Motivate Me Monday?

Oh man. I am not actually as far behind as I feel like I am but wow am I feeling the pressure.

“Of what Darla?”

I don’t even really know at the moment. It just feels like I am on a slippery slope of trying to finish everything and catch up and schedule this and get ready for that. And like I said, I’m more prepared than I normally am for the things I’m feeling stressed about, but nonetheless I am feeling the stress.

In times like this I make a list.

What to do?

When is it due?

What do I need to get to do the thing?

How long do I need to do each thing?

That usually helps. I’ll give it a shot and we’ll see.

This whole year has felt like trying to get up an icy hill. Last year my footing felt more certain in all the ways… I’m not sure what changed this year.

Whoops, a break. And now we’re back.

So I accidentally took two weeks off. First I was tired from Paul’s birthday weekend adventures in NYC. Then I was busy. Then I was not motivated to write anything. Then I was sick. Whew.

Since I’ve been “away”, I started a new piece. A self portrait, which has me all “a way” about it. I love sculpting figures, despite rarely getting a chance to do so anymore. Portraits are not my thing though. Usually it ends up looking like a second cousin of the person I’m sculpting. I am not generally interested in sculpture for the sake of translating direct observation only, so I get bored, impatient, annoyed, etc.

I personally tend to work more intuitively and would rather get the “feel” of the person (it sounds bit woo woo when I put it like that but bear with me). In my animal work I’m most often going for “emotional portraiture” which often captures more clearly what I’m after. However what happens when we turn the lens on ourselves? Can I get observation and emotion? Ahhh it’s a bit of a winding path here. I started off enjoying the process, but very quickly I’m up against a wall of what I think I look like and what’s true (measured literally by calipers or more loosely by the looks on the faces of my loved ones). I see myself as this wide jawed stoic figure with better eyebrows and hair than I know I have. I have a hard time finding softness and beauty in myself, which is interesting to observe. So it’s become this inner battle, made real, between my actual self and my perceived self and I am fighting on all fronts. It’s truly wild when thinking about it like that. I just posted a quick video of the piece and immediately afterward cut back into the nose and structure of the face. We’ll see how far we get but that’s when I’m at for now.

Back at it

Well it doesn’t exactly fall in the “Art making” category but this model horse skeleton is reference material for a piece that I want to do in the not so distant future. Therefore I decided (after years…it was initially inspiration/reference for another sculpture I made) to finally put it together. This was no small feat. I am not a patient person and while this model kit had all the indications that it wanted to go together in a certain way, it did not cooperate as I thought it might. So instead of the relaxing my way back into making something that I thought I was doing, it was more of a “cursing like a sailor and accidentally gluing things to myself situation”.

With much more glue than necessary I got it almost entirely together, after which it almost immediately fell over and broke apart again. SO I’ve dedicated most of the rest of my day to doing things around the house like organizing skulls that were a gift from a friend of ours and making a way for plumbers come through and fix spaces which have not been used since we moved in years ago.

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3

While not much at all is getting done in my world this week, last week I was able to test a glaze on these three tiny skulls (which I made a bunch of while taking Simon Lee’s class at the beginning of the summer.) I wanted to see how it looked at one coat, two coats and three coats. I have a tiny kiln, which I programmed for a glaze firing and let it do its thing. They came out great and I imagine I’ll get around to glazing the sculptures I had in mind soon enough. Most people don’t realize that I don’t, almost ever, glaze my work. And I’ve never fired my own glazed pieces until now. That’s why I love making Art…every day is an adventure.

Packing and Shipping

Packing and shipping is a funny thing. It is INTEGRAL to the piece surviving its journey between point A and point B, yet no one teaches it (well I do, a bit), until recently no one talked about it and lots of artists just throw their stuff in whatever box with whatever “packing materials” are lying around. I used to do this, before working for an art handling company, and still cringe at the thought of sending out sculptures wrapped in plaster splattered bubble wrap, packed in old clay boxes.

Now, depending on what the sculpture is, it’s either cavity packed in foam or wrapped in tissue, then bubble, then more bubble and then space in the box is taken up with paper. For very fragile pieces I will double box them if needed. All this to say that a lot goes into this process and it takes a fair amount of time if you do it right.

Below are the boxes of sculptures from my Seconds sale and they are ready to head out to their new homes. This was two days of packing and labeling, but again, that time is really important to make sure that the pieces get where they are supposed to, in the way that they are supposed to. I also feel like it should be really exciting to open these boxes and see what’s inside, so I really try to focus on that as I’m wrapping them. For anyone selling and shipping work, or showing and shipping work, I’d say to think about how the person on the other end will feel opening the box and that is a great place to start. I will do a more in depth tutorial soon.

Throwback

As I’ve been experimenting in a new medium (more on that tomorrow), I am looking back at some themes that I love but find harder to successfully incorporate into my work on a regular basis. The theater stage is one of them. To me it speaks of drama, artifice, pretending to be someone you aren’t, trying something new, or acting out your dreams. I have a few sculptures in which I’ve used this as a tool but never quite in the way I’ve hoped for.

Every time you open your mouth…(Drama), 2020.

This sculpture was meant to speak to the idea of someone who, no matter what they said, every time they opened their mouth, you knew it was going to be some drama. I love that the simplicity of this piece allows the drama to be implied and therefore invented anew by each viewer. Someone wrote me that it made them think about the former president whereas others expressed knowing someone like this personally.

Another instance of using a small stage is in the sculpture below, To Sleep // To Dream, where in the double sided piece, the viewer is able to decide whether they’d like to be more practical (sleeping bird side) or more fantastical (dreaming bird side with a theater stage in his belly…an invitation to dream beyond what is possible in regular life.)

To Sleep // To Dream, 2021

I’m hoping to incorporate this as a symbol in some upcoming work, on one level or another. We’ll see how it goes… Stay Tuned!