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.