I have actually finalized some of my arrangements for the Six Drawers series. And I have the first drawer finished! And what a struggle it has been to attach and light this drawer!
If only I could/would plan ahead, and do things in the most sensible and efficient order. That rarely happens in my studio though. Think about it: I really should have considered the lighting first. But no, I left that until last, even though I have made this mistake before. It is much more difficult to cut into the drawer or box after the interior is fully mounted and detailed. The risk of damaging the contents is high… but all is well.
See the progress here, with the “skylight” photo coming soon:
And now with added cutout/skylight. This provides a little natural light and will allow addition of LEDs if desired.
So far I have interesting arrangements in four of six matching drawers. These arrangements in drawers will become assemblage pieces, but they will change. I have already put in considerable effort into these, and almost wish they could be magically complete just as is. But the arrangements rely on ephemeral plant material, with nothing attached in place, so no, these cannot be completed works as currently viewed.
I do envision a series of related work. Currently the drawers are variations on a theme, all featuring aspects of the same face. I don’t know what they mean yet, and maybe they are more fictional memorial works. Here are a few glimpses of these changing arrangements:
I toy with abstraction, but most of my masks and faces are attempts at realism. I don’t know why I make faces (no pun intended!) but I think it is just human nature.
Here is some recent work with paper clay built up over a ready made plastic face mask/mold. After the paper clay dried, I was able to remove it from the plastic, but not without some minor damage.
I have made a mold of this face to be cast in cement or epoxy resin, but it is not a good quality mold. The silicone was old and I probably should have scrapped it instead of making a fully cured & sealed plaster support mold for it! So the results from that will come later.
A few days and many hours later, casting the bird is back on track. At least I think it is. My new plaster mold is cured, sealed, and I have put it to use. I cast Fat Baby Bird #16 very hastily late in the evening, and it was not well done. I did prove the mold is good, and I do have another bird that I will count in the edition, but … this poor bird is somewhat wounded.
Truth is I did a poor job of it. I did not mix enough cement, and I tried using a “slip” before filling. I should have pre-measured everything and had a good set up so I could work faster. RapidSet cement is true to its name. The product thickened quickly, and I ended up with several conspicuous voids in my cast.
I could certainly have patched and painted these so that no one would be the wiser. However I chose a different solution: Fat Baby Bird #16 is “Wounded Baby Bird”. I chose to make these voids more conspicuous rather than less so. Now Wounded Baby Bird is painted in raw Sienna with silver highlights, and the voids feature black or red glitter or gold paint. Here is #16 before and after full color. Should I touch up the black glitter with a bit of silver? The the black seems a bit stark. Here are three views of Wounded Baby Bird:
Fat Baby Bird #15 sits pretty below, in front of my studio. With a vivid three tone paint job plus a silver beak, he/she is hard to miss. I will keep her/him right here in my yard for a bit:
So for now, #15 and #16 are happy enough here at the studio. But perhaps someone will want to take them to new homes soon. My baby bird adoption fee is a mere $200.
Casting the bird is back on track whenever numbers 17-25 are wanted. My limited edition will stop there.
This update on casting the bird is about relearning lessons learned! I am not methodical, I don’t track, write down, or review all the steps, tips, and lessons learned from my endeavors in art or life. And of course that can create trouble!
Before I made a new mother mold for my Fat Baby Bird, I did briefly review the process. But sadly I didn’t think it all through carefully enough! The outer mold failed when it leaked resin. I had two options for the remake: use the original stone carving with my still intact silicone mold, or use the new resin cast to support the silicone mold.
Foolishly, I chose the most convenient option: the resin cast. I pulled the silicone mold over the resin cast, instead of cleaning up and drying the original carved bird. Since the resin has leaked in the casting, it is about 1/5 shorter than the original and of course the silicone mold. So I added a bit of oil based clay to fill the bottom of the mold, and built my new plaster mold over that.
This was a mistake! I took the time to dry the plaster fully, coat it with oil based polyurethane, then rushed to make two cement casts without examining the first one carefully. It was only after I pulled the first one out of the overnight water cure that I saw the problem. My new mother mold was fatally flawed. My casts had misshapen heads, and I needed to make another rigid outer mold!
Here is the flawed mother mold, and the flawed cast, after I whacked them with a sledgehammer, which was somewhat satisfying…
The broken bird will not be part of the edition, but may become an amusing installation, TBD.
So now I have made a new plaster mother mold, using the original stone as the base. This was still problematic because the stone is mounted to a base, which crowds the silicone mold but this should be a small issue that I can correct readily in future casts. I have yet to use my new mold however, I may be a bit afraid to do so!
As of this post, I have made fifteen good casts for my limited edition from the Fat Baby Bird limestone sculpture. I still hope to complete the planned edition of twenty-five. And that is the update on casting the bird. Stay tuned to see if the new mold will be a success.
Note:it may be telling that I do not find any photos of my flawed castings prior to destroying them. I was so disappointed, and not at all proud of them. So apparently I did not document my error. So much for even trying to learn from my mistake…
I sold the last finished, and favorite, Fat Baby Bird cement cast during Studio Tour this year. Two more Tour visitors expressed an interest, so I cast two more recently. Numbers 12 & 13 of the planned limited edition of 25 are sold. I sold Number 12 was sold to a Tour visitor after my follow up email, and then sold #13 to a new friend. I love this! Thank you art buyers!
This is great for me, but the problem came when I decided to try an epoxy resin cast. It has been far to long since I cast anything, and forgot some of the hazards and tricks! Resin will leak from the smallest crack.
My quick dry acrylic cement is pretty trouble free, but my glove mold has a 2 inch opening seam that did not fully contain the resin. The resulting cast is actually fine, although my blue resin Baby Bird is 1/2 inch shorter than my cement versions. The problem is that the resin leaked, then hardened on the plaster mother mold and the packing used to stabilize the cast. So I had to destroy that rigid support mold in order to extract my cast. This meant a lot of work and significant delay before I can make another cast!
My new mother mold is complete, but the plaster is not fully cured yet. Then I want to seal it with polyurethane before I use it. And although I do plan to make another resin Fat Baby Bird, I will take some precautions! Using cling wrap around the silicone mold might do the trick, along with ensuring the mother mold is very snug. It is also important to seat the silicone mold fully on the inside. Then I will hold my breath until the resin is cured, metaphorically speaking of course!
Casting in Resin
I really do love the blue resin Fat Baby Bird #14. The trick was to make it hollow, which allows more light to pass through. And when I place it on an LED base (at right) it really glows. I can place a translucent colored disk over the LEDs to give the bird a subtle hue at the bottom. I have tried yellow and purple paper so far; now I want to make a set of disks with more saturated colors for the purpose.
The image at right is an “artsy” photo of the remains of the plaster mother mold!
Some figures emerge, slumber, then reappear in my work. When they reappear they are generally quite different: in a radically different context, in different material, or with very different mood. Most of my imagery emerges from my subconscious, but I have used well known symbols from various cultures in the past.
Long ago I drew a simplified version of the flute player who appears in rock art around the Southwest USA. I did this to create a few silhouettes in wood that became a gift for my mother, and for other family.
Recently I repaired and scanned one of wooden flute players, and used this scanned image to make a couple of collages.
I have also experimented with a new material in an old cast of my draped field worker figure. And I found a home for him, lifting a fallen planet! This background is an old linoleum print that did not have enough value as a stand alone work.
So here are the Flute Player and the Field Worker: my most recent collages.
Many of the people that I know are stressed and full of angst, but not from things we experience directly. Rather it is because we hear about so many terrible happenings around the world, and ever closer to home. Here on the west coast of the US we are experiencing a several year drought. And this brings summers of wildfire. We live in a world of fire and ice.
My art will always contain some aspect of my life: my fears, hopes, history and more. These two pieces are about fears, nature, and more. There is the horror of a forest fire, but there are some elements of hope and the promise of new growth. There there is the ice that may form a protective shell around our hearts, or it may provide a pond to skate on.
So here are Fire and Ice:
These are mixed media work that can be labeled as collages. The added elements layered over the paintings are more than finishing touches; these elements are intrinsic to the artwork.
At left my wildfire painting evolved but never quite satisfied. So there are many layers of paint, under collage elements that were added over a time. This work evolved over a couple of months; I returned to it again and again. I may yet add a bit more wildfire smoke to partially obscure the circular windows to worlds without fire…
At right, the ice formed more quickly! My palette knife smears of green, gold, and silver over blue evoked water. My stash of acrylic fragments from disassembled yard art became the ice. The running figure is cut from an old photo etching. Will she escape, or is she already trapped?
I needed to correct something about a “finished” artwork. It was really bothering me, although I wasn’t sure why. I just did not quite like it, however much I wanted to. The individual elements seemed mostly OK, but… it wasn’t working for me. So I made some changes; are these subtle changes? Or not so subtle?
Here is the Before and After my changes:
The light is probably different for these two photos, so you may find the color and contrast difficult to compare. I did mute the background pattern colors considerably. The color and contrasts on the figures is mostly the same, although a bit different where I carved away portions of both figures.
The primary changes are:
For the the background I muted colors & contrast, removed one distracting dimensional element. I did add a soft new element to the drawing.
On the left figure I removed a lot of the draper around the head & shoulders, and worked into neck & rib cage a bit.
On the right hand figure I reduced the size of the head, and gave him a shard of glass to hold/offer.
For me, this fixed two problems: first that the figures were did not fit well on the panel, being too large and too close to the top. And secondly the background was too dominant and distracted from the featured figures.
I like it much better now, but I won’t know if this piece is really satisfying until I live with it for some undetermined length of time!
Here is my new finished collage: Flute Player with World Tree. I started with an arrangement that I planned to stick to! And I planned to stay with the basic white paper background in the mock-up seen on the right. Well that didn’t happen! I changed the color scheme and a few other things along the way, of course. The finished work is on the green background at left. Always things change!
It is fixed and final now, after a good deal of struggle, so I guess I will like it better! It does seem more finished, balanced, and better fitted within the overall dimension. The paper parts are mounted to a painted board, and the whole is an awkward dimension of 15″x22″x5/16″.
I sometimes like to think that I know what I am doing these days, after so much practice. But it is quite the opposite! I still make just as many mistakes, and often almost destroy a piece before salvaging it. All I can really say is I do get most of my work completed to a satisfying state that I am not ashamed to display. And I absolutely get immense satisfaction along the way. What more can anyone ask of life?
Of course I also experience plenty of frustration, and make a lot of mess. I am not making much progress tidying up my studio, but making is much more fun!
