Entering the Home Stretch 

Not a heck of a lot to post this week. Life here at the Suburban Hermitage continues apace. No events mean nothing bad has hit home.

 

I'm grateful for that.

I'm trying to think up some clever analogy about the way that progress on a stone project speeds up as the job gets closer to completion. Maybe something about pushing up a hill, and coasting down? No. It's nothing like coasting. Maybe something about dwindling percentages? Too much math. Something will pop up, I'm sure.

 

I began this stone back in the last week of September, and we're in the last week of January, now. I'm four months into this, and still grinding away. This piece is taking longer than the big white stone.

 

 

I've been working hard. I forget that sometimes, because the work is a lot of fun. I can't wait to get started in the morning, and I'm putting in a good five or six hours a day on the project. Yesterday I hit the wall, realized that I've been burning on this thing for weeks without a day off. The skin on my hands is like sandpaper, and  the fingertips are cracked and painful.

 And I'm tired of looking at this damn thing. A good part of the job is just sitting and staring, and I've done my share of both. I'm at that place where I'm so close to the project that I can't really see it. Even the mirror image trick has worn out its novelty. Many times a day I tour the thing  searching for the imperfections, flat spots in the curves, tool marks that ran too deep. And always working the walls a little thinner so the stone can catch and hold the light. It's tempting to focus in on finishing one single feature of the piece at a time, but doing so can throw the whole composition out of whack. The whole thing has to come together as a unit. Progress has to be distributed evenly across the whole stone. So the photos probably won't show a lot of change from last week.

It's the last day of January as I sit here typing. Somehow, I got it in my head that I want this thing done for the show in Brea. That gives me nineteen days to get it carved, polished, signed, and submitted.

So right now, it's time to get away from the desktop, and go play at being an artist.