Saturday, January 16, 2010

January is application, sculpture, proposal and maquette time!

This past week I had a scribing business trip to Minneapolis and got the pleasure of working with two amazing scribes. I learned a lot from them and hope to work with them again very soon. Together with Chris http://christopher-fuller.com/ as our lead, we created a 7' tall x 15' wide graphic capture of the workshop. I also worked with Victoria, who is also a filmmaker when she is not scribing http://www.linkedin.com/in/vgarza. It was really a great team and experience!

As soon as I got home Thursday afternoon I began to work on one of the many exhibition applications I need to complete before the month is over. Here is a link to the application I sent off yesterday for Art In Public Places Knoxville http://www.dogwoodarts.com/art_public.html.

I have three other major deadlines coming up with www.socratessculpturepark.org,  Sculpture Invasion 2010 at http://www.oakton.edu/index.php,  Lakefront Sculpture Exhibit: http://www.chicagolse.org/.

For the one of the exhibits, I will be proposing to exhibit this sculpture. I will make it regardless of if it is right for one of the exhibits. I am pretty excited to get started on it. Let me know what you think!





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Now onto the rusty stuff:



This sculpture, Hole, I made a couple years ago and since then, I have been wanting to make another one similar to it. I have been a pack rat about saving the square and rectangular pieces that I need to make another one. This piece of scrap is not generated as fast as many of the other circular forms I work with, so it has taken two years.

This series of work is an exploration of gravity and mass. I want to make the steel look light and almost like it is floating. I do this in a lot of my sculpture. This series is also special to me because you really get to see what the elements have done to the steel scrap that has been outside exposed to all of Mother Nature, grease and limestone gravel. I think the result is beautiful in nature and color. It is sort of a metaphor for the aging process that all humans go through. Rust is a protective coating. We all have a protective coating that is ever changing based on what we go through in life. I think this next square sculpture I am building has the benefit of my subconscious thinking about it for two years and I have a better understanding of why I am compelled to make this a series. Maybe I only will make one every two years or so, but with each new one I will learn more about what I am doing and why.

The good news is I don't expect anyone to know that when they look at it. It is what I am thinking about in the studio when I am welding, arranging, grinding and setting up a weld. If you like the lightness of the forms, cool. If not, that is also cool.

I got started on the new square-ish sculpture on last day of 2009 and have been working with it for the last couple weeks. Here are some photos of the process.





The edges of these square plate are cut with a torch and have a very raw edge (which I love!). In order to make a clean weld, i sometimes have to grind a the edge so that it meets the other square piece as close to perpendicular as my eyes can make it. 




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