anymore.

A trip through the bookmarks? Do I have to say anything? Thousands of writers are out there writing away to remind us all that the world is in a bad way, and getting worse.  

So, as always, the challenge is to keep focused on those things that feed the spirit: My art, my cats, my wife, my friends. And those things are all close to home. Next week I'll have work going into the Santa Fe Springs Artfest. Being sick last summer cut into my productivity (among other things) so I have only  two smaller pieces to display. The week following, I'll be submitting work for the May show at La Habra.

There has been no progress on The Lost Era showings. I'll be talking to Luz, at La Habra Arts in the near future. We'll see what comes of it.

I'm getting close to finishing the big stone. The work will be challenging. As per always, I've created a bunch of tight little spaces that will be difficult to sand and polish. There is no easy way to work the inside of that bowl.  The narrow crevass in the spiral will be difficult, also.

So, it'll be nothing but sand, sand, sand, for the next few days. Should be fun.

 

Is Anybody Home?

Is Anybody Home?

(above: a chunk of rock. below: Rat Fink)

(Rat Fink has nothing to do with this post. Just found the pic, and got a kick out of it.)

Well, it looks like a month has gone by without a post. Good thing nobody depends on this blog for an update on current events. Odd. When I do the daily tour through the various sites I have bookmarked, I don't have a problem coming up with a comment. When I drop by The Meow, I enjoy trading notes on the small events of daily life, but when I sit down to write here, I go blank. I don't want to get into politics, religion, or current events, and I haven't felt much like writing about the stone carving, or The Lost Canyon Project either. It's easy enough to come up with stuff that gets me angry, or keeps me angry, but that's back to politics and current events.
And, truth to tell, I've been in a state of out-of- sortedness lately. I can place much of it on the sad and sorry state of affairs in the nation, and the world at large. I will not, and do not need to go into particulars. We're all living the same age and time. We're all staring down the barrels of the same uncertain future. It's easy enough to blame a bad frame of mind on things external; you can always find something to get depressed about if you look for it. Even if you don't have to look far.

 And close to home, here in my own small world, stuff has been quite good. This Monday, the 18th, I'll be showing The Lost Era film at the Whittier Central Library. Luz, over at La Habra Art Association wants to arrange a showing in La Habra, and one in Fullerton also. 

My own work is being featured at the Ahmad Shariff Gallery in Claremont. Sunday, Mary and I are attending an opening at the Sasse Museum in Pomona. I'm getting a lot of good feedback on the stones. All to the good. And my domestic life is as good as it could be. Mary and I have a very easy relationship. There is peace and love here at home. Tranquility, and all that. Much to be grateful for.

I'm finally getting my strength back after being ill this last summer, and I'm putting in ten to fifteen a day on the red cruiser. 

Not bad for an old bastard. But despite being accutely aware of how richly I've been blessed, the blues remain.

 So anyhow, let's take a look at the stone project. I started this back on December 23rd. Of course, I lost a lot of days to bad weather, and sheer weight of this chunk of rock forced me to change up my way of working. Normally I begin by grinding the face off of the raw stone with the angle grinder, then cutting a flat base, then taking the time to plan out a form, and draw the cut lines out on the clean rock face. With this one I had to just start in with the chisels, and see what happened as it happened.

As it happens it's turning out OK.

Just as a reminder, here's what we started with. One hundred twenty five pounds of Anza Borrego Desert:

And here's where we are, now:

Challenges of Anza Borrego alabaster- the amber right side with the spiral is much harder than the silver side on the left. I was fooled by all the red on the face of the raw stone. The only red in this piece is a thin layer between the silver material, and the much harder amber stuff. That's it: the little red line on the base in the above picture. Most of the stone is silver gray.

More work to come on that opening. It's going to extend to under the heart shaped piece in the center.

The next major step will be deep drilling into that flat oval face. The pencil line marks the hollow. How deep will it go? Not sure yet. Like everything, it's a matter of keeping it up until it looks right.

 The Part Where Some Stuff Happens

Several days of staring at the stone delivered nothing in the way of ideas or inspiration. I was just stuck.

So. I got out the tools, and did stuff that needed to be done anyway. Much of that consisted of tapping away at the stone above the cut lines at the base of the sculpture. Breaking the scrap away left me with some shaping, and cleaning up to do. Then I needed to shave down the face of the bulbous section on the lower 'front' side. (see pic #2)  I don't use power tools, and there are some drawbacks to that. There was a considerable amount of material to remove, so I got out the wide point chisel. The point chisel is a pain to use with alabster. Alabaster cuts easily, but it scars easily, also. A 'bruise' appears as a white splotch or stripe along the line that the point chisel cuts. It  can take some serious finishing work to get the bruising out.

 But doing the necessary work, and the follow up has moved the project along. Here's where we were at the beginning of the week.

I had planned to cut into the blue line in the top photo. The idea was to cut deep into the stuff inside the "C"-shaped area, and separate the sort-of pyramid shape on the right side of the second picture into a wing, bifurcating the whole 'back' side of the stone. But I held off on the shaping work, Monday, and instead gave some much needed attention to the surface irregularities all around the boulder. There is a reason that clearing those pits, gouges, and lumpy areas is normally the very first thing to do. By the end of the session, much of the surface material was acceptably smooth, but the 'wing' idea didn't look  as good as I thought. Time to take a long second look, and  maybe change direction.

The Part Where Nothing Happens

The Part Where Nothing Happens

We've been here before. I made the base cut, and started taking care of that overhang. There was a lot of material to remove. Some of it came off with the bow saw; you can see the nice clean-cut faces.




The piece in the middle broke out with a few blows from the point chisel, and was unexpected. That's one nice thing about doing a free-form, abstract work. Losing a big chunk early on doesn't change the plan too much. Sometimes it can actually help the project along.
And, of course, there are problems and concerns. I thought that the thin red band running across the stone would make a nice feature on the finished work. But that thin red layer is soft, and mushy. And the rock is cracked along that soft red line. You can see it continuing up into the stone on the left.





Now, with alabaster, there are cracks, and there are breaks. Cracks are just a feature of the material. Breaks are, well, breaks. The stone could easily split in two, or have a major chunk just fall out. So what to do? I considered just going ahead and trying to split the rock along the crack, or sawing it in two along the line. But that would mean cutting away a good third of this piece. Another consideration is that the material on the top side of the crack in the above picture, and the flat face in the photo below is some really beautiful clear amber stuff.




Splitting or sawing could result in two separate projects, or it could mean that all that clear stuff just ends up as scrap. Either way it's a gamble. Finally I decided to flood the crack with Starbond, and forge ahead. Next was to clean up the rough edges, round out the ragged faces, and get as much of the stone smoothed out as I can. The smoothing out is usually the first thing to do, but this is still more rock than I can lift.

So here is where the project goes into the part where nothing happens. A good part of the job consists of merely staring at the stone. That's what I'm doing.










But I still don't see. It is frustrating. I am still running on very low stamina, not much energy, and little or no inspiration. The work just seems like work, and I feel like I'm trying to boil a gallon of water with a cigarette lighter. I try to keep in mind that some of the best work I did in the past began with weeks of staring at the stone until the lights went on. I am not so confident, now.