it's not easy raising the dead

Those of you following along at home may remember the mention of the death of my sculpture “Beauford” earlier this summer. If not, just pretend I placed a link to that entry here and scroll back down to July and read about it. Since I felt that I could have used the imagery better, I set about the task of disassembling “Beauford” and searching for better solutions to the visual communication problems. With a sketch and some good ideas swirling in my head I started on resurrecting the sculpture in early July.

Generally speaking, I can turn out a new large sculpture in about three weeks. Those of you familiar with my schedule will realize that does not mean 21 days of working, rather it means about 5 or 6 days of actual time in the metal shop over the course of those weeks. I am very impatient and even this relatively quick progress can seem to me to drag on forever.

But this one…this one almost killed me.

It took just over two months to complete this resurrection. I ran through all of my good ideas and realized after spending hours creating and attaching them that they were not such good ideas after all. Several dramatic changes in direction followed. A lot of steel was used. A couple of hammers were thrown in anger. I even had to venture into the research of some branches of aesthetics. And there were unfounded rumors of some sort of mild case of heat exhaustion (I maintain that I was just tired for several days).

One of the greatest experiences of this almost eternal process was the uncertainty. I’m supposed to be an artist – a professional – and yet there were so many days I left the shop in frustration fully convinced that I had no idea what I was doing. At times I just wanted to toss it all in the scrap bin and start on something I was more sure would be a success. Like everyone else, I wanted to go back to what I “knew”. Growth is overrated anyway, right? But I kept going back and kept working at it determined that I’d eventually figure it out. Each new choice I made was huge and each time I decided to try an idea, it always seemed to be an action that would either work perfectly or completely destroy the entire sculpture.

The result is “Stinky”; a sculpture that shares some similarities with my previous work in terms of its fabrication and its reliance on the design fundamentals yet it is a sculpture that stands out in stark contrast when compared to my other work in terms of color, texture and mood. It is a step in an unknown direction – a direction that I expect to explore and continue to learn from.

Will people like it? I’m not so sure. But I know that something does not have to be pretty in order to be beautiful.

There are some photos on the website, so go over and have a look and see what you think.

october ball

I dont want to jinx anything by talking about it.

The first playoff series begins at Wrigley Field on October 1.


and please...network announcers: can you please go easy on the whole "it's been 100 years since the last time they won a World Series" stuff? I know you think it's a great story, but everyone who really cares has just about had enough of it already.

nobody expects the spanish inquisition

A student uttered a wonderful sentence to me recently.

She said, “I don’t know.”

I can’t get used to a scene that repeats itself each semester almost without fail. The students are trying to get a feel for my boundaries and using testing questions to see if they find me an instructor they can trust to provide them with constantly correct information. This goes on until I prove myself worthy or unworthy and always in the course of this interrogation they get around to finally saying something along the lines of “well you just know everything, don’t you?” or “are you ever wrong about anything?”. Oh yeah, it’s loaded with sarcasm but it’s also revealing something they’ve learned from or about teachers over the years of their educational experience.
I feel that it’s important to quickly let them know that I do not know everything. I am not always correct. Do I have a lot of visual art information crammed in my head? Sure. Do I have a large number of years of experience working in sculptural and drawing materials and in using problem solving to create art? Sure. But even though this is my area of concentration I do not walk around with all the correct answers to all questions sitting on the tip of my tongue. This is art. There are no handy formulas to always provide the artist with the right solution to a given problem. Each drawing and each sculpture I make is about exploring and trying new things and working and reworking to see if I can find a way to communicate a particular idea in a non-verbal fashion.

This idea seems to match up with older artists working late into their careers. I see no evidence that even those we refer to as “masters” ever arrived at such an artistic nirvana where they never had to really work at problem solving any longer. It seems that Rauchenberg, Oldenburg, and yes, even Picasso and DaVinci were involved in asking questions and trying new things long after they were established as “greats”. Perhaps this art thing is a race that one can never finish. Maybe finishing is not the point.

“I don’t know” should not be an ending, it should be a beginning. The uttering of that statement should be the point where learning actually begins. We don’t know, so we look it up. We ask someone. We try something we’ve never tried before. We take a bit of advice and run with it.
The multitudes of things that I do not know push me toward research. For several months I’ve been interested in possible connections between the Divine and Aesthetics. Following these ideas has forced me into reading about Theology in general and Theological Aesthetics in particular. Last week I sat down with a copy of The Holiness of God, a nice little extended essay by David Willis containing a chapter of interest called “The Holiness of Beauty”. My learning started fast…beginning with a truckload of words in the first paragraph I had to look up in the dictionary. I felt only slightly better about myself when several of those words proved to also be foreign to the folks at Webster. I also learned that Mr. Willis is the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary which meant I was attempting to read far above my grade level. And let me tell you, it’s tough to get the meaning of a sentence when you have to stop and look up every second word. I think even my dog felt bad for me as he sighed deeply and buried his head in the couch. He can be very condescending.

Do I know everything? Not even close. But with the help of my dictionary and my curly-haired friend who just happens to be a PTS graduate, I’m going to learn some new things about beauty. It’s going to take a while, but I’ll learn.

And that student? She’s going to learn some things about Design.

it is finished.

Update on Clara

Clara won 3rd Place in the 9th Annual Will's Creek Survey!

I suppose this means that if the 2 higher runners-up are unable to serve or find themselves the subject of some internet photo scandals she could reign in their places?

See photos of the exhibit here: Gallery Tour The Allegany Arts Council

*Clara also pulled in the "Sophia Brill Art Award for Playfulness"

that clara

She's at it again.

If I knew how I'd insert a link here to the very first E-Sketchbook post, you could click it and see an image of Clara in all her green glory. I suppose you can still see it, but you'll have to work a little harder.

If you're going to be in Maryland during the next month, and come on, you know you've always wanted to go....drive on over to the Allegany Arts Council's Saville Gallery in Cumberland and visit Clara. She's there as a part of the 9th Annual Will's Creek Survey Juried Show. The show opens Saturday night (9-6-08) and runs through October 3.

The Summer of Living Leisurely

At the beginning of summer I had a stack of books I needed to read. I eventually worked my way through all of them but I began with what turned out to be the most entertaining and educational of them all.

A.J. Jacobs is a writer and editor for Esquire Magazine and tends to write about his own adventures and experiences. In a previous book called The Know-It-All he wrote about a year of his life he devoted to reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A-Z. His most recent book (and the one I read) is The Year of Living Biblically and it details how his life changed as he sought to follow all the rules of the Bible literally for one year. He’s also a pretty funny guy.

Jacobs considers himself an agnostic though his family comes from a Jewish background and of course that means he went into this project with some preconceived notions about the book the was attempting to follow. One of his reasons for undertaking this project was that he was interested in the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism. He was skeptical of religious zealots and wondered how anyone could engage in a belief system that seemed to leave logic so far behind.

One of the interesting things that happened along the way is that Jacobs became a very disciplined follower of the Bible. In fact, though he never considered himself a “believer” during this process his “biblical life” for that year put to shame the lives of most individuals who say they follow the scriptures. One example of that is in the book when he out-talks and out-lasts a visiting Jehovah’s Witness.

Personally I believe that Jacobs let his cynicism get the best of him in the end. The book is well written and will make you laugh out loud again and again and as far as it details his year long struggle to follow the Bible literally, it accomplishes that goal completely. But in his mostly scientific approach I could almost see him retreat a couple of times in the book. Retreating from what? Maybe you should read it and see what you think.

In the end Jacobs is relieved to be free from all the rules and as what he now calls “a reverent agnostic” he gives short book tour talks about some things he learned from the year long experiment. One of those things is that your behavior influences your thoughts. Stemming from Biblical ideas of giving thanks, Jacobs found that as he was required to be thankful for every tiny thing that went well each day he became more positive and pleasant. Who knew the Bible dealt with cognitive psychology? Another thing he says he learned from the year of rules is the importance of a Sabbath. The Bible forced him to observe the Sabbath day for a year and as a workaholic father and husband he found this quite distressing at first. It was difficult for him to stay away from his computer when he knew he had so many things to do. At first it seemed he was losing a work day each week but soon he began to see the peace and calm this day of forcible rest brought to his life. It caused him to slow down, to enjoy more of the things around him, and I would argue that it also helped him in his creativity and idea development.

I finished the book in May and inspired by this idea of forced rest I decided to slow down and enjoy my summer. Normally this can be one of my busiest times since I can be in the shop more and can usually turn out several new sculptures and drawings. This summer I completed two small drawings and two larger painting/drawings. I did an indoor show, a public art exhibition, and worked on a new sculpture, but still haven’t finished it. I played with legos and rode tricycles. I went to the beach a few times. I ate a lot of ice cream…apparently about five pounds of ice cream and I read that stack of books.

Now that the Summer Sabbath is over, I’m going back to finish up that sculpture I’m still sort of excited about.

I leave you with photos of the last hurrah of summer…from the outermost bands of tropical storm Fay.