On the Way

 Last week I just sort of  let stuff tumble out onto the keyboard as I was thinking it. I guess that's what they call "stream of consciousness" writing. I'll try to stay out of the stream, and on topic. 

 

I  wanted to do this project from a set plan. That is, I wanted to have an idea for a completed figure in mind before starting in on the work.

It's not going to go that way with this chunk of rock. I do have a completed idea in mind, but I'll save it for the next stone. With this one I'll have to do the planning, drawing and sketching on the stone itself.

 

 Trying to coordinate the three sided pyramid shape, the flat plane on one face, and the lumpy contours of the back face is a serious challenge. I made a start on some of the preliminary shaping, but I had to just stop, and shift back into planning mode. The rest of the week was just drawing on the rock. Saturday evening the light came on.

By Sunday afternoon I had the beginnings of a plan. I'll get grinding on it today.

OLD BIKE

 1950 Schwinn B6

One of my treasures

 

 

Anza Borrego One: The Bloodstone 

 

Hey, how's that for a snappy title, huh? Just like the first installation of some  rocket ship time travel to another futuristic universe way back in the past type of novel: 

" The green skinned judge ran a quick tongue across his lower eyeball, and pronounced sentence on the hapless Earthling, Grank Dawston.

"For the crime of space smuggling, I sentence you to 20 years hard labor in the bloodstone mines on planet Borrego, in the Anza One solar system."

 

 Or maybe a Western.  

 

"O, Mateo, do not go to the Anza Borrego. It is a place muy mal, con  muchos desperados."

" But, I must go, Chiquita Muchacha. When a fortune in bloodstone calls, no man can resist."

But it's just another chronicle of an amateur sculptor doing backyard art.

 

I'm looking at doing these five stones as a single project. Works in a series, I guess. Maybe create an imaginary spiritual narrative around some big theme or other. Each stone represents a different facet of the grand cozmik yoo hoo.

 

 All goofing aside, this is the first "new" alabaster I've bought in a couple of decades, and it does represent a very separate phase in my grand avocation of being a sculptor.  The last four projects were all done with material I bought not long after my wife and I were married, in 2000. A warm-up exercise for this.

I have new stone, new tools, and a still newly ignited burn to work. I've got shapes like silent earworms twisting, and shouting in my head, and I can't turn it off. Don't want to.

 I do know that these five stones are five chunks of prehistoric California, a California that was here before it had a name. This stone slept in the ground while the land above it went from wilderness to the slouching, dystopic mess that remains today.

Now it's in my back yard; in my hands.

Regardless of what my state has become, or will yet become, I'm going to make these five pieces of it into something...

Fuck, I don't know-

 into something I leave behind me when I'm gone.

Like an old song on the radio when the singers are dead.

 

 Which brings me to one of my favorite topics: coincidence.  

 

I'm going to jump back three years, to June of '18.   I had a fragment of a song from the 60's stuck in my head, but for the life of me, I could not remember the title, the words, or who sang it. It was becoming a most annoying ear worm.  I remember talking to one of Mary's friends about it, and she came up with The Mamas and Papas tune, "12:30".  I looked it up on you-tube. That was it! The song was stuck in my head when I set out on this huge adventure.

 

A couple weeks ago, one of the blogs I visit, "The New Neo" , did a post on "12:30".
Here was the song, again, now showing up at Neo's blog, in my daily cruise through the bookmarks. I had to listen once more.

 
 (Here's a video with lyrics)

 

"12:30",  paints a picture of  California at its apex. The kooky, crazy, California hippy sub culture was in full bloom. California was everything that urban America, personified in New York City, was not. We defined cool. Of course, for anyone my age, the scenes in the video spark the memory of having been there.

 They were good times; better than we knew. Now, when I heard the song, the memory of the dream-like cactus trip was woven into the sixties nostalgia. The contrast of how things were, then, with the slouching, filthy, totalitarian mess of how things are, now, just about broke my damn heart. And  I mean the bitter contrast of today with  June of 2018. When I looked all the way back to 1967 I had tears.

 

 Oddly enough, though, getting all misty was not from anger or grief. The tears came from realizing how very fortunate I have been. I was there. I lived that California dream. Surfing, motorcycles, traveling Highway 1, dropping acid in San Francisco... And despite the horror of the last couple years, daily life for Mary and me, and for our friends remains very much intact. I am acutely aware of this, and profoundly grateful. For this one day. The ship may have hit the iceberg, but the water isn't up to our room just yet...The song is stuck in my head again. It's still haunting me. 

 But enough melancholic musing.

 

 

 

Once I got the chunk broken out of the stone it was time for my least favorite parts of the whole game: first, taking down the surface irregularities with the angle grinder. Power tools are loud, messy, dangerous, but fast.

 

Then came the business of deciding how the stone is going to sit. Here's where I have to look at the big flat plane. It would be easy to use the cut as the base. but doing so leaves me with a "mountain" shape, which is static, and not particularly interesting. I want a dynamic, upright composition that will let me bring out the colors and patterns in the stone. There's a lot of very clear stuff in this material, and I want to bring out all the surface area that I can to show it off.

 

Tuesday morning I made a trip to the hardware store, and got new blades for the bow saw. I got the rock mounted up, and strapped down to the table.

I've done the base cut a bunch of times, but this is the first time it didn't come out right. I did not get a clean straight cut, and the stone would not sit flat. Looking back, I can understand what caused the cut to bend. It's a mistake I won't make again. But what should have been a flat plane was bowed out and slightly convex. It took the rest of the day, and some serious hard labor to get a clean, flat bottom started.

 

 The next morning, I figured it would take a couple or three hours to finish getting the base sanded flat. I was wrong. This was a long tough grind, shoving that seventy pound stone back and forth down the sanding board. It took the whole day before I got the bottom where I wanted it to be. Even so, the stone leans back a little farther than I had intended. 

I'm OK with it, though. 

 

 

 

 This is easily the most beautiful material I've ever worked. Look at this. It's part of the slice I took from the bottom. Check out the snow-globe effect in the water-clear matrix, the deep scarlet red running through the clear, also the opal-like milky stuff. 

 

 Whatever I do with it has to be more than special. So here's the blank I have to work with:  I was worried that this stone may be mushy soft like the last two that I worked. No.  This stuff rings. In fact, it's quite hard for alabaster, which is as good a thing as I could ask for. It will hold as sharp a line as I'm willing to cut, and it'll polish up like greased glass. That's why it took so long to get that base flattened down. This is some seriously fine stone.

 

The basic shape is sort of a three sided pyramid with one face machined flat, one face sort of flat, and one side all lumpy. It's going to be a challenge.

 

This is the biggest problem I face: what do I do with that straight, flat plane? As of Saturday morning, it's a mystery.

 

 Here begins The Part Where Nothing Happens. Right now,  I cannot seem to get a toehold on a design. This is one where I want to plan what I'm going to do, not make it up as I go along. But the lights just haven't come on for any particular idea. I realize, in my head, that this is just part of the process. I remember driving myself halfway nuts  trying to get an idea working on one of the big crystal pieces. It took days of staring, but ultimately the project ended up being one of the best things I've done. 

 

But I feel uncertain, now, in a way I did not feel twenty years ago. Now I have that carping voice telling me I'm dried up, played out, and all my ideas are soggy, and cornball. I wonder if I've already done my best work. I wonder what kind of disaster will come down the pike before I'm done with this five-stone tale. Grim thoughts. 

It all stems from the end of the world as we knew it, and the gut dropping realization that this insane evil isn't going to stop, short of war. It comes from feeling that my back is against a wall, as everything goes to shit, and all that stands between me, and hopelessness is prayer, and the burn to work. This is the path in the spiritual wilderness. The drive to simply get up, and do another day is gifted out like manna: exactly enough for a single day, none to keep, and none to spare. Tomorrow arise, pray, and move forward.

 

Now I know this crap is all melodramatic as hell. Especially considering that I've already expressed thanks for the abundance we still enjoy. Despite everything, I have not lost my abiding sense of gratitude for the good we have. But it doesn't take much: a couple hours of news and current events, a visit outside the Suburban Hermitage to go to the store, or ride the bike. The faceless.  It becomes an awful background music, an infestation of petty reminders that seeps into every crack in every thought, and conversation. It precipitates down into my back yard thoughts, and makes me wonder if I'm just wasting my fucking time here. But I started rounding in the lower edges, lifting them up off the base. Sunday evening I began to get the germ of an idea. Even so, there's a whole lot of sitting and staring at the rock ahead.

 

Bringing It to a Close

  

 

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.

 

Bringing It to a Close

 

So it looks like I'm on the home stretch done with this piece. Last Tuesday I got started  on the finishing work, sanding out all the tool marks, and stone bruises. The work went much faster than I had anticipated. I had it done by the end of the day.

 

This makes two stones in a row where I've been working around inconsistent quality in the material. This stone, like the last one I worked, had some firm areas, but most of it is just too mushy to hold much detail. Oddly enough, it can be more difficult working a stone that's too soft, than one that's too hard. I'm beginning to understand why marble is the stone of choice for serious sculpture.

The soft stone takes a gentle touch with the abrasives, but it smooths out quickly. After the second pass wet sanding the carving, I put it on the portable table, and washed it down with the hose. When wet, the stone looks like French vanilla ice cream with caramel streaks. But the wet, glassy finish didn't suit either the material, or the figure. The piece looked better as it began to dry.

I ended up wet sanding  up to only 220 grit, (rather than 2,000) and then rubbing it out with  #000  steel wool, and Simichrome. Then I hand rubbed it with more polish, and the soft cotton rags until I got this satiny, very slightly textured finish.

 

It's an odd, quirky kind of piece. There's a little story going on here.

 

 

 But I don't know quite what it is.

 I don't know what it is about finishing a project that leaves me so completely spent, and tired. The physical labor is not exhausting. But this is the fourth stone in a row where it's happened. Tuesday I worked until late afternoon finishing up the stone, and then putting the work area back in order.  I turned in early, but didn't rest Tuesday night at all. Woke up Wednesday morning completely exhausted. That would have been bad enough, but an allergy fit had my nose running like a faucet, literally dripping down my shirt.  Two benadryl left me feeling like a zombie, and then I got no sleep Wednesday night. Couldn't even get a nap Thursday afternoon. 

It's Friday morning as I'm sitting here letting the coffee get cold. I'll be back on my feet later. But this seems to be a pattern. Finish up a project, and then I'm on my ass for two days following. Welcome to post-middle age, I guess.

 

Next up, I'll begin work on the five Anza Borrego stones, beginning with this one:

 

This material is absolutely gorgeous, deep blood red, and milky translucent white when it's all polished up.

This chunk of rock has problems, though. A deep fissure runs along the length of the stone, and the largest surface on the boulder is the flat cut where it was sawn from  a larger piece. 

 

The flat plane is more difficult to work around than the fissure. If I bust out a chunk of the rock, I can compose something cool around the irregular contours of the broken stone. 

 

 The only way to get rid of flat is to pick out spots that will be high points, and cut the rest way.

 

I have one very heavy duty masonry chisel that I inherited with my late father's odd-ball tool collection.  I put the blade along the fissure, gave it  three good whacks with the six pound mallet, and just the exact section I had predicted would split, broke out just as I hoped it would.

 

 

Now here's a mystery. I thought I had completed a piece from what looks like the same stone when I was doing this twenty years ago. I found my old photo album when I was cleaning up the den, Wednesday, and sure enough there was a photo of a small carving done from what looks like the same rock. I gave this, and a bunch of other pieces away at  our wedding in April, 2000. I can't remember who got this piece. More joys of post-middle age, I guess.

 

 

    It is quite probable that the stuff came from the same quarry. US Gypsum has been working those beds since 1920. But how likely is it that they'd be pulling the same stone out for over twenty years? I'll probably never know.

 

Next up is the take-down. I'll drag the big stone out into the yard, bring out the angle grinder, and spit some dust and noise out into the morning. Maybe take a little revenge for the neighbor's tile saw.

 

 Back on the Learning Curve

The Skinamalink ignoring my work

 I mentioned in the last post that my sculpting skill-set was somewhat lop-sided. It wasn't that the work itself was crappy, but I was doing all the shaping with saws, and drills, then going straight to the rasps, rifflers, and files. Saws, and drills are just fine, but those rasps, and rifflers are refining tools, and shouldn't come into play until later in the process. Not only that, there's a right, and a wrong way to use those quite costly tools, and I was, uh- doin' it wrong. The consequence is that many of my older tools are quite dull. I wore them out too fast.

The rough shaping is done with a point chisel. I didn't even own one until last Saturday. I had two good chisels, a wide and a narrow blade, but I seldom used them.

Even so, I'm not beating myself over past errors. When I started this game in 1993, I had no experience,  no internet, and no teachers. Starting over, I have all those things. Saturday I took delivery of a set of four basic chisels, and a one and a half pound soft steel mallet.

Monday I put the rifflers aside, and set to work with the single point to excavate the material under the rim around the left figure. A pound and a half mallet gets heavy fast, but the point chisels seriously kick ass. It's going to take time to build up the skill set, but  I'm learning fast. I went from here:

 

 

To here:

..in just a day. This would have taken several days doing it the hard way.

 

Tuesday night I got into a violent disagreement with something I ate. Might have the Italian butter and Parmesan cheese. Hard to tell. Whatever it was it had me out of bed sweating and retching, and pitching up my dinner, instead of catching a good night's sleep. My best little pals, Buddy the Cat, and The Most Mysterious Skinamalink both knew something was wrong with the big guy, and they were both there to help. 

I tried to curl up on the futon in the den. By the time I put my head down, Skinnies was right there to be my pillow. Ol' Buddy jumped up next to my chest. They followed me around the house until the nausea passed, and I went back to bed. Buddy jumped up on the pillow, and took his usual place, curled around my head. Skinnies sat on my feet. I fell asleep to both cats purring, and Mary breathing soft at my side.

 The bond between us and our animals is one of the small miracles of life. I recall (imperfectly) part of a John C. Wright story wherein Cat and Dog were the only animals to follow Man out of Eden. "He needed the company." was Dog's explanation. Cat came as well. He had to find out what was going to happen. Love my ol' cats.

Wednesday afternoon, and...

Whoever lives in the house behind us has been having an addition  put on the house, and now they're having the kitchen, or bath remodeled. Whoever is working there is running a fucking tile saw. This is the most evil, unholy sound in the universe. Or close to it, anyway. The shriek is continuous, and it's been going on for hours. Even with my shitty hearing I can hear it all the way in the den.

GODDAMN I HATE NOISE.

 This is one of the worst things about being hard of hearing. You lose the ability to hear everything but inhuman machine sounds. Birds in the morning are gone, but Skill saws, leaf blowers, and lawn mowers come in loud and clear. Noise pollution becomes more and more irritating the worse your hearing gets. The screaming, grinding, grating, set-your-teeth-on-edge shriek got annoying, then irritating, then insufferable. My temper broke, and I got so fucking furiously pissed off that I just wanted to break shit and kill things. I had to stop work, and go in the house. This went on non-stop until about six in the evening. They're lucky I don't have a flame thrower, or a hand grenade. 

 

I got an early start Thursday morning. A slow early start. The day started gray, and cool enough to need a sweatshirt. By nine thirty it was warm enough to shed the sweatshirt. I'm shaping in the teardrop between the two larger figures. The stone is coming to life. It's turning out much better than I thought it would. The mail came a little after ten, and brought two new point chisels.  I won't need these until the next project, but that's going to be coming up before long. As a side note, the bent tools at the right aren't chisels, but rather scrapers. They're finishing tools used to smooth out tool marks.

 

 Weapons of creation

 

I was just getting lunch out of the microwave a little after eleven. The tile saw started before I was done eating. 

[insert string of vile profanities] 

 

...and Friday afternoon arrived, suffused with autumn, and a good day's work on the project completed. That late golden light was glowing on the shaggy hedges bordering the yard, and a warm breeze was playing the wind chimes. 

 I'm getting near to completion, down to making some few refinements here and there on the stone. This part is pencil work: look,  draw, check, erase, repeat. Look...

Just in time for the tile saw to start. 

 

A sweet moment evaporated, and the anger  flooded in on a charge of adrenaline. I've been putting up with this shit all week, now. I want to nuke the bastards.

It isn't really the tile saw. 

 

The anger isn't coming from the noise. The anger is coming from a host of news items. The anger is coming from the theft of our nation. From the stupid and corrupt vermin who presume to power. The condescending scum who declare themselves our betters. The anger comes from  witnessing the spineless, sheep-like submission of almost everyone around me. The anger comes from the lies, the stupidity, the naked evil.

The mask. Every employee in every business is masked up and faceless. I cannot leave the house except that I see a good half the people on the street slouching along, masked up and faceless.  They don't know, or care that the mask is useless. They take great pride displaying their humiliation, their utter unquestioning submission to the authority of the Lie. 

Nobody stands. Nobody resists. They kneel, bow, and scrape. I see those worried eyes peeking over the edge of the paper. "He's not masked!..."

I don't have the words to describe how deeply I hate this.

Last week I wrote about how the September 11th attack on America showed me how little I understood evil. "You thought 9/11 was the apex of evil? Fuuuck, dude you ain't seen nothin'..."

 

 The hatred of Evil is righteous, but the constant anger is toxic. I can channel some of the anger into work, but the rest seems to metabolize into bleakness, or free floating grief. For that there is only prayer. Forbearance is like manna. You get exactly enough to get through one day with none to spare, and none to keep. Tomorrow there will be more. Or so we hope and pray.