Bees and Wasps and Give-Away

This is my small (about 4" across) version of a mud dauber nest, 3 separate chunks. Susan figured out the way for me to make it:  rolled newspaper tubes coated with slip. It's been bisque fired but is very fragile. I need to make more chuncks and then figure out a way to put some underglaze on them and fasten them together. Mud daubers like to make their nests up high under eaves but I plan on gluing mine up in a high corner of the living room.

 
I'd get a lot more done if Susan didn't keep giving me ideas of things to make in sculpture class.  She found a picture of some hexagons in a magazine, they were stacked up sort of like this with things inside each one.  The sides on each of these are about 5" long and I have no idea what that means the total size is.  I lost attention when the discussion involved things like 30 degree angles and measuring 120 degrees. Jason, our sculpture lab assistant, helped me set up the chop saw and I went on a hexagon binge.  Right now I have about 25 made and will be arranging them in different patterns for my sculpture class final project.

 

This little Sweater Child give-away went to the parking lot of the Contemporary Craft Museum in Houston. 

Before:



 

After: (I love the graffiti)



Please know that the Give-Away of the little Sweater Children (or any other art) does NOT mean abandonment. It just means they are going to a new place.  Maybe someone will adopt them and take them home.  Maybe someone will just leave them there. Maybe they won't be noticed.  Maybe they'll be thrown away. Whatever. You can't make art and then keep an emotional leash on everything you do -- you have to take a chance and put it out in the world, either with your name on it or not. Let go of some of your art and there will always be room to make more.

Give-Away and Sell Away

We recently had our Student Art Sale and I had to move things out of the apartment so I sold some of my stuff. When we lived in our house I had the luxury of a two-car garage to use as my studio, with the cars banished to the driveway. There was also the back yard, front yard and side yards to use for display of those pieces that didn't find a home inside. Now I just have to do Give-Away or use the Student Art Sale where prices have to be very, very low.

This wood sculpture went to a good home.  It doesn't show in the picture but I took some gold paint and brushed it on a few of the edges, just enough to catch your eye.

This poor boat suffered from a lousy glazing and firing, result in a pale pukey green -- all my fault.  I was just going to throw it away but Susan insisted we could maybe salvage it.  It took Adirondack Alcohol inks, Daler Rowney inks, and some acrylic paint but I think it came out pretty good, especially on the back. 

Austin Community College is spread out in a building that used to be a high school.  It's pretty beat up but it does the job.  The latest Sweater Child Give-away is by our loading dock and she's been there for about 2 weeks now.

 

Give-Away and Ken Price

Remember the Sweater Children? (here) They are still slowly going out as Give-aways. This particular one went to live in the gardens at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.

 



Sometimes life is just like this:

This guy lives outside the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.  Behind him is a stunning new building, The Museum Tower, covered with reflective glass. Unfortunately, the glass reflects so much sun into the Nasher Center that it is affecting the art inside and the exterior grounds.  The museum was there first....

We were at the Nasher to see a Ken Price exhibit.  The best part was actually seeing the beautiful pieces up close but the worst part was not being able to run your hands over them. 

Raku Birds

This is the peephole in the raku kiln I use at school.  Look carefully and you can see a little bird in there.

The pieces are taken out hot and put in a container filled with something that will burn so as to make an oxygen reduction when covered up.  I don't get to barbeque any more - funny how grills just aren't allowed on an apartment balcony - so this is how I get to do the Guy Thing of Fire.

 

 All my work at school is supervised by the Peacock Teaching Assistants.

 



Once that fire goes out the pieces are carefully lifted out with tongs.  They'll look interesting then ...

...or the smokey residue can be rubbed off off.

The reduction firing can affect the structural integrity of the pieces and make them very subject to breaking, which is why there are 6 birds before I started rubbing on them. And 5 birds when I was finished..

New York City in January

This is the cover of my sketchbook I use when we travel. It's the 4x6" size and Susan helped me cut up one of my old art papers to make the cover. 

And why, you ask, have I waited so long to post the rest of the  information and pictures from my January trip to New York City? I have an excuse and it's a very good one.  Susan is my Blog Wrangler and it's HER fault. She has been doing things like wrangling with the new (now 6 months old) computer and has now figured out that for every snag the old one had, the new one has a different snag, just a bad. It took just about 2 weeks to get rid of the crummy security program that came preinstalled so she could use her familiar one. She has no idea why she can't play Yahoo games anymore. She has no idea why Yahoo Mail randomly ignores paragraph spacing. She is beginning to hate Yahoo.

This week she hates Picasa Web where she normally puts pictures so that this Blog can get at them. For no reason it keeps telling her "Upload failed: Server rejected". But if she keeps trying a LOT of times it will finally take them, one at a time, very slowly.

Anyway....

Now you know what we do with our days. This is how we travel through the city:

I finished reading Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Wow! Martha tells it better than I can. I'm now starting Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson and the first chapter has already hooked me in.  Susan is reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking and gave me the Introvert Test in the book:  Scoring 19 out of 20 makes me a gold-plated Introvert. She thinks the book is great reading if you are, as she is, a "pseudo-extrovert". 

Looking back on the notes above I see that we watched the movie Hanna. A fascinating creepy movie, 5 Stars.  Last night we tried to watch Cosmopolis. I don't care what the reviewers said about how great it was, we stopped it after the scene with the doctor in the taxi. Dumb. No Stars.

Ernie Pyle

"When he looked at the war he saw no politics, no ideals, only soldiers."



It's sad to watch and hear news accounts from Boston. It's sad to know there are still soldiers in Afghanistan and South Korea and many other places outside the United States. It's sad to know they wish they were home, holding family and friends close as they watch the news. It's sad to know that today's news always seems to revolve around politics.

Roger and Grave of the Fireflies

Roger Ebert was special.

He made "small" movies special.

He wasn't afraid to tell you a too-big-to-fail movie was a failure.

He helped us see the art and wisdom and talent where we

probably would have missed it without his guidance.

We'll miss him.

The clip below includes a wealth of information I can (and should) use in my art. We've put the movie on the top of our Netflix queue.

His description of "pillow shots" is the best advice an artist can have: edit.

Gone and Giving It Away

 

Ernesti has gone from the gallery to a new home, taking his shell with him.

And so has Kathai.

But for no reason whatsoever, this Give-Away piece is still in place after more than a month.

This spot is on a busy corner and has a bus stop just a few feet away.  Go figure.

I'm reading Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Definite 5-Star book, very unusual and surreal, definitely holding my attention..

Adorn Me

I went to AdornMe in Houston a few weeks ago. When I first heard about it I thought it was called "Adore Me" and couldn't figure out how that went with jewelry making but thought I could probably get a lot of attention there since it's mostly women attending.

Unfortunately, most of the attention I get is because
1) I need a lot of help and
2) I bring a lot of tools to share.

I've taken great classes from people like Richard Salley and Thomas Mann and for the first time, from Mary Hettmansperger.  The piece above is from one of Mary's classes, a small copper pendant made with a technique using black gesso and silver embossing powder.

 

 

 

I'm not sure what will happen to all these class samples but I'm thinking they will get incorporated into larger pieces that will become small wall sculptures. Or become jewelry for the Little Dudes.
Or become Give-Aways, hung with invisible fishing line from a tree or bush. Or, given my tendency to schedule too much for myself, will just get tossed in a drawer.  Susan tells me that when I die she's going to pay for my funeral by advertising a big "Stuff Sale" where people will pay a fee to pick through all the drawers of my stuff. She figures she'll make enough to put me in the ground and then do her grieving in Tahiti. Cold woman!

Still mapping.

Give Away Or Never Let Go

When we moved  (and did major downsizing) I had to give up (and throw away) a LOT of stuff. Rusty, cruddy, gnarled stuff I'd collected for years. I did manage to set aside 3 small boxes worth of selected pieces. 

Never look back on what you left behind,

only look forward to what you can start collecting all over again.

 

Susan just grits her teeth when I say that but she's the one that taught me that men don't go to estate sales and garage sales and antique fairs to go "shopping" -- they are going "hunting".  She hates to drive my car so that's a good place for me to hide stuff I capture.

For a long time I made a lot of ceramic boxes, mostly with open tops and bottoms.  The goal (somehow there is always a goal there but maybe that's just an easy way to say "I don't have a real plan") was to stack them up in a window on their sides so they would look like ruins of a city but you would still be able to look through them. 

This give-away is still there after 30 days.

 

Ludvig and Mapping

Ludvig is at the gallery.  I tried a different clay for the heads this time but managed to keep them from blowing up in the kiln.  It still isn't the exact mix I want but I'm working on it.  He's holding a little shell in his hand.

I'm still doing maps.  What size is this? What color of ink do you use? Why is the paper rippled? How do you get that shape? Inquiring minds want to know and I will tell all, as promised.

The size is 6x8 inches, the paper is from a Strathmore Drawing paper tablet. When Susan puts the pictures on the computer she usually does a rough crop to eliminate the edges of my sloppy photo so the actual image you see might not show that proportion exactly.

We set the tablet open on the kitchen counter with a piece of aluminum foil under it and a piece of foil under the top clean page.  When we have finished drinking coffee for the day I take out the wet coffee-loaded filter and put it down on the page. Randomly, just where it wants to go.  During the rest of the day we sometimes push down on it. Sometimes the grounds spill out.  Sometimes we splash a little coffee back on it.  Look at the map above and you'll see a vague filter shape starting at the bottom left.

The next morning the filter is taken off, foil put down on the other side of the tablet and the damp page flipped over and a fresh page is ready for its filter.  At the end of a couple of days some of the pages will be totally dry so their foil can be taken out but the stack will still be several days worth high.  The pages are very rippled because they dried with a wet blob on them.

Susan tried ironing them.  Nope, didn't work.  She tried ironing them with a damp paper on them.  Smelled just like fresh coffee but totally diluted the color.  We've been given ideas about how watercolor artists "stretch" wet paper but haven't bothered to buy expensive paper. Yet.

The ink? Just fine point Sharpies and (preferably) Pigma Micron pens or Faber-Castell Pitt pens.  Once every page in the tablet has some stain marks on it and the whole table is dry I can start marking on them.  This series of maps needed a unifying element so I started by making dotted lines through every page first.  No thinking allowed!

Susan has told me to read the book The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet and the map illustrations look really cool but I just haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

However, I have taken time to watch the movie The Grey with Liam Neesom.  It's the movie about guys trapped in the wilderness as they are stalked by wolves.  I learned a valuable lesson watching that movie:  Never take a leak in the woods at night.