One Hundred and Four Days

 

Finishing day is a lot like being in Wyoming in the morning, and deciding you've been on the road long enough. So you burn it to Los Angeles in one brutal run. (Ask me how I know this.) 

I started this rock trip a hundred and five days ago. 

 

But carving isn't travel, and there is no mileage marker, or exit sign on this road. 

 

 

It just gets narrower, and narrower, and then runs out of pavement. You just keep grinding and scratching away until you find yourself working with finer and smaller tools. 

 

Before you know it, the tools stay in the box, and it's finishing day. The last leg is a long, messy, marathon session of sanding, rubbing, and polishing. 

  Start with 80 grit coarse, to take out tool marks and small irregularities. Go over it again a few times with 150 grit, a little finer. Repeat through 220, 320, and 400. Then a rub down with #0000 grade steel wool. 

Out comes the plastic tub. Now, it's wet sanding, several passes at 600, and then 1500, and finally 2,000 grit. Then go to a rag, and a sticky paste of water and tin oxide powder; then to a dry rag, and Simichrome polish, and,  at long last, to carnuba wax.

By now, the surface area of this thing feels like it covers a square mile, and I've been over every square inch of it so many times that I can't tell one side from the other.  By the end of the ten-hour session, Saturday, I was exhausted, and dizzy tired out.

Sunday morning was touch-up. How it is humanly possible to have missed a molecule of this thing, I do not know.  That's not true. I know exactly how I missed all the little scratches. Working outside, even under the canopy, the stone was all glow-ey with sunlight. A lot of the work was done by touch. When the stone came indoors, in lower light, I saw all the places I missed; all the little scratches, and tool marks showed. 

Dang.

So... 

By noon it was done. I don't have any fingerprints left. They'll grow back. The stone is in the living room.

Oddly enough, this part of the project kind of sucks.  I've been so close to this thing for so long that now I can't even see it. I'm sick to the eyeballs of looking at it.

 

  I can't tell if it's good or bad, if I knocked it out of the park, or struck out. It all looks the same. It's like that creepy feeling you get when you hear your own voice on a recording, or when you repeat a word so many times that it just becomes a sound.. That's my voice? eew... This is the thing  I've been making? It's mediocre. Just one more of my stupid ideas. It's genius. Best thing ever. This thing will make me rich and famous. It's ugly. No, it's OK...

All part of the fun.

 

JWM

 

Tai Chi Skinamalink

 Tai Chi Skinamalink

The Tai Chi exercises are healthful, and enlightening for  both people and pets. Mary and The Skinamalink rehearsing the moves:

 

Three Months Into This Thang

 So here we are, a little over three months since I rolled the big stone out of the garage. I needed help getting it up on the table. I started out with 115 pounds of crystal, and cut 18 pounds off the bottom for the base. Now, if my arithmetic is sort of close, that left 97 pounds of rock for the carving. It weighed in this morning at just over fifty pounds. So, I've turned about 45 pounds of stone to dust and scrap. That's a lot of dust.   Now, I can lift it, and turn the piece without much effort.

Monday and Tuesday of last week I worked on the large egg-shaped lower bowl, and the curves on the neck that drops through the upper bowl. By Wednesday I realized that it would take days to get to the bottom of the bowl with the tools I have. 

 

This coincided with the weekly email from the Stone Carving Supplies web site.  Milani tools aren't cheap. Three clicks from the catalog cost me a two hundred bucks. But it got me three new rifflers, a 10" spoon, a 14" spoon, and a 14" knife.

 

 

  I ordered Thursday; the tools came Saturday. The big spoon (center) is new, very sharp, and proved to be an aggressive excavator. By the time I put up Saturday afternoon I was within sight of my goal.

 

I'll get the last of the excavation done in the next day or two, and then the work comes down to fine tuning the whole composition. I'm not doing grooves, or surface detail on this piece, so the polishing work should go pretty fast. This is the fun part, but it's also the part where it starts getting a little scary. As the walls of the carving grow thinner, the stone begins to ring like a chime under the rasps and files. The bowls  catch and hold more, and more light.   Everything glows, and the crystal won't cast a shadow on itself. It's often hard to see where you're going. Shapes, and curves start changing very fast. No stroke of the file can be undone and the margin for error gets smaller with every pass.

 As Confucius says: To exceed is as bad as not to reach. The form gets "better" only to a point, and then it's time to stop. It's very, very easy to get carried away on some small detail, and over-carve the piece. You gotta' know when let it be.

All in a sudden, that moment is coming up fast.

 

The Any Day, Now Club.

I'll get to the stone stuff in a minute. 

Last week, a post over at American Digest got me thinking about the "Rainbow Bridge" story.  (Short version, and spoiler: our pets go to heaven, and they are the very first ones to greet us when we arrive there.)

 

Never leave your pets unattended!

It’s a sappy, and sentimental little story that never fails to put a lump in your throat.
But the little story does touch on something profound. We cannot really conceive of heaven except in terms of life here on earth. The thought of being re-united with those we’ve lost gets more and more poignant as we begin to feel the hard truth of our own mortality. And the heaven we conceive is always something less than earth. It’s always : “Just like this, only without _____.”

It's always too easy to make a long, long list of "withouts". And this last year we’ve all seen the end of the world as we knew it. As the slow shipwreck of Western Civilization continues, the list of "withouts" continues to grow. The spirit of this age seems hell bent on un-making the Good the True, and the Beautiful. How do you fight it? As Dylan once wrote, "I wake up then in the early morning, blindly punching at the blind..." 

At the very least, we can tune out the torrent of lies, propaganda, and bullshit from the media. For me, it just means keeping my focus as close to home as I can.

I almost feel guilty saying this, but once I shut down all the media feed, except for a few sites on-line, it caused me to focus on the world as it exists within the confines of my property lines- one more tract home in suburban So Cal. That world is abundant with beauty and love. The hedge we put in, and the gazebo in the back, make the yard a little sanctuary. The creative burn is back. I am working the stone, hanging out with my cats, and my days are full. I have been blessed with as close to a perfect marriage as a man could ask for. Twenty one years, and I’m still stupid in love with my wife. 

Our bicycle gang has become extended family. For a few, it’s close to the only family they have. I love these guys. 

 

This last Saturday our club got together with The Pedalwhips, for a beach ride and barbecue. We had a great turnout, and everyone brought out the show bikes. We've been doing these group rides for ten years, now, and when the stretch bikes roll out it's a hell of a show. Everyone stops and stares. Heaven only knows how many home videos we've starred in. The party was a big enough occasion that one of the riders brought a "sound bike", a big electric cruiser towing a trailer with  a DJ level music system. Most of the custom bike scene is Gen-X, with a few of us old bastard  boomers. So we had classic rock, and 80's tunes. We had cool temps, a light breeze, a gorgeous sun-soaked day by the seaside. Smoking a few bowls, rolling down the bike path in a big pack, with all your pals, a good buzz, and Steppenwolf at full volume. Life is good.
It’s all so very precious. I wonder that heaven could be better. 

And yet.
I’m like the little cartoon dog in the burning cafe. “This is fine.”

We’ve recently lost family friends. Others are, well, let’s just say, close. The cats are old, and Mary and I are both slowing down.
When we’re in our prime, we talk about death in the same way a pre-pubescent kid laughs too loud at a dirty joke. The kid laughs, but he really doesn’t get it. We’re past the puberty of Death. Now we get the joke, and it’s serious.
Welcome to the “Any Day Now Club.”
Cherish each one.

But back to the stone.

 

This week I finished the through-cutting on the upper bowl. This officially puts the rock on the home stretch to completion. There's a little more excavation to do in the big lower bowl, and after that, it's down to the final shaping. 

Still a long ways to go, though... 

 

 

Grinding into Summer

 

 Monday, July, 5, 2021

Grinding into Summer

Stone work is slow. I started this project in the middle of April. Now it's July, and this stone is just about as far along as the last project was when  I abandoned it so many years back.  When the creative drive went dead, I had to let the artwork go, and move on. I like to think things happen for a reason, that there is a greater hand that guides our affairs, and a telos toward which we are moved. In retrospect, I can see where I got pulled away from art to do other things that needed to be done. But at the same time, just because there is a reason for everything that happens, that doesn't mean that everything happens for a reason.

"What's that supposed to mean, John?"

 Buddy the Cat

Thoughts while working: Casey Klahn mentioned, in a comment over at American Digest, (paraphrasing, here) that an artist has to give no fucks about what anyone is going to think about what he does. We've talked about it taking some courage to  dive into the work of an art project. It does take some courage, but it isn't the same kind of courage you need to climb rock faces, or surf big waves. One seldom falls to his death, or drowns as the result of a bad art project.

Even so, in my life-time, no one had ever been to the top of Everest. The god-like legends of surfing were going for twenty foot waves. 

Today?

I've seen the photo of dozens of climbers, who had the stamina, and the money, lined up to take a selfie at the top of the world.

Surf spots like Nazare, in Portugal, or Jaws in Hawaii, are crowded out at forty foot.

No matter what the field of endeavor, what was once the pinnacle of achievement is now just another level on the game.

 Stone work is no different. Since I began working again, I found this site.  It's a small California business selling hand crafted tools from Italy, and run by two gals who carve stone in Nor Cal. It's a great source for tools, and supplies, and all the better since  They send out an email every week, and include a link to an artist's yoo-toob video. Here's a great example of the extreme in stone.

It's a beautiful piece, for sure. But good heavens, a stray whiffle ball, a bump, or a knock, and the thing could shatter. (Just exaggerattin' a little, here.) All kidding aside, even before I saw work like this I always had a 'hundred year rule' when I did a stone piece. If it's too thin, too delicate, too fragile, sooner or later someone will break it. There's a ponderous quality to stone, a silent strength that each rock should retain. When the stone leaves my hands I want it to endure.

But that comes back to the issue of courage. Look at the stone, the way it's shaping up. A large, egg-shaped bowl arches up at the narrow end, then turns inside-out to form another bowl. The the lip of the upper bowl loops up like a wave, and drops though itself in a teardrop sitting in the lower bowl. Now, I could undercut that teardrop, and have it suspended free, hanging above the bottom of the bowl. 

 

The difficulty in carving it is not the issue. Difficult is fun. It would be dramatic as all get-out, too.  But that would leave a large soft stone appendage dangling there just begging to break. Not sure if I'm brave enough to risk that.

 

 So anyway, we're in July, now. Soon enough, the summer will get hot and shitty. I should see this thing done by labor day, but I'm in no hurry.