Sometime you gotta take a couple steps backwards

I got back from Pilchuck, mostly revitalized and ready to get back into the studio.   I had a few set backs during my trip home, my valiant stead or perhaps valiant slow plodding pony Ethel (my 1999 mazda protege) died in Texas, may she rest in peace.   About a week before that on the first day of climbing post Pilchuck I sprained my ankle.   Making driving and life in general less awesome than it could of been but I did get to camp in some truly soul affirmingly beautiful places mostly lakes and rivers.  If you can only hobble a river makes a good icepack/place to drink beer and watch the sunset.

Bear Lake Idaho

 Lake Granby Colorado

 The Snake River, Celebration Park Idaho

 The Snake River, Celebration Park Idaho 

Here are a couple of the places me and Ethel hobbled to on our trip back from Seattle.  There are worse places to convalesce.   But as said I got back mostly ready to work, maybe a bit less hours than I normally do.  My foot tells me to sit down and stop working after about 5-8 hours.  

This one needs a couple more pieces of glass (i think) but I don't think I have anymore so I might have to wait for Tulane's furnaces to go hot again.  

 Being that I am a bit more stationary than I would like I've also been doing a lot of drawing.  

So first I had to render a piece some of you might have seen.  In order to figure out what the piece which I am thinking of calling Single Spoked Wheel but not sure if that will be the title or not.  So then I did some preliminary drawings about how I think the stand/ramp should look.   I will do some drawings based off which CNC router I can get access to.  The art building has a 4 foot x 4 foot CNC router but the architecture building has a 8 ft x 4 ft.  Since the wooden parts of the wheel were cut on the CNC it makes sense to keep the same material sensibility.  But my cut list/illustrator files to generate the wood for the ramp will have be designed around the size pieces I can cut.  

Let me know if you like one of the drawings more than the others.  I will probably do a couple more.  

In case you didn't see them here are 2 of the 3 pieces I made at Pilchuck, I still need to photograph the third.  But the Neon survived the death of my car and 3000 miles of travel.  Well the neon for 2 of the 3 did and I photographed the one that no longer lights up.  

This one I am thinking of calling Rock'n Lines which is sorta punny and terrible but it made me laugh.  The tubes are Neon Mercury, which means when it first turns on it is more like the top image but after awhile it goes all blue and sometimes does this crazy wavy blue lightning magic.  

This one is called Powerlines.  Unfortunately the neon did not survive the trip home so maybe I will remake it or maybe it will just exist as is.  One of the main things I tried to do with neon was make objects that were not dependent on just the fact that Neon is sexy when lit up.  I wanted to make things that were sculpture with or without electricity .  

One year of graduate school down so lets talk about failures.

        Graduate School is a strange phenomenon, it is a life consuming whirlwind that one devotes their entire being too and then some.   Don’t get me wrong I love making things and being committed to my art making practice, I love stretching my mind, my hands and my skill set to rise to the challenges I have set for myself.  But there are days when I miss rock climbing and nature so fucking much that it physically hurts.  

            My life right before graduate school was a glorious period of itinerant homelessness, camping and climbing.  I feel a bit burnt out, a bit broken both mentally and physically.  I take crap care of myself during school, often forgetting to eat or only putting one meal in my body.  I ask my body to preform obsessive repetitive processes that hurt my hands and my back.  I drink too much and don’t sleep enough. 

            Today I am going to write about failure.  Art making is a continuous, terminal and never ending exercise in failure.  Ever piece, even the successes have certain aspects of failure, there are always details that I can and do obsess over . . . things that are not quite right.   I worked on these two pieces for about 2/3rds of my first year of graduate school.  They consumed my world.  I was obsessed with bring them to fruition and I committed hundreds of hours to them and as of yet they are still failures.  One more than the other but humbling giant learning experiences just the same.  

So I guess I thought I would start by showing you a drawing of an imaginary and by now much over crowded gallery space.  I do a lot of my more finished drawings in a program called sketch up and this is the fastest way for me to keep a catalog of drawings in one place.  I can never quite remember what thinks are titled in the drawing stage so its easier to keep a bunch in one place.  

But the these are the two projects I want to talk about specifically, the water wheel and the line (also not there actual titles but how I tend to think about them in my brain)

So this piece wants to get a kinetic element so it slowly raises and lowers and creates multiple compositions and multiple line drawings allowing the viewer to choose the composition they like  best.  Unfortunately the kinetic elements are on hold at the moment.  For two reasons, one I got burnt out on the piece and two  I don't have a giant room to hang a couple hundred pound piece in to just muck about with but I will later this summer.  The gallery space lies unused over the summer so in theory I can get in there and get it working and get proper documentation.

Here is a picture before the glass went in and I had it hooked up to a chain hoist.

So that piece feels more finished and less like a failure than the Water Wheel but even after hundreds of hours it needs a lot of attention and tlc and probably installation in multiple venues to be photographed before i think I might be happy with it.  The next one I am pretty unresolved with how I need to change/fix it but it too wants to be kinetic and got there for a bit but not in a way I really wanted.   Beyond that I have not even gotten good documentation of it.  Probably because it has persisted in kicking my ass.  

Procrastinating Art History Papers . . . Blogging instead

So I got 12 hours of sleep last night which is two more than the last three days before that.   This must mean it is the end of the semester.   This post is a bit of a hodgepodge showing some work that is extremely recent and also some work I just had not gotten around to photographing until today.  I shot and edited all of these pieces today.   The fact that I was happy to sit and edit photos for a couple hours makes a pretty fitting commentary on how much I wanna write a research paper.  But enough of my rambling and I will get to the pictures.

 So this was actually the first piece I finished in New Orleans it was a responce to my thinking about New Orleans and the parade centric nature of the city... It is called Parade Route

This piece I just finished a couple days ago, and might get a projection through it but I have not figured that part out yet and just broadcast found media through the piece ... Tentative titles; Loose Cooperage, Primitive Haldron Collider,

 So I am not as happy as I could be with the photos of the one.   It is a collection of loose glass bricks that has at this point been stacked into 70 or 80 different configurations.  So its a bit of a meditative exercise or maybe just an obsessive behavior.   So each iteration is different, I will keep stacking it until I get the perfect one and then maybe think about permanence.  I also figure it needs to get installed in a clean gallery space that way I can photograph it better.  

 In my brain this one is called  Rumination on a Starry Night ... but I doubt that will stick

So this piece is actually sort of broken, it is a casting that got cold worked and then picked back up and worked hot.   But I didn't let it soak long enough and there are a lot of little interior sealed cracks. But I still like it and think I might make more of them.

This one might be called Tear Drops and Concrete or perhaps Star Bellied Sneetches

Obsessive geometries and processes, cnc routers/new technologies .... And Perhaps a temporary lapse in sanity

So I have been thinking about barrels, walls and arches.  Casting more glass than is entirely good for me especially considering the heat and humidity has already settled back into New Orleans.  That and I have been stacking things, over and over . . .  

I guess I have been making glass bricks for an installation 

 Each configuration I stack them in only tends to further my thoughts that I need more.  I am looking into that Fantasia thing and trying to figure out how to magic them into making more of them self but failing that I will keep casting more.

 I have been doing some research into masonry and wall making and how to stack things so when it gets big enough it can't fall down and kill people.

 So I have also been thinking about barrels and CNC routed these polygonic circular forms for yet more rectangles to interact with.  In theory both these pieces should be done very soon.  The glass is all cast and drilled.  The smaller one in the above picture is going to get bound with leather or rawhide.   But I don't really know anything about that process so I guess I will keep my fingers crossed.

This bigger barrel form is going to have the glass bolted to the plywood, with bolts that believe it or not are called sex bolts or barrel bolts, which seems appropriate and ironic in equal measure.   

So these are renderings of some of the things I have been thinking about.

I will have more resolved photos of things soon hopefully.  

Frantically making things, but not blogging about it

I have been neglecting my blog since I started graduate school.  Mostly because I am pretty much too busy to do even normal things like laundry or feed myself.  So blogging keeps being one of those things I intend to do never manage it.  But I figured I should post some of the things I have been making.  This is by no strench everything I have made just some finished peices that I am reasonably happy with the photography of.

Sandstone Canyons, Stone and Cast glass

I probabbly should have a whole post dedicated just to this piece.  It sorta kicked my ass for a long time and kinda still is. . . There are a bunch of potential titles for it and I plan on installing it a couple more places.

 Cast glass, concrete .  . . no title yet 

Sandstone Tower, Cast glass and Stone 

 Clock Tower, Cast glass and Concrete 

Cairn for Lost Roads, Cast glass and Concrete

 I have been making a series of cast glass Mono Prints or Drawings ... There is a bunch more that are either have not been photographed yet or not photoshopped yet.   I was thinking of calling this one 
"The Falls I've Missed"