Taking a Soft Approach

Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting.  

The Lost Canyon Project is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018) 

 

The Lost Era Transcripts is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 

 

Taking a Soft Approach

Before:

After:

 

Well, this didn't take long. I started a post in the middle of last week, but I got too lazy to put the photographs into the computer. So I put it off a day, and then I put it off another day. Stuff came up with the stone. Stuff has a way of doing that, you know. In this case, "stuff" was the rock itself. I noted early on  that the material had areas that were quite soft, even chalky. Other layers were hard enough to work. I would like to have shaped this into something with some open work, or thin, wavy, fan-like curves, but the material won't hold an edge. Everything had to be played close to the surface. 

 
Shapes on the raw surface suggested the jigsaw curves. I hoped to cut deep enough to achieve some sense of separation between the two interlocking figures, and make the overall shapes bold enough that it would give the illusion of being two pieces. So let's go back a week to last Monday, right after I posted the last exciting adventure.

 

 

 Mary has a Tai Chi class at nine on Monday mornings, and she follows up by going out for coffee with her friends. This leaves me with the grounds all to myself. 

So, last week at this time, I re-heated my  coffee, and took a stale cup, and a fresh bud out to the gazebo to get a start on the morning.

 

 

Buddy the Cat followed me out, and came plodding across the lawn to join me. A minute later The Skinamalink came over the wall after bumming a snack from the neighbors. Buddy hopped up on the table, and  Skinnies took the chair right next to me.

 The coffee was hot, and bitter, and the morning sweet and cool. The yard was quiet. Ol' Buddy stretched out on the table, and rested his chin on my left wrist. Skinnies curled up in the chair, and snoozed. I took a sip of coffee. 

The world's in a bad way.

I know.

Yet...

Despite ...*everything*... there are still these moments when life can seem to brush up against heaven.  I have become so intensely aware of the blessings that surround me, and how very fragile they are. I am so deeply grateful for even the smallest among them. The sweetness of this is moment...

 

 I took a nip of the bud. Amazing how little it takes anymore. It takes a little while before the tweet hits home.

 Part of the job is just staring at the stone. From the gazebo I can look across the yard, and focus on the basic shape of the material I have to work with, rather than on the details of the surface. Five minutes later I was still sitting there staring at the rock. 

 

The local speakeasy had this weed as a Sativa. It passed the smell test, OK, but it's a hybrid, and I'm not all that crazy about it. 

Those who don't care about this kind of stuff can skip the next few paragraphs, while I digress.*

 

If you're not familiar with weed you may not be aware that there are many different strains of cannabis. There is also a significant difference in effects from strain to strain. In the most general sense there are three families of bud:

 Indica is the old-world strain. The smell is dank and spicy. The buzz is heavy, sleepy, and dream-like. Smoke Indica, and sit in the recliner with music.

 

Sativa takes  in the new world varieties. The smell is sharp, and close to citrus, or pine. A Sativa buzz is stimulating, and very cerebral, sort of like coffee in technicolor. A couple tweets of a good Sativa, and you're off cleaning the house, or writing the Great American novel. Sativas are pretty much all I smoke.

 

And then there are the Hybrids. Some few of them have a distinctive character. Most do not.

I'll swear, every bootleg botanist must get the same notion: I'll cross a real sleepy, couchlock Indica with a real jumpy, cerebral Sativa, and come up with a buzz that has the best features of both...

 But it seldom works that way. It's like trying to come up with purplish yellow, or greenish red. The vast majority of hybrids produce a  non-descript  buzz with the good properties of both strains cancelled out. A good sativa fires that creative energy.  I'll be out of my seat and at work before the second tweet hits home. I'll lock in on the task, and won't look up until I'm getting hungry, and hitting that pre-lunch flat spot.

This hybrid injects that indica lethargy into the stream, and just leaves the buzz dull, and flat. I sort of have to push-start the work. Once I'm moving  I stay focused, and the works goes along OK. Still, I'm not all that crazy about this weed.

 

* So enough bullshit about pot.

 

 

By Tuesday afternoon I found myself up against the limits of the material at hand. You can see in the cross section: 

 

 

The white stuff is hard. Everything else, isn't. Some areas on the surface polish up like fire opal. I don't want to sacrifice that natural rock face for a swoopy curve. I already knew that thin, wavy stuff is out. And now, deep undercutting has to go as well. The best I can do is to smooth the ridge lines, and emphasize the jigsaw contours on the chunk as it sits. If I try to get all fancy I'll either break it, or end up with something too fragile.

 

But by the end of the session Wednesday, I realized I had pretty much achieved what I set out to do, which was to take that odd shaped chunk of stone, and bring out what was best in it. The rock was telling me, "OK. This is fine. Don't take me any farther."

Thursday was wet sanding. Friday was finishing day 

 

 

...And by dinner time Friday it was done.

 

Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting.  

The Lost Canyon Project is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018) 

 

The Lost Era Transcripts is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done. 

 

 

Soft Colors

 

Well, I jumped from a stone too hard to work to a stone that's just a little softer than I'd like. Just no pleasin' some folks. This little beauty weighed in at 40 pounds. I've had alabaster like this before. Some parts of the stone are chalky, and some of the layers are firm, and solid. 

 

 

I just got a new, and very aggressive horse rasp from the Stone Carving supply gals, but I don't even need it for this piece. I got the take down done with a piece of 80 grit sanding belt, and the curved blades on the new rifflers I just got.

I had a plan in mind when I began work on the big white stone. I spent a lot of imagination time visualizing what I wanted to do. I made a whole bunch of sketches, took measurements, and essentially did my homework before starting the project. Of course I had to work within the confines of the rock, but I imposed my shape on the material.

 

This one isn't like that.   The chunk is oddly shaped. Both ends have narrow ridgelines. One side is mostly concave. If I cut this down to a workable block I'd waste most of the cool stuff in the stone, and a lot of really pretty material would go into the scrap pile. So rather than invent a shape, and impose it on the stone I have to modify the shape that I'm given.

 I think working like this is called this "free-carving", or something like that.  It just means I'm makin' it up as I go along.

 

 

So here's where we are. The most mysterious Skinamalink hopped up on the table to get in on the photo session. He is the most helpfulest of cats.

 

The profile suggests a human skull, while the front view sort of looks like a sheep skull. Overall, I'm working toward two interlocking figures. I'll dig some of these curves into concave, and others into domes. The object is to create as much surface are as possible, the better to show off the colors in the stone. I'm not sure yet about doing any cuts all the way through the stone. If the emerging figure calls for them, I'll drill. A little too soon to tell just yet.

 

Thanks for stopping by.

Just how hard is it??

Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting.  

The Lost Canyon Project is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018) 

 

The Lost Era Transcripts is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 

 Just How Hard Is It?

 

 too. 

I bought the chunk of anhydrite from Dodd Roth around twenty years ago. He had a finished piece done in this stuff. I've mentioned this before; it polished up to a beautiful metallic sheen, almost like hematite. But Dodd  often worked in hard stone like calcite, and even onyx. That kind of work takes power tools. Where I have a long row of files and rasps, he had a five gallon bucket holding half a dozen angle grinders, and die-grinders, all with different cutting heads. 

I was looking forward to working this stone. I had a sort of science fiction theme in mind.

 Monday I set the rock up to cut a base. It was a much easier set up than with the big white rock. I got the stone blocked up level, and strapped it down on the table with a ratchet tie down. I started, as always, by scribing the base line out with pencil, then a hacksaw. By the middle of the day the groove I cut in the rock was barely the depth of the saw blade. I experimented with rasps. The material was hard, but the tool seemed to cut OK. I couldn't get a smooth pass with the chisel, though. This was odd, because a few days ago, I rubbed out a corner of this stone with some 80 grit sandpaper, then a few finer grades. It took very little effort to get a nice finish on the stone.

This wasn't looking good. But it coincided with lunch break, and while the burrito was in the microwave I checked the email. There was the weekly email from the Stone Carving Supply gals up north. Coincidence is always important. They recommended an organization called NWSSA, Northwest Stone Sculptors Association. I looked them up, and perused their web site. And, what do you know? NWSSA had a brief guide posted, describing the characteristics of the various minerals popular with sculptors. I read some stuff I already knew, but I also learned some new stuff about my stones.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to know anything about chemistry, here, but this is interesting. Alabaster is an evaporite stone. It is formed in layers from salts that remain on the floors of dried lake beds. Alabaster is hydrous calcium sulfate. The molecule is composed of calcium, sulfur, and, oddly enough, water.  On the Mohs scale of hardness* alabaster generally rates a 2.  Anhydrite is the same molecule only without the water. It is much more dense, and it rates about a 3.5 on the mohs scale, a little harder than marble.

The guide confirmed my experience. Anhydrite, I have learned,  is a poor choice, for working with hand tools. The stone is too hard to work with rasps and files; it tends to be brittle, and fractures easily under the chisel. Another drawback is that, like alabaster, anhydrite will not weather well. Over time, the stone will actually absorb water, and slowly morph into alabaster.  That's why it was easy, at first, to get a groove started, or sand down a corner of the stone.  The surface of the stone had weathered, and softened a little over the years. A few cuts in, and I hit the hard stuff.  This is power tool territory: diamond saws, and grinders. It's an entirely different way of sculpting. I have only some small experience shaping this way, and I don't have the tools to do it. This stone is a no-go. bummer.

So, it's back to the finish.  Before starting in on a new task, it's important to finish the last one. I wasn't happy with the finish I achieved on the big white stone. There were tool marks, and scratches, and dull spots that remained even after two days of sanding and polishing. So Tuesday, I brought the beast back out to the table, and started over from scratch. (ha ha) I started wet sanding, making four passes, each with a new sheet of 320 grit. Each "pass" means going over the stone, head to toe, until I wear out a new sheet of sandpaper. I worked the stone through four or more passes each of 400, 600, 1000, 1500, and finally, half a dozen passes at 2000 grit finishing paper. That's a wet mess of sanding.

 Finally, it was time for the soft cotton polishing cloth, Simichrome polish, and, at long last, carnuba wax. There is something zen-like about going over and over the same surface of the same shape again, and again, and again. The routine becomes hypnotic; with each pass the stone looks just a little bit better. Each improvement is an enticement to make another, and time evaporates. I knocked back about nine hours on this thing.

Much more shinier

Too bad about the anhydrite. And the big white stone was the last of the crystal. Except for some scraps, the crystal is gone. I doubt I'll ever see the stuff again. Even so, I have two very nice chunks of alabaster left. I started this one today.

The picture above is of the flattened base.  Notice the layers. I sprayed the stone with water to bring up the color. This is a softer stone. It'll take a gentle touch, but it's going to be candy store pretty:

 

 I don't have a plan in mind, yet,  except to emphasize the beauty of the material. Lots of surface. Lots of color. Lots of curve. The last piece was kind of staid, and serious. I want to do something a little more fun. We'll see how it turns out.

* The mohs scale rates stone from soft to hard: talc (soapstone) at #1, to diamond at #10.

 Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting. 

The Lost Canyon Project

is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of my late friend, artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018)

The Lost Era Transcripts

Is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 Between A Rock and A Hard Place

  

I try to avoid politics and current events here at the WFB. The last thing the internet needs is one more crusty old bastard griping about the news of the day. There's a ton of  people doing this who are much smarter than I am, and they are not hard to find- at least not yet... I have dozens of them in the bookmarks.

But there was this, over at Fran Porretto's Liberty's Torch. 

I commented :

“This is never going to end. That realization hit me as soon as I started hearing about the delta variant bullshit. And it hit me like a punch in the gut. I don't know why I thought otherwise. I’ve been following Briggs every week on this. And Barnhardt. I’m taking my ivermectin. I’m leaning hard on  prayer, and what faith I have, but the hope that I’ll see and end to this in my lifetime is dead."

 And it's more than just the virus bullshit. Ubiquitous woke insanity. The Great Inversion, and the Tyranny of Lies. Western Civ is in collapse. The bleakness is nearly overwhelming. My wife can maintain a sort of Buddhist optimism. If the World is breaking down, it will ultimately resolve into something better. Perhaps. But not within the span of the years we have remaining to us.

We have to fight the darkness where we meet it. I spent most of last year alone on the bike path. Mary and I kept our door open, and we provided, for our friends, the remnant of a social life that had been strangled in the hysteria. My bike club did the same. We held our monthly event, despite.

Then, this last Spring, my creative burn re-lit. Now, I’ve retreated to my art work. Twenty years ago, I engaged in the stone work with a sense of optimism and hope. I’d make cool, beautiful things. People would maybe even buy them. I’d create a little beauty in the world. 

 Now, every stroke of the rasp, every rub of the polish is an act of defiance, a FUCK YOU to the darkness. The panopticon tower of cybertech Babel is being put on line as I type. Shit, this post is part of it. I'll defy it by spending my time carving on a rock. That is as primal, and primitive as a human task gets. It's been going on as long as there have been people and rocks. That's old-school, dude. 

Will it stop anything? no. 

Will it slow the decline, stop the madness? rather doubtful.

So where's this "beauty" gonna' go? Where's it gonna' end up? not a fuckin' clue.

So why do it?

You got a better idea?

My wife and I are still keeping the relations with our friends as close as we can. Friendship and love, too have become our weapons. We have to fight the darkness where we meet it. We’re meeting it here and now: face to face at the desktop. We get it like plutonium radiation every time  we get near the toxic media. It's behind our feet when we kneel to pray. I’m tired.

1961 Mark IV Jaguar  

Sunday was the monthly Cyclone Coaster antique, and classic bike ride in Long Beach. I've been going (almost) every first Sunday of the month for over ten years. Our club, RatRod Riders got its start there. It used to be common to see close to a hundred bikes, almost all cherry antique, and classic cruisers from the 1960's and before. Now its down to a few dozen. I was down there early Sunday as always. My club sister Penny was waiting. Jim showed up later. We talked with our friends, the regular old crowd, but the sense of excitement is still damp. And the vibe has changed. The ride meets at a coffee house in the rainbow neighborhoods of Long Beach, a few blocks in from the beach. You see a lot of tats, and a lot of masks. The bike crowd does not diaper.  It used to feel like we were part of the fun and funky vibe that comes in the alphabet zone. Now it feels like we're sort of tolerated because tradition, but... they'd just as soon we left.

 The run of ancient bicycles used to draw an instant crowd as we cruised through the neighborhoods, and down to the bike path. We were a spontaneous parade event for anyone visiting the beach that day. Don't get me wrong, we still get hoots and cheers from the locals who happen to be out front as we roll by. But past that we're just a pack of bikes, now. 

Even still.

There was that moment when we reached the end of Belmont Shore where they have the street barricaded off for pedestrian traffic. Bright yellow sun. Sky like a blue marble, and sand like a paint-by-numbers seascape. Not too many folks out, and the cars held at the stop signs to let the whole pack glide onto the bike path. We got a thumbs up. The sweet spots remain, and life remains Good. For this one day, anyhow. Later today, I'll start in on the new stone.

 Thanks for stopping by. The WFB is my 'whatever I happen to be in to at the moment' corner of the web. I have two other Blogger sites which are far more interesting. 

The Lost Canyon Project

is the chronicle of my work photographing and cataloging the life's work of artist Pete Hampton (1940-2018)

The Lost Era Transcripts

Is the fruit of the Lost Canyon Project. It is a re-creation in book form of Pete's unfinished master work, The Lost Era. This is a good candidate for the finest work I have ever done.

 

Thoughts Post Project 

Just as a sideline, here,  before I get into bloggin'...

Sweden? Seriously?

I was looking at the stats for this blog, and they show a handful of hits from facebarf, and the few friends  who drop by here, but it also shows thousands of hits from Sweden. Now when you get "views" from China, or anywhere in Asia, you just figure they're bots crawling Blogger looking for anything they can spam, plagiarize, or steal. But Sweden? Maybe the Swedes are interested in what I'm doing. Who knows? If any of those views are actually from real Swedes I'd love to hear. Update: I read a post on another Blogger account where the author mentioned the Swedish rush on his stats. Apparently there is a bot from Sweden prowling all the sites on Blogger. And here I thought I was getting all world-famous. Oh, well...

 

Anyway, here's a preview of the next project. This chunk of silver anhydrous alabaster is a little harder than the crystal, and much more dense. The crystal stone weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds. This stone is a little over half the size of the crystal. Nonetheless, it weighs in at right around seventy-five pounds. It polishes up to a glassy, metallic sheen. I'll get rolling on it in a day, or so.

 

 

The big stone has been on the shelf for a few days, now,  doing what stones do best, which is collect dust. When the alien archeologists arrive in their flying saucers, they'll determine that dust was the most important of all things to this odd race of beings. Why else would they make such elaborate devices for gathering it?

 

Part of me wants to jump straight in, and start grinding again. That's how I worked before. I'd put a finished piece on the shelf, and start in on a new one the next morning. But "before" was twenty years ago, when I was not quite fifty. Now, I'm just about seventy. I'm not jumping anywhere. My needle is on "E". The tank is dry. Right now, I'm  catching my psychic breath, allowing the spirit to recharge, and also taking a break from the physical grind of working hard, six days a week.

And the big stone? Nunya Bidnez skewered it in the comments.  I did a whole post on watching out for free association. But it bit me in the butt again. Here's what I mean.

The planning for this piece began in my head long before the stone came out of the garage. I was largely focused on the problem of having the stone pierce through itself without creating a fork, or a cleavage. Too, I wanted the form passing through itself, but I didn't want to do something suggesting anatomy, or having erotic overtones. Not that I'm averse to doing either; it just- how do I put it? wasn't where I was at- you know?

So, in the quiet space before sunrise, with my eyes  closed, and coffee jump starting consciousness, I imagined the form of a leaf,  then pulled the stem around, and poked it through the 'palm' of the middle of the leaf to form a loop. This notion eventually became  the foundation for the design, and later morphed into the upper bowl. 

 The raw form of the stone lent itself to to the egg shape below.  I saw that egg shape, and the concave arch extending from the narrow end as having the potential to show off the clarity and translucence of the material. It would be a big glowing pearl bowl, gracefully arching up, turning inside out, arching back again, and finally dropping down through the  top bowl, and  into the lower. Sort of a Mobius effect.

But of course, the conceptual stuff is all conceptual. Everything changes once it hits the rock. The stone doesn't care about ideas.  A rock is a hard, fixed place. Either the idea fits inside, or something has to change. The stone had a few very cool natural features that I was tempted to exploit. I worked through, and discarded several ideas, all of which involved some degree of flamboyance. But, just like the erotic thing. Nothing against flamboyance. Done right, it's great. But still; not where I'm at- you know?  

 Whether I'm dreaming it into being in the early morning dark, or rasping away at the table, the whole dialectic between me and the stone takes place pretty deep down in the brain. I get so locked in on task that I can't see past it. Sometimes it feels like being on auto-pilot.

But anyway, I started by mentioning free association, and the comment from Nunya Bidnez. Here it is:

a Swan?
an Ampersand?

very beautiful, sir ...

Nunnya Bidnez, jr.

Once again, Thank you. I appreciate the kind words. 

My work has always had that quality of a three-dimensional Rorschach test. The stones suggest different things to different people, and different images at different angles. The shapes and forms emerge in the process of carving. I don't plan them. 

Now, the ampersand is kind of cool. It would be a fun, and whimsical notion to carve a punctuation mark out of stone.... &

But the swan.

 *ouch* 

I hate to admit this. It did not even occur to me. I was well into the stone, fully committed to the 'egg, and arch' form before I realized that I was doing the swan. It's a visual cliche. Just like every plastic lawn decoration, or cheap terra-cota pot from the swap meet. Like pink flamingos on the lawn. Just like the ice carving at the cruise ship buffet. Just like inflatables for the pool.

I'm not kidding, it feels like pouring your heart into writing the all time greatest love poem ever, and then realizing you just rhymed 'moon and June', 'fire and desire', 'sorrow and tomorrow'. It's all sorta' been done before.

I just had to laugh. And then, my old pal Mike points out the sombrero guy:

Top picture makes me think of the classic Mexican seated with his arms around his legs and back to a cactus, minus the cactus!  

I swear, sometimes, I just can't win.

As a final note, I just realized that I may be in danger of being taken too seriously. I'm having a laugh at my own expense, here. Truth to tell, I am very pleased with the work. If someone sees a swan, I'm cool with that. 

But the sombrero guy? Aye caramba!

JWM