Getting Out of the Flatlands

I got a call for work this morning, so I've been up and running since a quarter to six. I spent the after work hours with the exchange over on One Cosmos, and that was a brainful and then some. And my head was already filled pretty close to capacity from trying to digest yesterday's comments right here at the wfb. (and Thank You all very much!) It's almost eight thirty, and I'm just now sitting down trying to improvise some content.

Actually there wasn't much left to say on the topic of losing the burn. I started carving rocks, and didn't stop until the fire went out, which it did abruptly, and without even extending me the courtesy of letting me finish the last piece I was working on. But it was great while it lasted. I turned rocks into three dimensional versions of the forms that I had formerly put on paper. I'll get out the camera and take some pictures later this week.

It took a whole new set of brain muscles to start seeing, and working in three dimensions. It was like going from swimming laps in a pool, to surfing. The knotwork drawings are impossible figures. They can exist only in a world restricted to height, and breadth. Stone will not tolerate that kind of fanciful nonsense. It makes you play by real world rules. Along with height, breadth, and depth there is balance, strength of material, hardness, flaws, and all sorts of other considerations to deal with. And oddly enough, courage. Courage? Well, it's like this. It's really tempting to carve thin, to carve delicate, to carve with lots of open work, and things soaring off and hanging in space. It sounds really cool to make something with a lot of mass sitting on a tiny foot, and depending on a precisely placed center of gravity to keep it stable. Until you have a two hundred dollar chunk of alabaster, and ten weeks worth of hard work sitting on the table in front of you.
I'm reminded of people who go around climbing rocks, but that's a whole 'nother kind of idiocy. And I wouldn't be so presumptuous to compare breaking a sculpture with breaking me. I'm sitting here right now looking at one of my early, loopy efforts which was instantly transformed from one piece of stone into three, courtesy of last summer's earthquake. It was disappointing, but it didn't involve the loss of blood. But I'm getting all sidetracked here, and besides, that's about all I have left for now. I get to work again tomorrow, and that's a good thing. Maybe I'll dream up something during the day.

JWM

Bikes and Connected Parts

So how does any of this connect? I worked off boredom, frustration and pressure from the office job by doodling at my desk. Someone saw the little drawings, and showed me George Bain's book. I got 'The Voice' at a stoplight across the street from a Harley shop, and was inspired to return to school. Years later I started doodling at the desk again when I got into the School of Education, (see a connection?) and again, people would ask me if they could have the pictures. I got the artistic burn, and turned those doodles into serious work. I bought the motorcycle at the same place where 'The Voice' first prompted me to go to college, and get a job that would give me enough money to buy the bike, and enough time to travel on it. And to stretch the web of coincidence even thinner, I would not have made that first long solo journey if the gal I also met at the Harley shop hadn't broken up with me just before the school year ended in '91. 'The Voice' again prompted me to stop in Elkins where I found the Celtic art book again. As I said yesterday, the connections are often tenuous, and separated by great lengths of time.

But time, and timing are also part of it. I didn't get inspired to go to college until I was ready to invest the effort required to finish. I didn't get George Bain's book in hand until I was ready to invest the effort into learning how it was done. It took months of study to get it down. And this blog sat empty for two years until I was ready to 'find it', and begin this project.

But here's a lighter, and more amusing example of synchronistic coincidence. The bicycle is a 1950 Schwinn B-6. When I bought it, it was missing the headlight, pedals, seat post and gooseneck. It had a set of chrome plated fenders that rightly belonged to the Schwinn Phantom, which is the same machine only with a fancier paint scheme, and more chrome. I was still working in field service when I bought it. Sometime before I bought it I had a service call at a run down, and very old house in a crappy part of town. I noticed a large pile of junk bikes in the back yard, and mentioned to the owner that I had been looking for old Schwinn stuff. I left my phone number, and moved on. Many months later, and shortly after I bought the B-6 I got a call from the old guy. He had a thrashed old Phantom sitting in the back of the garage, and wondered if I would be interested. The bike was junk, but the headlight, gooseneck, and seat post were just what I needed. Some years later during the college phase, I was on Main Street in Huntington beach, standing in front of a shop that had some old bikes for sale. In the window sat a dingy Phantom. I noticed a guy standing next to me, also checking out the old Phantom. "Cool bike, huh?" I said.

He said, "Yeah. I have one like it at home, but the problem is that the fenders on it belong on a red B-6.

Oh- a final note. Shortly after I bought it, I designed a custom paint scheme for the Hog, and had it painted in the same pattern and colors as the old Schwinn. I have some snapshots of the motorcycle somewhere, but no decent pictues. bummer.

JWM

A Long and Very Windey Road

this too will grow

I have to take a step back, and pause, here. The topic is synchronicity, not the amazing story of my fabulously amazing life. I have to resist the temptation to get sidetracked into why this happened, and how that happened, and what was going on somewhere else that was weird, sad, funny, or otherwise worthy of re-telling, and so lose the thread in anecdotal trivia. And I also have to make some huge jumps in time to see the connections between events. Some of the connections are rather tenuous. Strands seemingly broken may not be tied together for years. So it was with the drawing.

I left the city. I had enough money to get me by without working for a while. So I camped out on the couch at my mother's house, and spent the summer surfing, and taking day trips on the bicycle. It was good. But I knew it couldn't last, even though I had no clue what the next phase in my life would be. I was on my way back from the beach, waiting at the stoplight at Garden Grove Boulevard and Golden West. I was absentmindedly gazing at the Harley dealership on the corner, and I heard myself addressing a bunch of first year high school students about the importance of getting a good grip on the English language. Where was this voice coming from? Some weeks later I registered for college. I threw myself into school with all the fire I had in me. It wasn't until I had actually graduated, and was enrolled in the School of Education that I began to doodle in class the way I had done in the office. Again, classmates would occasionally ask me if they could have the drawings. That summer, 1987, I bought a rapidograph, a tablet of Bristol board, and a big set of colored pencils, which lit an artistic burn that would sustain me for almost twenty years.

Jump to 1990. I bought a Harley from the dealership at Golden West, and Westminster. 1991, I was riding through a small town in West Virginia, heading back west after jumping into the Atlantic at Virginia Beach, Va. A voice in my head said, "Stay here." I didn't know it, but I had arrived for the first night of Bluegrass week at The August Heritage Arts Festival at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, WV.. I stopped there again, the next year. In '93 I again planned my itinerary to include a stop in Elkins. It happened to be on a Sunday, registration day for workshop classes. I thought, "Oh, what the hell, see what they have to offer." Music and dance are the main focus of Augusta, but they had classes in Irish folklore, which sounded just OK, and Celtic Stonecarving which sounded cool. But Stonecarving was full. So I signed on for the folklore class. As I left the registration center, one of the clerks came running after me, and caught me at the door. Someone had cancelled; there was an opening in the stonecarving class. The first day of class I sat across from a woman who had brought along the book, Celtic Art, the Methods of Construction, by George Bain.

JWM

A Change in the pattern

grows with click

It was early in 1979 when I left my job as night custodian at my old Junior High. I didn't really want to leave that job, but I kept hearing, from my girlfriend, and others, "You're too smart to be wasting your time doing this kind of work." I didn't think so, but I put in an application with the Gas Company, just to shut them up. I figured that a utility would be such a huge bureaucracy, that they'd forget about the app, I could tell everyone, "Hey. I tried", and the whole business would be forgotten.

The bastards hired me. I got a job in field service, and hated it from day one. I applied for other positions in the company, but never heard a peep. One day in the spring of '81 I was, as always, up to my elbows in rancid grease and cockroaches, and I just said, "Screw it." I drove back to the yard, parked the truck, and headed straight for the office. I had my speech for the boss prepared. I opened my mouth, and before I got the first syllable out, He said, "How would you like a transfer to the Hollywood office?" I took it. Within the week, my brother, who lived about three miles from that office, moved to New York, and I got his apartment on Melrose Avenue.

Out of the grease pit, and into the pressure cooker. I had always sworn, as genuine, bona fide, surf rat hippie individualist rebel type that I would never end up in some office job chained to a desk. I spent my days answering billing complaints, and doodled to pass the time while I sat there, tethered by the earpiece to my cubicle. People would pass by the cubicle, see the psychedelic stuff I was making, and ask if they could have it for their wall. One of the women in the office brought in a copy of Celtic Art, the Methods of Construction by George Bain. I just went nuts.

But I didn't last a year in the office. This time I didn't say screw it. I yelled,"Go straight to fucking hell, and take your goddamn gas bill with you, and you can shove your fucking meter up your ass!" I really needed to go surfing. Suddenly I had plenty of time to do it. But I wouldn't find the Celtic Art book for another ten years.

JWM

Knot a Lot to Say

click to make all big

Synchronicity, or as I like to call it, The Web of Coincidence seems to be afoot these days in the blogosphere. All sorts of things are getting tied together. There is an enormously unlikely sequence of events that led to me being able to create this piece, and I may get into telling that story later on. This artwork is old. I did several of these pieces between 1993, and 1997. This was the first. It is one of the few pieces that I actually sold, and now I regret having sold it. I tried last year to break a long creative drought by starting a new one, but it didn't get far. The pencil sketch is sitting on the light box waiting. I call this sequence John's Impossible Knot because it's easy to begin, and continue, but very difficult to end. This sequence did not come from a how-to-draw-Celtic-art book. It is an entirely original composition, not a copy of anything. But that, too, is another story for another time.

JWM