This is the second Shawn/Rooster combo. The prior piece was my first Centaur Chicken, and sold almost immediately. It now lives in England. This one has some additions; the comb & wattle, and spurs. The prior piece joined the legs to the bird at the knees, while this one goes all the way to the hips- it stands at nearly 4 feet tall. All-thread runs the length of the legs and bolts to the underside of
the base. The plaster sub-base was poured in place to ensure stability. I used Hydrostone, a new-to-me kind of high bond plaster backed with hemp- and it is much stronger than my previous Hydrocal/burlap/bandage figures
The base color is established, but still needs patination, while the wood base needs wire-wooled and another coat of stain- but this is as far as it will go for quite awhile as I am heading back to Montana this weekend. I'll bring the laptop and post some Cowboy images when I head in to town.
The view toward the mountains showed new snow and grasses ready to jump out of the ground after a solid week of rain.
A two week trip to Montana to help out at the ranch and see my father through a tough health patch. My sister came out as well and on the morning of my last day there the weather broke and she & I headed out for a walk on the higher pastures. There were plenty of flowers blooming all at once, as the spring had been cold. Down at the house the Lilacs had yet to bloom. The faithful ranching dog, Ben, had been killed over the winter- possibly by a bear that had scalped him a few falls prior. A neighbor brought up a new pup, who was taken by a Golden Eagle in the late winter.
Below is the view down the valley to Belt Butte, and in the foreground is the mixed bag of cattle from a bullfight that brought down the fence a few days before. We left the job of separating them to wait until the fence was mended, but they came out of the bottom country and the woods easily enough to walk them back to their herd bull so he could get his work done.
I unloaded all the remaining winter firewood from the horsetrailer, split and stacked it, then removed the trailer to the equipment corral.
My sister and I replaced the old collapsing split-rail fence in front of the house. Dad felt well enough to fire up the tractor and pull the moldering posts and push in the new ones with the tractor's bucket.
Pasque flowers were blooming by the bushel, but already starting to fade in anticipation of the quick turn to spring.
My dad is feeling better, and the doctors are thinking he'll recover well enough. I hope he'll be able to run the swather in early July, and bring the hay in at its highest yield.
This is why I have been absent from my post for a few weeks: the latest Figure With Heavy Ball- the ball as metaphor for all the unseen weights borne/perpetuated/imagined/real. I started him the Monday after The Existentialist, and have been working on him and the previous unfinished female figure with heavy ball (she has been a bit of a nemisis...). I think this is the best figure I've created to date, so that implies improvement- which is encouraging. The model is 47 years old, 6'2", 190lbs, shaved bald (E's brother-in-law: sorry ladies, he's taken). Quite a lean and muscular build, which inspired capturing his sense of strength. I took digital photos and created a slide show on the MacBook, then worked from the laptop images- I'll have him over sometime mid-month to work on the face/portrait. This is a half-sized figure, but still large at just over 3' tall, he took about 8 gallons of clay.
This figure languished in the studio through the winter- looking quite a bit different. Yesterday afternoon darkened with storm and felt like twilight. I figured I'd work on him till the rain began. I plunked him down on the gurney and took a look, and actually started getting a steady stream of direction. The rains began in the early evening, and I was done.
I created her last spring in my plaster figure spasm, and had some issues with her figure mold beginning to collapse (rubber molds will deteriorate over time) creating weird areas. I thought I'd move on to other things and repair her later- and later became now, a year later. I brought her out of the basement and looked at her anomalies,and determined a triage plan. I ripped down with files and built back in with plaster, and she lived through it all. I painted her a bit differently- and she came out with a stronger metallic sheen than the past few painted forms. I used two layers of thin washed color (vs 1 heavier layer) over the opaque base layer of stainless steel- the stainless steel paint is a craft paint that has real stainless steel suspended in acrylic. The result is a complex French Brown patina.
This hen is a mix of a Polish Chicken, a breed kept as lawn ornamentation that are nervous critters as their vision is impaired by the pom-pom. She also has a V-Comb, which has a nice devil-horn quality. The female form was sculpted from a 24 year old model who posed back in my MFA process (hence the mold being old enough to begin to slump).
After lugging it around for ten years its ugly factor began to really sink in, and as I became more despondent over my current work I just wanted to smash it. Instead, I decided I'd transform it. I challenged myself to keep the original intent and theme, but see how far I could push the form while remaining true to the original sculpture.
The small side-by-sides below show some before/after work.
The original idea was to combine an animal with an emotion: in this case it was anger with a snake. The fangs wrap through the head and emerge as horns, showing the self-destructive and aggressive result of unresolved anger.
The new approach added the Ouroboros, the gyre of cyclical devouring and rebirth.
The first priority was to relieve it from illustration. When there are 40 students in a class, and most of them squirrelly boys, the snake/dragon illustration helped keep them amazed. For us grown-ups though, it can be more than a bit trite.
The next challenge was to loosen it from the Block- it still read like a form fitted into a rectangular block (the maquette was a soap sculpture; also a block).
Adding gesture, flow, dynamism, rhythm, balance- these all began to occur as I smashed out the most obvious bits. I knew I was getting there when it became necessary to pierce the form. Back in the day I used to sculpt abstract wooden forms, and the dynamic of negative spaces plunged through the form was a core aspect of my work. To have the stone suddenly require an opening began a real transformation of the heavy and dead original form, to the fluid dynamic of the finished work.
So for an artist working as a teacher, the classroom may be a place to show technique, but creating higher level art in that environment is problematic. Which then begs the question of the art classroom, but that is going in the wrong direction. What I'm positing as a near impossibility is an instructor's ability to create high level intuitive work in an overcrowded high school classroom environment.
Or maybe it still sux, but just a factor or two less.
Not a doorstop anymore, at least.
As long as I was revisiting work from the summer, I couldn't forget the Centaur Chicken! This is CentauE, holding her egg on her shoulder- now in a nice Bronze color. Now I really need to create a better base for her- without snapping a leg off.
I created this figure last year, and thought it would be nice to check back in with her. I gave her a patina this week, and now am considering doing the same for my Centaur Chickens. The raw plaster flattens the form quite a bit more than I had realized- the form's dynamics are much easier to engage with now. I gave it a bronze like patina, in part to see what she would look like in bronze.
I finally remembered to take the camera out to the new Nerman museum. In fact, my gal and I went out just to take picts, and I thought I'd focus on this piece first. This is the only piece that I forgot to take a reference shot of the artist's info, so until my gal has lunch in the museum cafe and can sleuth the name, we'll just call the artist Dropstitch Weft. This work is in the new Nerman Museum of Comterporary Art at the Johnson County
Community College in Overland Park (Cupcake Land), Kansas. This is the only
contemporary museum in Kansas, although just a White
Flight away are the great museums of Kansas City, MO.
Who would have guessed, another modern art museum with examples of Modular Repetition: MR-Repeating like forms with resultant grouping effect wherein individual forms are perceived as structure of larger mass. Forms can be uniquely created for this purpose, or common objects recontextualized. (for more MR see two posts back...)
This aesthetic is derived from the strict formal character of Minimalism's conceptual bias. The altered context of the modular item strips it of its common use. The item is given a new context as media. Pop Art also utilizes the industrial everyday object, and since these are Pop-Bottle tops one might lean toward pidgeonholing it with the Pop movement; however this work has none of the socio-political references of the Pop Movement, focusing instead on the specific media without it's cultural significance.
Weft brings an interesting shift to MR, fusing it with a Textile aesthetic. This rich tapestry is created with round bottle caps and rectangular bottle neck-bands (I think) The heavy dose of Obsessive Compulsive tying of the caps, in this instance meets with the general OCD of Textiles and so, blends into the logic of the process.
For the budding art student, these are some thoughts to consider while hot-gluing your scraps of industrial detritus into a mass. Whether you have any political leanings at all, a working knowledge of the following concepts may help you grasp why the art world embraces hot-glue as the new universal media.
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Kathy Ostman-Magnusen said:
Oh my gosh! I am just astonished! This is FANTASTIC!! What a way to start out my day by viewing... read more
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Kathy Ostman-Magnusen said:
[this is good]WOW!! Darn impressive!Kathyhttp://www.barebrush.com/Artists/ALB43e.html read more
on Ecorche: flayed anatomy
on Weighted Sphere: Peter