When you want to give something presence, you have to consult nature.

- Louis Kahn, architect

Searching out the lines that already exist interests me more than imposing new ones.… Pressing leaves into the bark of a tree produces lines dictated by the tree's growth patterns. The intention is not just to make a line, but to draw the change, movement, growth and decay that flow through the place.

- Andrew Goldsworthy, artist

(Andrew Goldsworthy image)

My time at the Sandpoint studio is coming to an end. Rumor has it the new developers want the place vacated by May 1st. I will miss it there, with the waterfront and the old wood floors and high open-beamed ceiling. But it will be nice to have my work back home again. No more commuting, no more too-hot-in-summer and too-cold-in-winter, and I can wander down in the middle of the night to work if I want. That will be nice. Still a lot to do to finish off the basement, but it's coming along. I have my work cut out for me these next few months.

Been working hard at the studio, all to finish this piece for an upcoming auction. The title of the work is "The Measure of Her Fortitude." It's a mixed media piece incorporating found objects including a quail egg, sparrow's nest, Victorian brass hardware pieces, antique ruler, fossilized nautilus shell, animal bone, Bakelite and bone beads, beeswax, tarot card, watch face, hemp thread, vintage rusted tin container, old metal frame, powdered pigments, wood, wire, nails, paint and glue. It measures about 15" in height. There's quite a bit of depth and dimension to the piece which was hard to capture completely in the photos, so I've uploaded two very differently lit pictures to try to convey this. First, with top-down lighting --

And this one, lit from both sides which emphasizes the depth of the frame behind the central image --

I had so much fun doing this. It's actually a re-working of a piece I started in a deMeng workshop last fall and which I even uploaded a picture of here in this blog a few months ago.

My favorite element is the sparrow's nest material tucked into the lower part, inside a turned-up Victorian drawer pull. The color of the nest was much grayer than I wanted so I mixed in some gold colored hemp thread to warm it up. It worked out quite well (below hangs an amber Bakelite bead and an animal's femur bone) -

Up on top is the nautilus shell and the quail egg. I devised a way to reinforce the egg so that breakage is unlikely, even though it sits freely on the wire and can rotate around. I really love sculpture with moving parts -

And below is another "moving part" element -- the bone beads threaded onto brass nails on either side of the central image. The beads move back and forth giving the whole thing an abacus-like feel. Between the beads and the metal frame piece you can just make out the textured surface where I tried to match the rusted metal. I tried to keep as much of the rusted metal showing, but as I had to affix the metal frame pieces with some epoxy putty I needed to cover that up to match the rusted tin. Powdered pigments really helped with this --

And here's the back of the piece, showing the backside of the old rusty tin. I love that burnished and rusted gold surface and didn't want to hide it, although the other side of the piece is just rusted tin with no old gold paint on it. You can also see some of the ways I attached all the pieces together. I used rivets (hard to see, but they're there) to attach the wood rulers to the tin, and brass nails to secure the wood piece in the center (the tarot image is on top of the wood). Down at the bottom are a couple of Lowes-bought brass machine screws and nuts. They were shiny-brand-spanking-new, which I burnished on the front side of the piece to match the aged look, but on the back here I just left them new and shiny. I threaded some brass wire through holes drilled into the tin to create something to hang the piece on a wall -

I'm fascinated by illuminated manuscripts. So much to love about them, from the sacred texts that are made even more sacred through artistic embellishment, to the archaic secrets behind ink formulas and quills, to the gold leaf and the preparation of the animal skin vellums. And what got me started again with this interest? I’ve recently been reading C.G. Jung’s “Red Book”. It was made public for the first time last month. Jung, of course, touches on some other favorites--mythology and symbolism--which were richly portrayed in medieval times, the peak of production for illuminated manuscript. All of these converging interests of mine, going round and round, circling in toward that which draws me strongly, artistically. Here are some images from Jung's "Red Book"

So I'm prowling the internet again, searching for images of ancient texts, and tonight I hit the mother lode. It seems that palaeographists are so thankfully passionate about their discipline they’ve built enormous (and, best of all, free) online image libraries of historical texts and manuscripts. The sites take some patience to navigate and presume the viewer knows more than a little about the subject, so you have to do some poking around to get to the images. My favorite site is the Digital Scriptorium -- http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/. But unless you happen to know the precise name of a manuscript or the collection it’s held in, it’s easiest to start by clicking “more highlights” on the home page. Initially I gaped at everything without discrimination, but after awhile it got easier to discern the high quality manuscripts from the low. While all are wonderous, a few stand out as true works of art. The Book of Kells is of course familiar to most, but of the hundreds I looked at my favorite by far is a manuscript at Harvard University’s Houghton Library -- the Calderini Pontificale dating from the late 14^th century Italy. It’s undoubtedly one of the most finely executed illuminated manuscripts in existence. Here are some goodies --

"... art is the imbuing of matter with spirit."

-Christopher Day,

in "Places of the Soul; Architecture and

Environmental Design as a Healing Art"

(sculpture by Javier Marin)

Been a while, eh? All I can say is life happens. Just like the moon waxes and wanes, so it goes. Been busy with a million things but creative endeavors have been creeping back in again. Most recently, this has been through a couple of classes I taught at Puget Sound Community School.

The first was a fun drawing class designed to teach the value scale by way of learning about the art of Chuck Close and then emulating his grid portraits technique. I can't lay claim to this lesson plan though. Just do a google search for "Chuck Close portraits" to find many variations listed. We watched a slide show and movie about his life and work, then I took pictures of each student and posterized these in Photoshop, reducing the number of values to 4 or 5. Next, I printed these out and we gridded them and transferred the images to a larger piece of paper to begin the drawing. Each square on the grid was assigned a value (dark, medium dark, medium light and light) and the students would then do a doodle drawing in the squares. The darker the value of the square, the denser the drawing would be. Here's a demo I worked up to show the process --

Lots of little squares to fill in! I should have put more thought into that before choosing such a large piece of paper to transfer the drawings to. I think in total there were nearly 400 squares to do.. poor kids. It's so true -- work like this requires a very specific artistic temperament. You have to enjoy doodling (perhaps I should say ENDLESSLY doodling?). Fortunately, one of my students had it in her and found the whole project very inspiring. She completed a wonderful drawing which she's planning to give to her Mom for Christmas.

Her finished work here. Amazing, no?

For week two I switched gears from 2-dimensional to 3-dimensional work, doing a class on plaster masks. Though I don't have pictures from the first two days of class, we spent them paired in two's, as students would place wet plaster bandages on their partner's face to create the base of the mask. On day three we began the process of smoothing and refining the masks as well as adding sculptural embellishments like large cheekbones or protruding noses. Here the kids are doing just that --

The last two days of the class were scheduled for painting and finishing. The rest of the photos here showcase some of that process as well as a few of the finished (or work-in-progress) masks. The class itself was a big success and all were engaged for the whole process. I think the work speaks for itself --

So many different interests pull at my attention, but it's all good. One of the perks of not having deadlines to meet. I can do whatever I please. And there is much that pleases me. So on that note, below are some recent studio projects.

A few weeks ago I traveled to Portland, OR, to take part in a week of various art workshops. It's all good fun and a great excuse to play with abandon (not like I'm doing that already!). One class was all about resins, which I've long been interested in. I confess I didn't do all of the intended projects for the class, but as I was working with the material my mind started buzzing about the potential it held for other projects. Specifically, resin is a great substance to reinforce some of the natural materials I'd like to incorporate in other pieces. I have a growing collection of natural eggs of different kinds. Some of these are extremely fragile and hard to come by, so I'm not experimenting with those. But button quail eggs are a dime a dozen. I used a cutting wheel to cut off the top to make little cups and have been using the resin to reinforce the inner chambers. It's working very well and I'm pleased with the results --

Below is the piece I did in a Michael deMeng class. His classes are mostly technique-based (my preference) but with enough of a "theme project" idea to get everyone over that dreaded hump of "what do I do"? Plus he plays great music while we work. I also like that he gathers us all at the end to do a group critique which really extends the learning as well as the inspiration. Good stuff. I apologize for the snapshot photo here. Hard to tell what's going on, but it involves a nice rusty tin, various bits and pieces of.... well shoot. I'll just promise to take some better photos and discuss this in a future post --

The drawing below is not a recent one, but I pulled it out after going to a recent show of an artist/friend of mine, Ellen Garvens. She had several drawings in the show done on mylar and had used the translucent nature of the material to great effect, with layering and utilizing the impermanent and delicate quality of graphite on the surface. I've also used mylar for some of my drawing work and really love working the surface of it. Below is a mylar drawing done with graphite (on the right) layered over a graphite on paper drawing (on the left). Never did finish this piece, but may yet go back to it and continue the process as it pulls to me.