Gray May Monday

 I met Ray Bracamontes at the Santa Fe Springs show. Tuesday morning I drove over to Ray's  studio for an  interview on

Raysflavs Spotify podcast.

I asked Ray to make sure to take a photo that makes me look all skinny, old, and crusty. (Like that's a challenge, or something.) We talked about my stone work for a while, but spent most of the time talking about my work on

 The Lost Canyon Project blog, 

and especially

 The Lost Era Transcripts. 

I regard The Lost Era Transcripts as the finest work I have done. For those who haven't seen it, The Lost Era Transcripts is a series of vignettes from the early childhood of artist, and showman Pete Hampton. The stories were originally presented in the form of a slide show. Pete's paintings, and his narration tell of life deep in the Puente Hills of Southern California in the early 1940's. The remembrances climax with the grizzly, and terrifying nightmares in The Deep Dark Hole.

And now, back to our usual BS (blog stuff)

 One of the problems in working alabaster is that the stone is always full of fine cracks. It's just the nature of the stone. Most of the time the fine cracks don't cause any problems. But some times the cracks are fissures, actual breaks in the rock. We were looking at that last week.

Small fissures can sometimes be held tight with Starbond, a very thin set super glue. But not this time. It turned out that those fissures on the side of this stone were deep, and they went all the way through. I set the point chisel, and a couple of firm blows with the mallet dropped a big chunk of the material on the table.

 

If you're going to lose a big chunk of your stone, it's way better to lose it at the beginning of the project than at the end.

So now, I had two very uneven sides, one nearly flat, and the other convoluted with a large bulge.

A little excavation with the point chisel took down the bulge, and now I have a clear idea of where this piece is going. Next up will be getting the whole stone sanded smooth so I can draw on it with a colored pencil.  This is the part where nothing happens. For a while, anyway.