A Question of Attitude

 

 

Monday, May 31. 

A Question of Attitude

On display at Whittier Art Gallery

 

(Tuesday, 5/25) 

I was getting near the end of the session, Monday, but something wasn't sitting right with me. I was shaping in the upper part of the stone, trying to get all the curves to feel right, but somehow it felt like I was working against myself. Something felt wrong, but I couldn't tell what it was. Sometimes you can get so focused in on something that you can't see it. So I stepped back, put the tools down, re-heated some stale nasty coffee from the morning, and took a break. Two bowls later the lights came on.

I need to make an attitude adjustment, but not in me; my attitude at the moment was just all kinds of great. 

The attitude of the stone was the issue. It comes back to free association. The composition consists of two rough spheres. That's always going to translate into body and head. The attitude (position) of the 'head' is going to determine the overall attitude (mood) of the piece as a whole. I was shaping the upper spheroid to a soft point angling up at about  sixty degrees, and leaning to one side. This gives the impression of a lifted chin, something looking toward the heavens.   The curls in the upper figure would undulate back from the point, suggesting swimming, or flight.

 

But, no. Just no.  Too corny. Not where I'm at. Not where the shape wants to go. This thing is rolling in on itself. It wants one, unbroken fluid curl. No frills, or flounces. It is quiet, and self-contained. If it has a mood to it, the mood is not expansive, and joyful, but rather contemplative, maybe even withdrawn.

So I'm changing direction again. The 'chin' is gone from the upper figure.

 

 

And yet, there was still something bugging me. Here it was: Days ago, I drew the pencil line for the top edge of the 'shell' of the lower figure, but when I went to cut it I gave myself a good two-finger  margin above the line. This left a lot of stone, but you can always remove extra stuff later. Once it's gone it's gone. But what happened is that I changed the line, and then committed to it. Now it was way too high, and needed to come down. Even so, I was really reluctant to change it. The "new" line had become the plan. So I asked Mary to have a look. I grabbed a pencil, and said, "See, I think this curve ought to be dropped to here..."

And then something happened that just doesn't happen. Usually drawing the cut lines is a battle: draw, re-draw, higher, lower, in more, out more... 

But I drew that new line in one smooth, effortless stroke all around the globe. This went down like the guardian angels were guiding my hand. So I traced it over a couple times (OK, it wasn't totally perfect). Even so, it has to sit overnight, just to be sure. 

 

(5/28/21)

Holy cow, it's Friday morning. I've been slack about sitting each day and writing.  Just like the picture taking, I get to the end of a session, and I'm dirty, and tired, and I put off taking the pic until the morning. So I'm a little behind. Wednesday afternoon I drew the line. Thursday I made the commitment, and cut it, and cleaned up the cuts. It was the right decision.

 

I finished off the week by bringing the bottom part into shape, 'lifting' the curves from the base line:

 Tough stuff coming up next. Got some sittin' & starin' to do.

In the mean time, I'm going to talk about  "The Carp" for a while. We, all of us deal with The Carp in some form or other, but once you start playing at being an artist, that nasty little bastard cuts loose on you without even pretending to fake mercy.

Wait. What are you talking about? 

The Carp is sort of like the evil twin of The Voice. The Voice is insight, intuition, inspiration. It speaks seldom and softly, a nudge from your guardian angels.

The Carp is that inner heckler. Doing anything creative takes a lot of concentration. But paradoxically enough, once the mind locks in on  task you go into a sort of auto-pilot. You change tools, move from working one section to another without thinking about it. You just do it. Meanwhile your mind steps away the from the task, free to wander through all it's its inner archives. You can walk into things that happened thirty years ago, as easily as reaching for a file. The Carp lurks in there. It whispers that you're a fuckup, and have always been one to some degree or other. And then The Carp dredges up an encyclopedia  of examples starting from sometime around when you were in the third grade to prove the point. The Carp reminds you that no matter how hard you work, you're never gonna' be one of the real guys. Not only that, you can't tell jokes. Sound familiar?

I submitted my last piece for the June show at the Whittier Art Association. After a year of artists having too much time at home, the gallery was swamped with entries. My stone took first place. But The Carp was right there to remind me that my piece was really pretty mediocre, and I only got first cuz' the other stuff there was worse than mine. I told The Carp to piss off.

Like I said, there is hard stuff coming up this week. I'll be moving slowly.