Out of the Blue, the huge wall relief I've been working on for the last two years is "finished". Or at least it's finished enough to enter the Finger Lakes Exhibition the Memorial Art Gallery holds every two years.  You can see the complete development by looking at the previous post.

                                              March 29, 2015

                                                 February 21, 2015

I have been juried into this Finger Lakes show for the last 3 times times. This would make it 4 in a row. While I'm hopeful, you never can tell; its a different juror each time.

Out of the Blue

Its been almost a year since the last entry. I return to update the work on the piece in the last entry "The Heart of the Matter". After months of work I rushed to "finish" it for a show at the Geisel Gallery in the Bausch and Lomb Headquarters downtown. I titled it "Out of the Blue". This is what it looked like on display:

 I wasn't completely happy with it. It was too dark and I didn't think the round objects worked with the whole piece. So I started working with it again. I took some pix and played around with them on in Photoshop:

So now, after painting it over the last couple of days this is what it looks like currently (the color is off because I am shooting under my fluorescent lights):

Thats much better but it still has a ways to go................stay tuned.

Heart of the Matter

I return again and again to the heart shape. Back in 1978, when I made my first foray into the commercial craft world I started making various heart shaped ceramic pins.

Ceramic pin circa 1978

I see this as related to my interest in yoni shapes, specifically the "coco de mer" (see the previous post, below).Almost 30 years later shortly after I got my "second wind" professionally, I returned to the heart shape:

My intent was not to make a "heart" but rather this biomorphic growth shape that divided in two. Some other references in play in the back of my mind would be various alchemical diagrams:

Left: from Besant and Leadbeater's "Occult Chemistry"; Right: from Edwin Babbit's "Etherio -Atomic Philosophy of Force

So.......Back in February, as I was thinking about doing a large piece to enter in this year's Finger Lakes Exhibition at Rochester's Memorial art Gallery I make some sketches:

When I decided to start with a Styrofoam core over which I would cover with a "paper mache clay" (the recipe I found at:  Ultimate Paper Mache  )I made a life size drawing:

 

I used this to trace the outline right onto a section of a 4' x 8' sheet of Styrofoam insulation. I added layers and shaped it with saws and files:

After It was fully shaped and covered with the paper mache "clay" (a mixture of toilet paper, joint compound, Elmer's Glue, and flour) I started to paint it wit a base coat of cobalt blue:

(So big it takes up most of my dinky studio)

Next I gave detail to the "background"

So, finally I am starting to begin to start the conversation and this is the state its currently in as of today:

 

I just finished a large, 48" tall, piece for a show in March. Actually it is a piece I made years ago and put in a show in 2008 as part of a suite of work for a show here in Rochester titled "Big". The surface of  the piece was very simply painted when I made it for that show, so now, after may work has gotten decidedly painterly the past five years, I decided to repaint it. It's actually the largest of the yoni shapes that I have been working with for the past 25 years. Here is how it progressed:

Left is 2008. Center is Fall 2012. Right is Jan. 2013

I first got interested in this shape when I saw a picture of a Coco-de-mer, a coconut found in the Indian Ocean, in a book about Tantric Art by Ajit Mookerjee:

After Grad school when I started a ceramic jewelry business in West Almond, NY, I made a line of erotic pins including these:

I decided to title the new piece "Locus Amoenus" which is latin for "pleasant place" (thank you, Wikepedia). It is associated with a garden and connotes a physical or mental space of safety and protection. It was a literary device developed by the ancient greeks, although when Ovid used it it was something of the reverse I understand from my limited search. As I was looking at my finished work, I kept being reminded of the patterns on the "oriental" carpets of Turkey and the middle east. Researching this lead me to this term, locus amoenus. Here is a parting detail view of the piece:

Particle Dance

 

      

     Finally, after 4 months of work I have finished my second kinetic sculpture. It is made with 8 plastic hobby gears and 16 pairs of wooden off-set cams and followers to create the up-and-down, spinning motion of the sculptural parts. I got the idea for this motion from websites such as Automata.

    I did a lot of surfing the web looking at what other artists are doing with motion. Cabaret Mechanical Theatre is a great site with a lot of resources. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I am pretty pleased with the latest result of my efforts. You can see it in action at my You Tube channel. The next step is to refine this further, make it bigger and, possibly as a relief to hang on the wall.

Second Kinetic piece

It has take a while to get back to this blogging business. Usually if I have any free time I prefer to make art rather than talk about it. This summer I devoted my time to building a more ambitious kinetic piece than the first:    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXkR1j4VyOI

Here is a peek of what it looked like at the end of the summer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiMl3oytqbI

I should be able to have more up to date next week.

Old paper mache projects and new directions

Here are more examples of past paper mache projects. I am thinking about these now because I am having my sculpture class start making animal "characters". No matter how serious and abstract my work gets I always keep returning to the silly and ridiculous. I don't believe in the zodiac horoscope crap, but I long ago noticed that I was a gemini and that I seem to often be pulled in two (or more) different directions.
This week I have researched more robotic stuff, ordered fine fabric fasteners, fired the two clay pieces pictured below and bought a quantity of reed and raffia ( to make some woven 3-D forms) as well as a soldering gun and station. I also took apart one of my old electric tooth brushes to see if I could turn it into a vibrating motor/apparatus for a kinetic piece. Pam insists that I not solder in the house, so I guess I will be doing this at school until the weather warms up.

In light of the many different directions I am pulled in perhaps a better name for the blog should be "Gemini journeys" or something like that...Hmmm. I welcome suggestions.