little known fact

When sculptures bore me or otherwise get on my nerves, they get cut up and recycled into new and more effective sculptures.

Such was the case with an early yellow unnamed sculpture and "Lady" a light purple sculpture from grad school. Each sculpture had a particular area that I thought was interesting but each was lacking that "something" to communicate a complete idea. Both of them needed to go away.

Lucky for "Lady" and "Old Yeller" I was taught to recycle long before recycling was a cool thing to do.

The image below reveals just how these two "parts" were fused together with new steel in order to more fully solve the problem of communicating a specific persona through abstracted imagery. The armature is visible as well as the steel "skin". You can also see the welding seams as they appear before they meet the grinder.


The resulting sculpture was painted bright red and named "Ethel's Daughter". Some of you may know that "Ethel's Daughter" made the trip to North Charleston, SC recently to be a part of the 6th Annual National Outdoor Sculpture Competition at Riverfront Park. She also won an Honorable Mention Award at this show.

You can view a photo of her in her new location and read an artist statement by going to the website below:
http://www.northcharleston.org/residents/departments/arts/OSCE.aspx

pride and tetris

Blue graduated from preschool. That's him in the front row singing. I think that's one of his "girlfriends" on the back row to the right.

3D Tetris: It helps to be a spacial thinker when you need to pack all your stuff in one truck. My packed U-haul was a thing of beauty. This photo was taken the day before I finished packing it. When It was finished it was 99% filled with positive space....much to my brother's dismay. He had to help unload it all.

finally

new sculpture....

I pushed enough stuff out of the way and made a work space and finally got a new sculpture under way. I was not alone in the studio though.

This guy

and this guy decided to stick around.

This year is the big 13th year emergence of cicadas in the Greenwood area. I've never seen or heard anything like this. These guys are everywhere. The stairwell, the offices, the classrooms. They cover the sidewalks and just walking across campus seems like you are walking across cicada rush hour traffic. The buzz by your head and smack into your chest. The trees absolutely pulsate with the cicada songs. I grew up collecting cicada shells from our weeping willow tree and my son and I still collect them from the ash tree in our backyard. He calls them bug-a-bugs. But I'm used to seeing less than 50 each year. They are harmless and actually really friendly little bugs but the massive number of them and the nonstop chorus they play in the trees in Greenwood is like something out of a Steven King story. I'm relatively sure they had some impact on the new sculpture but it's far too soon to understand exactly how.

And now it's time for something painfully adorable:

wiregrass postcard