GRBarnett

WORKIN' ON A CHAIN GANG...

2011-09-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

We were delighted when earlier this spring the contractor who did the remodel of Soundcliff more than a decade ago finally had some time to work on a much smaller series of projects we had long been dreaming.

Falling in love with the views from our part of the Island he bought a house just up the road & became a neighbor... Peter has also become our friend. We trust & appreciate his attention to the details inside his sense of basic, simple & sturdy design... all done with singular quality. Much of the Soundcliff's character has his fingerprints...

As his reputation grew the projects he took on grew ever more complex as well. Multi-million dollar rehabs, however, are rather more rare these days, so we were able to attract his attention once again to our several comparably small projects.

The initial work involved remaking the rather steep rock path leading down the south side of the house to the studio with steps to harmonize with those built from the parking during the remodel. As one can see in these two views before we began the change, our entire property is quite a slope down into the view over the edge of our cliff.

That rustic lower path was a great solution in the beginnings of making a garden from what had been a severely raw site reworked after the new foundation was poured & the septic system/drain field installed. Megan, who designed the bones of the garden, gifted us some necessary early traction... gardening here includes a good deal of hiking!

When I moved to Soundcliff we made the garden level into my working space & soon I became involved with the Island's Open Studio tours. I had, for a number of years, wanted to make that path more comfortable & inviting for those guests. Here is the current result:

This terrace broadens into a functional destination giving access to the hose bib & the half wine barrel we use to coil the hose. We got more of the square Indonesian paving stones I first found 5 years ago for another walkway on the north of the house to make this detail. The posts act as guides for the hose while moving around to water the gardens. I've been dreaming all this for several years...

Since we'd decided to do the work of re-laying the old stones into the new frames ourselves... not quite realizing what that meant, there was a summer's worth of rock moving... hence my notion that I've been working on a chain gang!

Indeed, it became a huge jigsaw puzzle!

I particularly like this image from the beginning, when the stones were first lifted, leaving the sod which had grown between them... like a negative "print".

Peter had worked very carefully to plan so the steps would be graceful to both eyes & feet, then sprayed a working drawing directly onto the ground from from his various horizontal measurements & vertical leveling stakes, since ultimately such work must be accomplished

I believe he accomplished that grace...

But... the project continued to include more... just as the path continues... down & around, leading to my studio door, which itself acquired another terrace paved with those Indonesian stones & presenting a cedar plank bench... a working surface for garden projects or to become a buffet or bar for entertaining...

This was built atop a new drainage system to relieve what had become a problematic puddle during winter’s wet.

[Peter is on the left, directing that work...]

This view shows the terrace from the deck above when it had just been filled with a pristine layer of sand into which the stones were laid:

Then with the bench & stone installed:

Inside the studio a new step levels the entrance, replacing a ramp which had served when we stored the lawn mower in the space now occupied by the metal polishing area:

Another terrace laid out some years ago finally got paved with the same dressed volcanic Indonesian paving stones. I’d first used them to make the steps & path traversing the north side of the house, on the way up from the house deck to The Forge, Stephen's writing cottage, or down to my studio, which in turn, we call, The Hold. I again called the Islander who had back then advertised them in the local newspaper & we bought 120 more. They are gently geometrical , yet have wonderfully subtle variety of color & surface... they are easy & fun to lay in comparison to finding a fit of the irregular shapes. I love both their looks in combination for contrast!

A new step was made from the end of the plank used for the bench of the studio terrace... bringing additional harmony to our wide mix of materials...

A mystery emerged deepened when several more stones revealed a curious marking carved into the surface. I had evolved a notion that perhaps it indicated a sign for some "hotel", even as the spacing seemed odd for that, but each of the three additional examples we found were quite similar, with the same three glyphs. Another opinion suggests them to be some sort of mason's mark, like a signature or brand. I settled one into each terrace...

While I tried to resist tackling the final bit of path, even as it is the route which I personally use in daily frequency on my way from house to studio & back. But, I was in a groove, so that resolve lost to one last project, building several steps from recycled lumber & relaid the stones which largely had become buried.

I also reconfigured a crudely rough pile of stones at the corner of the building into a new garden for miniatures...

That brings my recent attentions fully 'round the perambulation of the house we use to negotiate our slope... I am content.

One last overview from the deck brings us back to the bottom of the steps... all rock laid during my stint on this chain gang. I'm back in the studio now, reorganizing the aftermath of all these projects!

You're invited to come take a walk!

A VISIT TO PRINCIPIA...

2011-07-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

The term Alma Mater doesn’t usually mean much to me. While my time at DU was certainly a seminal experience for me, I never have felt the sense of “bounteous mother'” which the Latin suggests... but seems now much more descriptive of Stephen’s relationship with Principia College, where he began his education after leaving home & high school.

While he was accepted at Harvard, which would have been his father’s preference, he followed his matriarchal history instead, choosing to attend the same small Christian Science school from which his mother & aunt had graduated. That decision represents a still omnipresent dialog describing his familial core & defining the strongest influences I know in him... his intelligence comes from the very deep matrix of Helen, even as the form of such rock has been hewn by equally useful Ottonian tools.

The campus atop those limestone bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River at Elsah, Illinois, was designed by the eclectic California architect Bernard Maybeck in the 1930's.

The 60-mile drive north of Saint Louis, into more of that history, has long been anticipated as an essential sharing for us. I’ve heard his stories about this campus from our beginnings & I was pleased when we were able to make this road trip inside our travels last month, which included the American Bell Association’s Convention in the Gateway city.

We’d discussed renting a car for the day, but were delighted when Mohan & Deepa, parents of the bride whose wedding around which we designed our travels to India in 2004... offered to facilitate & share the adventure, driving their car. They were visiting Anjana, Derek, Stephen’s second cousin, & their two-year-old daughter Kavya... now living in Saint Louis & with whom we’d spent several days of family time before the convention began.

I celebrate having kept in rather close contact with Deepa because we share linkage via our blogs. To be able to enjoy more time with these friends was additional bonus since we feel strongly that sense of the joining of tribes into a larger diaspora which that wedding in Bangalore created for us. I could not help reminiscing on the cultural similarities & vast differences between those worlds while being driven by an Indian man competent on US freeways!

Crossing the river over a lovely contemporary bridge into Alton we are aware of the high flood waters which drew closer than usual to the highway built against the bases of limestone bluffs along the Illinois side.

There is a bird or dragon named the Piasa, painted on one of the cliff faces above some caves as we got near. While apparently there were native paintings reported at one time further down river, this is obviously a modern version, more mythical in a European heraldic manner. The historic pictographs probably were related to the Cahokian Mounds culture, which is another excursion we wanted to make while in the area, but is now saved to our list for another time.

The little village of Elsah is a quaint, well cared-for antique. Many homes have been restored, even as some maintain a more weathered visage...

One of the first clues to the architecture we’d come to view was this bench in a walkway built in a style much later than the original Maybeck plan, which intended to mimic the look & feel of an English village using timber & native stone facing on poured concrete structures.

For Stephen this was looking into the past...

The effects are often sweetly arresting... still more campus than village, particularly since the buildings are scattered within a very generous space.

I especially appreciated the detail of sorting roof tiles in a graduated color scheme:

The contrast with later construction is jarring, even as I can see limitations inherent to the original concept... particularly as viewed through the commonality of a mid-twentieth century lens. Deepa is seen here in front of such shift. She posted early-on her own version of our excursion on her own blog here... which begins with her visit to the Bell Convention.

To repair to dorms such as these would indeed offer a fine & useful balance...

I found many details I liked: elaborate beams in the common room of one dormitory, copper downspouts, painted shutters, linen-fold paneling & that constantly unexpected mix of raw concrete with stone & wood... becoming quite "rustic"...

Even the chapel's traditional look was formed of the ubiquitous poured concrete, as I saw in the ceiling:

Without doubt my favorite building was this small cottage... the architect’s study building, which he called "the mistake house"... where he experimented with the various techniques used to imbue the “English Village” style atop the quite untraditional poured concrete construction. Stephen has a particular fondness for it as well, explaining he reserved it for a several week retreat space one year. I like this shot of him, which accentuates its miniature scale...

Stephen says there were tiles on both sides of the roof, but I found it interesting to see the underlying form of roof...

Here is Stephen [that is Mohan behind him] in front of his own dorm, so I can easily understand how he wanted to spend such time in the cottage. I love having now a much better appreciation for the setting of his stories from those college years...

SCI-FI HARBOUR...

2011-07-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

I was in Seattle yesterday for regular visit to my dentist, whose office is in the Pike Place Market... enjoying visiting favorite haunts on a rare afternoon in my old city neighborhood, including the very urban Steinbrenner Monument Park, which presents views over layers of concrete infrastructure & roadways out over Elliot Bay. Today I watched a rather stately dance of curious vessels, if such having more superstructure than actual hull can thus be called...

The dome shaped one we had seen moored deeper inside the harbor for some weeks, so I was pleased to be present with my camera on the very day it seemed to be leaving port for what must be presumed a more strategic place for its electronic visage...

From up the Sound came a floating erection to match & contrast its form... which now could only be viewed as bulbously feminine.

These two were obviously designed to do something else in the water than to carry cargo. The dome would seem to be something to do with radar or communication...

The other looks like a drilling rig of some kind...

As it became obvious they were going to be meeting in the middle of Elliot Bay for some curious tryst a number of watchers gathered with me to make photographs.

While I only imagined their stylized conjunction, even a ferry & another barge seemed scheduled to celebrate this watery nuptial...

A BEACH WALK, AFTER OPEN STUDIO...

2011-05-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

The Spring Open Studio weekends were at least successful in sharing the bells' design range & educating the steady stream of visitors about some of their production processes. While the business continued to reflect our difficult economy, exacerbated by the resulting increases in cost due to the precious metals' market, the bells still seduce with delight & frequently plant seeds toward future sales. As always after these tours I feel well stroked in the appreciation for my work.

The garden attracts much attention as folk walk down through the several paths toward the studio's entrance, allowing me to sometimes joke from the door that this is a studio, not a garden, tour & that it is time for them to come inside to play with the bells! The Petasites is once again a star, with its huge leaves, which seem particularly verdant this year. We've had to actively cull them in past weeks from our several plantations. Stephen had potted up numerous roots to give away but we had to dig even more to meet the requests for starts. They really are spectacular & I used some to make an arrangement with branches of lilac blooms for the buffet...

One clump greets from the road... from where signs direct down the steps of the main path to the studio in the lower floor of the house...

Another path to the bells wends through the newer north garden. Forget-me-nots have become a welcome weed throughout our gardens. Now we will begin to pull it out to free space for the plants they surround, often now too closely...

Looking back up that way one can enjoy the blooms along the horizontal limbs of a viburnum..

A view from in front of the studio contains a rhododendron in bloom below the first buds of a potted hibiscus. The water of the tide, now up, is visible beyond the birdhouse. We'd earlier noticed a wren beginning to build a nest, but it seems all the traffic of guests discouraged that family... sigh...

We've planted more Petasites in two wine barrels below the Prow deck to enjoy their water-lily-mimicking leaves while looking down to the water of Puget Sound...

No, this isn't any flower usual to our garden. It is one last view of Petasites... the stem of one of the leaves in that arrangement which had wilted. When I removed it I was struck by how it had splayed into a bizarre looking soggy sculpture...

I always need several days to recuperate from the output of energy necessary to clean & prepare for two weekends of continuously intense personal interaction with several hundred curious visitors. "Show Time" seems both rewarding &... grueling.

So today Stephen & I took a beach walk to enjoy the lowest tide of the year at noon. It is an opportunity to view Soundcliff from a rare distance usually covered by the water of the Sound.

For several seasons we have looked out at a large tree which has stayed put out from the beach... rare for resisting so long being lifted & moved by even high storm tides. Usually not much, even of this size stays in place. We have observed collections of starfish in its roots before & expected them this time, but that mass seemed abandoned today.

The creatures were taking shelter under its trunk instead...

There were many of these wonderfully colorful & curious animals in better view all along the beach...

This variety is slimmer & more subtle in color. I'm now curious to discover more about them...

Yet another variety called Sea Stars were there as well, with many more tentacles...

There was a richness of the nests or egg cases of Moon Snails, which are fascinating for looking like thin clay pots, delicately thrown on some water logged potter's wheel!

Stephen discovered this nest of eggs, but we do not have any idea whose... they look almost tempting as caviar!

A ship came looming around the point as we were ready to climb home...

Today I seemed to have the right eyes for finding the curious phallic rocks on the beach which I'm collecting to finish the construct in a bed planted with simpervirum alongside & between the foundation & the steps up to Stephen's writing cottage...

While I still have a pile of projects procrastinating in the studio, this is only one of the matching list of projects in the garden during this week forecast to continue sunny, if cooler than I wish...

BIRDS, BUSES, BELLS & BEES...

2011-05-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

This is an article I wrote which was published last week in one of our newspapers, the Loop...

BIRDS, BUSES, BELLS & BEES
... all on the Open Studio Tour...

By: Gordon R. Barnett

I've long appreciated the reliable history of the Vashon Artist Studio Tours... always the first two full weekends of both December and May. I have come to set my studio's seasonal clock by that schedule. Its logic is simple and useful for me whose bells often become gifts for either the winter holidays or Mother's Day. That schedule is one of the reasons I have participated for so many years, but I wondered how some other artists on the tour felt about those rhythms... and why they become regulars.

I think most artists on the tour would agree that the process of inviting folk into the work spaces we more usually occupy in solitude becomes an important teach / learning experience. We obviously want to share, promote... and sell... our work. We thus teach through our craft and technique... AND we look forward to learning in turn from everyone accepting our invitation. Whether or not you’re a purchasing patron, your feedback helps complete the cycle of communication which art is about.

To explore the back lanes of our Island in the bloom of spring is an opportunity in itself. Then, to be invited to explore behind the fences and gates, into the newly aired and tidied-up working spaces of such a wide variety of creative Islanders allows you to co-create the excursion in your own flavor. It is doubtful you’ll be able to cover it all.

One way to start might be to find a "neighborhood" of studios, like ours here on Dilworth Point with three artists sharing paintings, jewelry, garden sculpture and small wearable bells. The driveway to Steve Zartman's metal working studio is indeed next door to Kristen Reitz-Green's small carefully handmade pentagonal studio full with large paintings.

Steve was surprised one year to see a large bus, chartered for the excursion by a group from the city, moving up the single lane drive without first checking to see if there was room to turn that rig around! Somehow they managed, and while he appreciated the business from such a crowd, I suspect there was some cost to his landscaping! He is, like many of us, a gardener. His garden sculpture is designed to enhance such living spaces, while his jewelry works on a more intimate scale.

Before moving to the Island five years ago, Kristen was a professional musician, playing and teaching the french horn. Now she's made a huge leap into boldly painting oils on canvases -- ranging from the small studies, which become her bread-and-butter sales, to richly colored large images of food [...think 4-foot bowls of Fruit Loops or a huge glistening close-up of a succulent sandwich!] That she began her first study of painting with Pam Ingalls is obvious, yet that she has moved [with even more obvious individuation] gracefully into her own style in just a few years is impressive. She raises chickens & paints them alongside sensitive studies of children. One year when she had an excessive gaggle of roosters she gave several away to studio visitors... unpredictable opportunities abound on this tour!

Because I love and collect eggs, even making some myself, I'm pleased that the calendar this year makes for a late Easter so that Emily Pruiksma's Ukranian decorated eggs will be quite in season! We share the use of wax in our work, although the hard wax I use to make the models for my lost-wax cast bells is of quite a different nature from the bee's wax used to make the hand dipped & often sculpted candles made by Emily and her husband Shane at Fiddle Home Studio. Additionally the technique of decorating blown egg shells involves wax to develop the complex traditionally geometric patterns of a culture celebrating the spring holiday even more than the winter.

Emily's studio is a quintessential Island experiment & experience... bringing the cycle of living and working with nature closer to completion. They keep bees, using the wax produced to add with other, sometimes also local, sources of their organic raw material. Bees are a currently newsworthy important part of our ecology, so the cows which pose on this farm for the cameras of studio visitors & the window looking from the yurt into the chicken coop, dubbed the "chicken TV" to occupy younger visitors all necessarily depend on the cross-pollination of species, including artists!

The Egg Returning...

2011-03-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

While it may be premature to show this, I have played today with images I made last November, making a slide show... a technique quite new to me... so I'm anxious to share the accomplishment of both that learning & the piece of my creative history I am pleased has come back into my possession...

First, a bit of introductory story...

I was commissioned to make this object in 1983, during the years I was working in Sedona, Arizona. It was to be a gift commemorating the birthday of a patron of mine from his partner. They knew I had long dreamed of emulating the fabulous eggs made by Faberge for the last two Russian Czars, as Easter gifts to their Czarinas.

You may google to find many images of these rare pieces, but unfortunately most are not of quality resolution. I will share just a few of my favorites to introduce the tradition I followed in my own manner.

The first was quite simple, enameled white which opened to introduce a gold yolk which opened in turn to reveal a small hen...

Over the years they became much more elaborate... with colored enamels & stones...

I love the mosaic of this one, a relatively smooth texture... almost simple, compared to many others!

The Coronation Egg shelters a miniature replica of the state coach.

The Kremlin egg is a favorite to my love of the architectural...

So the bar was set high for me & I knew I could not match the materials in our budget, but I wanted to attempt making a piece which hinted at richness & reflected some similar elaboration. The metal of this egg is sterling silver, with some gold details inside.

Little did I know at the beginning what an adventure the project would become! I wonder if I might not have reconsidered if I had, but in that moment this seemed a dream come true. I blithely made an estimate, collected a deposit & began to lathe a blank wax on which I could begin to draw & design.

My client suggested the theme of iris & heron, offering as example a painted image he liked. Additionally, he requested a pagoda, which I resisted at first, but which ultimately became a very functional part of the design... as the hinge allowing the piece to open. Most Faberge Imperial eggs had "surprises" some sort & I knew I wanted to plan toward some similar device as well.

I acquired several pieces of mastodon ivory from another jeweler friend who had long worked with that material... which, unlike elephant ivory, is legal because the animal is extinct. The tusks occasionally are discovered in the melting glaciers of Alaska which have preserved them for thousands of years. I carved two heron from that lovely warm almost amber-colored bony texture, which resembles quite hard-dried soap

The bird on the outside is carved in low relief, nearly flush with the curving surface. The second heron, sculpted in the round, anticipated becoming the surprise, as the interior would become the same scene in three dimensions.

I collected faceted trapezoidal chrome tourmalines to tuck their deep green into the leaves & oval tanzanites, whose purple color suggested the blooms of iris . When it came time to fashion the catch, I used a cabochon sapphire as the thumb piece. Finally, I cut a flat slab of lapis lazuli to suggest a lake collected in the bottom of the interior.

The sequence of the process was quite experimental as I gradually wrestled how to pull all these notions & parts into some cohesive concept. It is interesting that my journal seems to record very little about this project... although I have not re-read the entire period as yet. My memory knows that it absorbed me for some 18 months, missing the first deadline & being finished almost literally on the day of the next birthday, when it was concealed under an egg-shape, woven of palm leaves, as part of the floral centerpiece during dinner until being lifted for the presentation of the egg, just before dessert with champagne.

The slide show will explain more, even as it still will mostly only present the exterior. It will show the piece in its present state, needing repair. The ivory has dried & cracked in the desert atmosphere & several parts are lost, needing replacement. I'm researching how best to accomplish that restorative surgery. I will make more photographs when that work is finished.

I also need to document how the mechanique of the engineering works as joinery of more than a dozen pieces with a variety of clicks & clamps, hinge pins, cams & toggles... all of which were contrived to allow me to assemble the total hundreds of times during the design process... plus to disassemble it now for cleaning & repair. A manual, as it were...

Enough of words without the help of images! Here is the egg!

DRAWING IN CIRCLES...

2011-02-23T16:20:00.000-08:00

While sitting inside the Heart Circles at the winter gathering of Radical Faeries at Breitnbush Hot Springs in the mountains of Oregon last weekend I made this drawing in the round book I have shared in an earlier post. These circles are sacramental events lasting three hours each morning where the center holds opportunity for individuals wishing to share their joys, or to wrestle tough questions... & too often to bring their pain for potential healing inside this cauldron of acceptance in loving safety.

[Click on the photos to enlarge them]

The first morning I only made the circle of the margin as I listened, beginning the process of collecting the meditative mood I use to intuitively "translate" the ideas & words, the voices & mostly the wide range of emotions into some visual form which reflects in some abstracted manner all that which cannot be literally shared outside the confidential enclosure otherwise.

I came to so love the simple line drawing which came over the second & third days that I was loathe to add the chiaroscuro shading I usually use... but on the last morning as I listened to a particularly difficult story I came to know I could not omit the more fulsome dark which all light requires as contrast. I brought it home to finish last night. Those denser tones require delicate building up with much care on the soft texture of the rag paper's surface which the pencil lead can crush if too much pressure is used, making furrows which actually resist taking more layers of graphite. As the pattern took more form in the process I came to love the further result as much as the original simplicity.

While making these-less-than-perfect photographs I also shot one page back-lit, bringing the previous drawing into a new combination. I've had the notion of experimenting with cutting openings in pages to reveal multiple drawing in several layers. That will take gumption not yet found! I continue to explore the infinite possibilities for this book, which will, I suspect, take the rest of my life to fill all its 100 pages...

Another detail, of a previously posted page, uses the opposite effect, the shadow of the slightly folded book makes a strong abstraction, also displaying the rather heavy laid lines of the paper's manufacture which affect the heavier tones.

The page before the one I just finished is another imaginary cityscape, rather like the more elaborate one posted here...

We experienced less snow than was forecast for the time we were encamped... still the decoration was freshened each day. Sometimes it dusted just enough to heighten my enjoyment sitting in warm lithium laced mineral water caught in a rock pool perched overlooking a meadow to the river below... while flakes melted on my pate.

One afternoon I caught the late slanting sun illuminating ice on trees deep in dark woods... a challenge I did not quite do justice with the camera in my haste to grab that light.

Now that's chiaroscuro!

The Kiva... My First Studio

2011-02-10T20:04:00.000-08:00

I recently treated myself to a new scanner which allows me to begin making digital copies from my 35mm slide collection, of which there are several thousand images, many snapshots of people & places, but more importantly those which document the work, mostly as jewelry produced in my studios during the last four decades of the last century.

The desire to view & share all those images without setting up a screen & projector long ago identified the need to bring my archive into a more usable format. The machine is a document scanner as well, so the first experiment was with a newspaper clipping from 1963 describing the studio I had in high school... the first of numerous working places I had been wanting to write about.

So I can begin what will become a series describing the list of a dozen or so studios which have been my creative life's bailiwicks. I intend to treat them one at a time since each represents a period & place with sufficient history to warrant a discreet article.

The summer before my senior year at Colby Community High School in NW Kansas, my grandfather "gave" me the farm's old well house for a studio. This was a two story building with an 9'X9' approximate footprint, built of a kind of burned red clay hollow tile/brick which used to be common before "cinder/concrete block" became standard. The exterior of which was stuccoed.The building had no roof because the upper area was filled wall to wall with the redwood tank which held the water produced by the adjacent windmill. By that time an electric pressure pump system had replaced need of either of these tall structures which were landmark/icons on the flat plains, marking for most of a century, each farmstead.

This was the view going toward my home in Kansas... a dozen years ago ago... the Kiva had been torn down long before that...

[...remember that you may click, & click again, on the images to enlarge them...]

Since I first entered what was to become my inner sanctum by climbing a ladder & scrambling onto the tank's cover, I whimsically dubbed it "The Kiva", that being a Hopi word I understood to include meaning entering... what I now know was a more subterranean room, through a hole in the roof... I was a romantic kid who even then made free with words. The name stuck, even when I'd left for college & the building became a play house for younger siblings & cousins who still know it thus.

My kid brother, Gary, helped me begin disassembling the tank which was build rather like a straight sided barrel of tongue & groove staves bound with iron straps. I must assume it had been put together before the walls had been laid up around to enclose its volume. When all had come to pieces again, I sawed a 24"X24" opening in the floor & built a permanent ladder so I could climb between floors on the inside. He also helped get 3 big [4"X8"] beams lifted into place, but if I recall he didn't grok patience for my plans required detailing their use ... I remember doing most of that work myself.

My nascent-decorator-self imagined the fancy cut details on the cross members which were thus tapered to construct the coffered effect of the ceiling. I cut into the walls with a masonry saw to open two high windows & began detailing it into a comfortable escape into the privacy I never knew in the too small house full of too much family 50 feet away. I now joke that this was a project fueled by youthful testosterone!

The article, was written by my friend Virginia Theimer, with whom I kept touch until her death a couple years ago. I'll let it tell more of the story from that perspective. She complimented me on the occasion of our 20th class reunion by calling the one person she said she was curious about... neither of us felt very connected to the class we'd come up with in that rural community which we'd both long outgrown. She was a writer & editor of children's books, so both of us had made careers from our early interests. There is even a hint toward my interest in bells as I drew a bell I remember buying in an import store in Denver one family vacation... a Japanese wind chime hung from one of those beams under the eaves... fifteen years before making my first bell!

The barn, which was one of my favorite subject for drawing & paintings is seen here in colored chalk as background for the BARN bell which it inspired years later. It too changed when the wonderful gambrel roof was blown off in a straight wind... not one of the cyclones the plains are famous for! The roof was rebuilt as a simple gable & the entire building was covered with corrugated metal, losing all the character I loved.

These mementos & my memories are all I have left of my first studio. I intend to share more about the spaces I've made for my working life, even as I do not have photographs of many, as I have not always had a camera. This list of GRB studios is an early working tool to help me organise future posts. I need to develop a corresponding time line... my memory is fuzzy about dates for some:

    •    The Kiva... Colby, Kansas [1962-64]
    •    Race Street.... Denver, Colorado [1964-67]
    •    Downing Street One... Denver, Colorado [1967]
    •    The Haunted House... Denver, Colorado [1967-68]
    •    Pearl Street... Denver, Colorado [1968-69]
    •    11th & Downing... Denver, Colorado [1969-70]
    •    The Highlands... Bryant Street, Denver, Colorado [1970-74]
    •    AUm -- Tlacquepacque Village, Sedona, Arizona [1974-75]
    •    Copper Bottoms... Sedona
    •    Upwillow... Sedona, Arizona [1977-87]
    •    Studio 3... Sedona, Arizona [1987-88]
    •    The Aerie Garret... Sedona, Arizona [1988-90]
    •    The Bothy... Occidental California [1990-96]
    •    The Cabinet... Seattle, Washington [1996-98]

• The Mews... Seattle, Washington [1998-2000]

• The Hold at Souncliff... Vashon Island, Washington [Current]

This last scan shares a piece of calligraphy I made for the Sedona Open Studio newspaper, which the artists published monthly for several years to publicise our tour. It fictionally describes Michaelangelo's studio, seeming a simple celebration of the complexities these places of "study". Over the years I've experienced the wonder & curiosity these places engender in others... & even in myself. They become intrinsic to the mundane work & sometime magic of the artistic processes. I celebrate studios!

Internal Winter Weather...

2011-02-03T22:57:00.000-08:00

...remember you may click & click again on the photos to enlarge them...

My lifelong habit prefers to work in the studio during the long winter nights. This nocturnal mode sometimes allows me to see sunrise on my way to sleep...

Sunset seems always to follow too quickly, but can reward us on these short days, if the weather is clear enough to see Tahoma [the mountain most know as Mt Ranier] with the alpenglow reflecting raspberry colored light in our eastern view. The spine of the island prevents any direct view of sunset from our aspect...

The last full moon rose dramatically just as I was on the beach, fortunately with my camera, even as I'd thought about leaving it at home when I left at dusk for a quick walk. I'd not been paying attention to its cycle & was surprised to wonder at its unexpected light rising behind trees on the horizon...

Later I took the tripod out onto the Prow Deck to make some longer exposures as that orange orb climbed high enough to make a causeway of reflected light in cooler coloration...

So my internal weather is affected by that of the external... deep, creatively dark, lit dramatically... productive, even as I am also feeling less than "on top" of the schedule finishing one year's business & moving into the next, which speeds along. Now it is Imbolc, St Bridget's celebration, when diurnal time begins again to balance day & night.

There are additional stories, explaining somewhat more mundane matters of weather on the "read more" button below:

We've had a share of harsh weather, as seen here in the birdbath's water frozen quite solid...

Cracking into patterns of stress against the stone basin...

Some plants hold structure in the garden being fair corpses of their previously vibrant form...

While inside, the remainders of holiday decor linger as the carved wooden putto I bought in Venice hovers on a big brass candlestick I've had for years... above the small army of oil lamps which have lighted the holiday season, which we spent at home this year.

Our climate is already bringing early signs of the longer days, like the butter burr or pesticides, which later make the huge leaves which we love seeing spread around the neighborhood for its dramatic size. Its early blossoms seem tentative... curiously small in contrast. I see cautiously joyful promise toward spring!

The usually quite hardy Lacinata kale has survived nicely, but is not exactly thriving. I've been postponing much harvest of those delicious leaves... but I'm reconsidering day by brighter day!

One result of our wet weather is some predictable shifting along our cliff. We've had an unexpected slide & have been watching the progress of several long active movements on the clay slope we've been monitoring for years with concern & have recently acquired... so as to attempt mitigating ongoing loss of mass.

Now... I've explained before that I agree with the ecology of clay's nutrients supporting the eel grass, which is so important to the salmon fry, whose survival is essential. I figure we can now eat that food, which we love, with an easier conscience... for the ongoing donations of our real estate!

The 12 year old stone bulkhead is our salvation... relative to the slumping clay... but even its substance has been challenged by La Mama. Several stones had shifted last year so we needed a somewhat adventurous repair... requiring getting a large piece of equipment down onto the beach during a low enough tide, with sufficient daylight to rebuild the breech.

[Photo by Stephen Silha]

Soundcliff breathes easier in this long view from out on that low-tide beach. Bulkhead renewed, the house perches bravely. The structure we call the Prow Deck juts seeming cantilevered yet sits on retaining walls holding an earlier slide. We live on a delicious edge!

Back up on the third floor, at another dawn, my camera caught the sun rising through the frosted glass collected on the wide windowsill.

An accidental shot might be my favorite, so I leave you with one fabulously fortuitous moment in my interior weather...

FABULOUS INDEED...

TIME FRACTURED... SOLSTICE...

2010-12-21T20:07:00.000-08:00

[CLICK & CLICK AGAIN ON THE PHOTOS TO ENLARGE THEM]

An accident occurring just two days before the Open Studio saw the door, which would soon need to welcome our visitors, broken into a million-pieced jigsaw puzzle... giving my camera's eye some wild visuals... while being accompanied by a curious soundtrack of crackling pings & tinkles which went on for several hours as the tempered glass continued its slow disintegration. It held in its suspension of gravity for most of a day before falling into a fine mess needing careful attention toward clean-up!

But for those hours I enjoyed views seeming quite decorative & festive, even inside the frustration of a difficult situation. I was sad when I opened it one time too many for its fragile state... as it fell into a heap of sparkling shards. I'd wanted to make even more photographs, although you might not want so many as even these!

Fortunately the inside pane was intact because it wouldn't get replaced until Solstice Eve. The door functioned fine during the two weekends of the event, which was slower than I had hoped, due to weather matching that adventure. Yet, in the end, we wrote a respectable business even so. The bells do love ringing their role as holiday treats!

This self-portrait suggests my own fracturing during this busy time... holding on while letting go.

While our weather was too overcast to view last night's rare Solstice eclipse... this morning's dawn was happily dramatic. A great beginning of the new year!

Solstice is the real deal of this season, as I've noted for many years. Test-able... as the light seems already to be changing, if simply because the gallop toward shorter days has reached its ultimate exhaustion. While the pace in their lengthening will not seem quick enough I love the turning toward the light which this... the real holiday... promises.

I am exhausted in tandem... the season in the studio is mostly finished. Christmas always seems a bit anti-climatic to me & our New Year is a tardy event waiting for the calendar to catch up with the astronomical fact.

While I remember years ago having a studio rush well into Christmas Eve... selling gold earrings to guys shopping last minute presents for their ladies, while I poured liberal shots of brandy to lubricate easier choices...

These days my clientele has it already wrapped up... Hurrah!

So I am holding the day in peace & quiet, sending those qualities to all who appreciate its inherent joy! Our Lady Tahoma, seen here several evenings ago, is a fine teacher of such sentiment... I never tire of her lessons. Perhaps she offers wisdom even at distance...

AUTUMNAL REFLECTIONS...

2010-10-24T18:56:00.000-07:00

The season has continued to be wet & mostly too cool for my preference, yet with enough warmth to encourage growth & blooms when most flora are aware of the shortening days. The garden has been a bit confused, along with the rest of us! This viburnum is blossoming a second time even as its leaves are turning...

[Clicking on the photos enlarges them... click again for full size.]

My camera has been challenged to catch images inside that lowering light. I've made some images forgetting that I'd bumped the the film speed up, rendering a grainy quality I would have tried to avoid, while giving some quality of mood which I rationalize as apropos.

Hollyhocks are favorite flowers from my childhood. These are the last of those in the garden...

One big joy has been the bounty of food available to my chef, although I am loath to harvest from the pink kale "roses" above. It has become trendy to make & share images of "food porn" on the Internet. As will become evident, I am not impervious to that notion, but my gardener would prefer to begin with food more truly "in the raw"!

Here in the north garden, which is in its third year being wrested from a steep dense clay slope, the purple cardoon blooms can be seen with the yellow umbels of bronze fennel

Cardoon is a thistle-cousin to artichoke, which it resembles. Its bud is inedible, but in France the stems are braised as a vegetable. Several have started from seed which survived composting in a bed of other greens seen beyond the smoke bush.... I'll transplant those cardoon to a drier border next spring. A couple of acorn squash volunteered rather too late in the foreground... they are involved in an improbable race to ripen!

But the Brussels sprouts [I've been trying to find why they are so named...] are beginning to find their way from the garden to our table. I've been experimenting with a recipe I found on the web for a salad of those buds raw, finely shaved with mint, dressed with a vinaigrette enriched & mellowed with toasted almond butter.

Now here are some shots of food on our table. Caprese is our favorite summer salad, fresh tomatoes from the local farmers market composed with slices of buffola [fresh Italian mozzarella made from water buffalo milk] dressed with pesto, atop greens [lettuces, Lacinata kale & purple orach] from the garden & garnished with blossoms [nasturtiums, arugula, kale] . Oh, now I spy a single snow pea which I suspect Stephen dropped alongside before he made the photo... I often do not have my camera at hand in the kitchen when I'm cooking. Thank you, M'Dear!

He captured this skillet of a succotash of fresh vegetables for me as well...

Here is lunch one day last month: An omelet topped with avocado accompanied a hash of vegetables from the previous night's dinner, garnished with the last of the season's fava beans... which I love best grilled in their husk... along with some of the pickled lentils I love to make.

Not having room for an orchard, we buy fruit. Pears are favorites for dessert. Here I paired one with champagne grapes & an excess of shaved chocolate. One of my mottoes has long been "Excess is best!"

A second version was grilled with a wonderful Gorgonzola & some pine nuts, plated with a puddle of warm marscapone softening chunks of dark chocolate... Armagnac to sip with. I wish I'd used the erection of the brass figure of Bes as the knife holder it was made to be. Playful friends sent us a pair from Istanbul & we use them with great amusement

A final pear joined the mushroom pies I made for dinner just a couple days ago. The crust was my first experiment using gluten-free flour. Each had a different base to the filling: one of curried lentil Dal, the other of sweet potato seasoned with smoked paprika & finely minced cedar needles, which my palate has been loving to dance with of late. Shitake mushrooms have been abundant, onions caramelized with garlic are constants, both pies were topped with these plus dollops of marscapone.

I made a special pastie for Stephen's flight to Mexico the next day, packed with a frond of that cedar.

Salmon is another favorite local food... perhaps caught in this net being hauled in below the Prow deck.

The reflection which inspired this post to begin with, before I got lost in the kitchen garden, was first seen, but missed as I hunted for my camera. The next day I was quicker & better prepared, anticipating the fleeting opportune moments of a freighter catching raking light of approaching sunset. I didn't plan the fulsome moon getting involved...

As the ship sailed through our view across the shipping lanes of the south Puget Sound, looking toward the city, that brilliant light caught the plates of the hull, turning them into gem facets of topaz... or the scales of a golden fish...

Meanwhile, back in the studio...
my birthday orchid has been joined by dahlias from the garden.

In this spell of solitude, I predictably find myself
seasonally settling inward...

TIME OF ANCIENT SPIDERS...

2010-10-14T19:23:00.000-07:00

This view of Tahoma, wearing one of her lovely hats, distracted me from the garden on a recent evening. I'd been photographing the sedum blooms ripening from a rich pink toward their autumnal bronze coloration under a Lacinata kale in the lowering light.

[Remember... you may double click to enlarge photos.]

I love this season for the appearance of a rich plethora of resilient webbing spun by the maturing hunger of a zillion spiders feeding during breeding season for both themselves & their egg cases. While gorgeously decorating Soundcliff's windows, doorways & garden paths... they thus render me the destroyer of much craft, art & sculpture.

I wrote last year about spider webs but this year my camera has been seduced anew. Being so subtle as to be invisible in some light while another angle brings them into stunning reflection against dark background... they are deliciously elusive to capture with the lens. Finding the vantage point with good back-light against a low-keyed background, or shooting at night to catch that deeper contrast are interesting problems to solve. Raindrops included might be photographically trite but that's probably because they too are such a fine teaching tool!

I have been re-reading old journals, trying to find mentions of a particularly important project during the 1982-83 era. Today I found a description of watching a spider building its web in the space above my wax desk in the studio when I lived in Sedona, AZ.

I frequently discover synchronistic rhythms in my history relating to current life so this morning's serendipity stretches & stitches this story of arachnid interest over some 28 years. I'm reminded as well that I had a spider collection during my grade school years on the farm in Kansas... so all this spins much older still... even as I happily present a more respectful enjoyment than what would now be 50 year old vials of specimens in alcohol!

GRB Journal: 27 July 1982

What an amazing fantasy environment exists above my studio lamp! A tiny white spider caught my magni-visored eye. First sight was on a piece of wax from which I'd been taking bits with a hot tool... stringing out threads of my own. Running along the mandrel. Sticking his/her tail up doing a tippy-toe dance. 'Seemed to be tying something. No, its the ass that's doing. What a trip to tie knots with your ass! Oh! There goes a thread... he's shooting it out! Another dance as he winds up the slack fibre he's floated out, sticky enough to catch on the lamp above ! & in moments he's scampering up that ephemeral line -- his own projection. Real enough to crawl on. Of Himself. A chance hook on whatever the breeze took it to. Or is it chance? Is he playing the breeze & his line whipping it with studied English. Surfing that rip let of air. Aiming. Probably some of both. He must be whistling while he works. He does dance & dash. Floating suspended on an elegant construction. Up he goes. This time I know he has a previous line. A more well traveled path into areas of the corner I haven't recently disturbed by moving the lamp. The lamp is a hunting expedition. Home must be up near the ceiling-- he's got roads & even expressways up there. The web even near the light & with my magnification are almost invisible. Only when they catch the light, then even only after he follows one... traces dot-to-dot do my eyes focus on it! As I become aware I see the drawing. He's been busy! Neat stitching! ... Becomes almost space travel. He's out of sight... I followed with my mind & got lost on this page.

[ I've only slightly edited this entry, deciding to leave the male pronoun I mistakenly used, apparently identifying myself with what was no doubt a female, but cutting a short confusing tangential reference. It is curious to make a transcription of only a single page out of the thousands which exist in these journals.

This shot attempted to catch several versions of flight seen through our bathroom window... a papier-mache figure with feather wings inside & an iron crow sculpture out on the deck rail, with a web built floating on the breeze, it's real flight spans some 12 foot distance.

Some times I can't decide which shot I like best. I give you this choice:

Ephemeral beauty abounds !!!

INTERIORVIRONS...

2010-09-21T00:36:00.000-07:00

Studio this evening encompasses
almost more than it avoids...
I think...

This study dances over several...
I mean three... decades.
The orchids on my desk were gifted me
by Joanna's husband Andrew
on my birthday last...

back dropped by
Kip's [Kevin Perry] painting
CYPRESS DANCING
which has its own collection of stories
weaving several delicious conjunctions of time
in Sedona ca. 1980...

I advise you to simply accept this picture

in lieu of some thousand words from me...

HIERARCHIES... BRASS: BRONZE: SILVER: GOLD

2010-09-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

[This has been sitting as a draft since I originally wrote it on the 28th of May. It is a example of the typically curious essays I write all the time in my mind & I should edit it more but I've decided to post it with photographs caught since to illustrate.]

Inside the opalescent light remaining from a stunning orange dawn I watch one of our eagles trying to fish out over the water of Puget Sound, bedeviled by an agile posse of gulls. The eagle makes tactical retreats toward our cliff in unmistakably dramatic flight... exhibiting a manner remarkably different than that of its hecklers.

On other days it might be the crows who gang-up to tree the predator, making a terrible racket during long demonstrations of collective power around the one who seems simply to assume ultimate dominance by sitting in quiet solitude on a snag with a bearing suggesting contemplative wisdom.

There is yet another racket today. In the same scene, fighting for the same salmon, are two fishing crews, Each pair of boats, straining-in-opposition with [to?] each other, first spreading the nets long & then with engines whining at full throttle pulling together, closing the ends, hauling in what hopes to be a fine catch.

We love finding salmon at our local fishmonger's stand, sometimes being told it was indeed caught within our view...

Inside this slice of life, viewed from my privileged situation, I sit in my own version of solitude thinking about the taut relationships defining value in all sorts of hierarchies.

It seems too easy to identify with the stately eagle, sitting-out the more active & less attractive societal confusion of the communities it competes with. I have witnessed such collaboration in an even more angry battle, mounted by robins upon the loss of a nest of eggs or fledglings to such a predator.

I hear with all my deeper senses the aliveness of this painful ecology. I have to sort my values: Songbirds, clown-birds, tough old salts of the shore... & a soaring invitation to the fantasy of rising above it all. I feel the conflicting polarities of being alive... of realizing conflict, freedom & death... of killing to eat.

I intend leaving that conundrum to hang as a mental postcard while I muse another value system which has recently sparked several studio conversations around questions that frequently come when folk encounter the differences between the metals of the bells in my display.

The silver, which has long been part of the bells' identity for its tradition of beauty & respected value, is familiar. But the warmer color of the bronze bells, which I stock in ever growing depth, evokes the question as to whether they are gold... making an implied compliment to my working the milieux of jewelry, but expressing another questioning sense inside such assumption... because bronze does not really look like gold, even to undertrained eyes.

Bells are historically common in bronze, for many reasons, but first because of its fine resonance. That my bells are most often considered jewelry might have excluded that less than "noble" metallic alloy altogether, but for the obvious bridge of this function, even at this unusually miniature size. When I began exploring what bells were about, it became apparent there was not good enough reason to deny bronze simply because it seemed a bit brassy & uncouth in the fancy venues to whom I intended marketing. Because of its qualities of voice I began experimenting with it even as I was having to bridge my own jeweler's prejudice against such common, un-precious, alloys.

Bronze positively resonates with a number of values different than its cousin brass, which has long been the basic "base" metal of costume jewelry & of the military regalia featuring buttons, medals & horns. The words "brass" & "brassy" have evolved to connote complicated shades of meaning around its qualities. Bronze has come to suggest an ancient age of tool-making & arms. We've biblically made swords into plowshares & historically made the sculptures & celebratory bells of the previous victors into new cannon for ever more "biblical" wars. Both are alloys of copper, with small proportions of other metals such as tin & zinc. Both have historic value for making a broad range of common functional objects, including coinage of small denomination.

Now, I do also cast my bell designs in the higher denomination coinage of gold, exploring the resonance of that rare alloy as well. I love encouraging comparison of colors, the subtle spectrum in their visual & aural palettes, as I share examples of the same bell design cast in each of these three alloys. Their values in the system can shift from familiarity as jewelry & tabletop material through monetary or military uses toward being something more simply musical.

[LARGER CHOCOLATE LILY BELL shown left to right cast in Bronze, Silver & 14K Gold.]

My favorite current example, showing the LARGER CHOCOLATE LILY BELL cast in each of those three metals, allows hearing first the gentle sweetness of that design in silver, which does indeed make fine sound & is the metal I use most frequently, then the gold, which ups the ante into a much more ethereal quality, to the bronze, which in this case becomes even more intense to many ears as it comes close to that sense of "brassiness"... pitched almost too high & perhaps a little insistent in the beginning, yet lingering into a sustained finish one's ears must strain toward, sensing impossibility to know its end, which then obviously extends beyond our range of hearing.

How does one value such sound? Can it override coin of the realm? Of course, my answer is affirmative. Much as I treasure the qualities of noble metals, as a bell maker I treasure most that elusive aspect, that delicious problem in physics which must be intuitively solved to develop resonance inside my sculpture as a result of the clapper's percussive strike. I'm making more than visual ornament. Nobility comes from more than vaunted rarity... its gift functions best in the broad sensual range of everyday reality as well.

So I've come to champion appreciation for this "base metal" snubbed by jewelers who need to ride the glitz & value of materials more ordinary to our trade. We know that bone, wood & feathers also have beauty, rarity & depth of symbolic value as material for design... ivory, ebony, the peacock & kingfisher feathers making such improbable color in ancient Chinese or Aztec jewelry, or the layers of shell carved to reveal our grandmother's cameos.

The large jewelry store chains which in previous seasons had been clients for the bells now refuse to stock any objects in even sterling silver for reasons of the high per-square-inch costs of space in their display cases. Only gold or platinum set with the sparkle of valuable stones net profit enough to pay their rent, they reason. The magic of my bells no longer fills their bill. Even the archetypical bell sound of cash registers has been reduced to electronically recording sales resulting [or not] from the predictably flat glossy pages of advertising bling. We probably won't be on the cover of Gump's catalogue again anytime soon...

I have few problems with that, having long ago realized the market for bells involves a more genuine rarity: actual delight, usually unexpected & certainly unpredictable are very personal values not shared or even easily perceived by those needing the validation of a common taste directed by mass advertising. True shoppers have always had confidence to explore & search for those qualities made evermore elusive by the dilution of our language in advertising full of words like "unusual" or "rare" or "artistic" for items we know are not. Most businesses simply can't afford the media to tout anything actually limited in availability or taste...

I am rich in rarity: my bells are not mass produced & neither is their curass-cum-clientele. Even though I've more than 200 designs, none are produced in large quantity, being made in small, literally hand crafted runs. & offered by a half dozen independently minded outlets... plus my own studio's website.

I never did have the psychic energy to deal with a mindset narrowly focused on some bottom line, so my studio has always stood outside what would be commonly considered good business sense. The bells have taught me values beyond such ordinary notions. I am rich for that alone.

We hang out quietly making our own vibrational energies palpable to the subtle senses of those who happen upon come to share our kind of joy. The bells, cast in metals noble or not, celebrate very experiential values of personal meaning. They are jewelry. They are sculpture. They are musical. They are seen, heard & held in ultimately intimate ceremony with life. Ageless connections to deep places different in each psyche... tools & toys of delight!

This post arrived with that card left hanging in the beginning... I return to wonder am I eagle or crow or sea gull? Songbird, salmon or fisherman? Where do I fit in the hierarchies of this animal business? Am I magician or merchant? Alchemist or artist? Hopefully I am a small part of the fulsome creativity of it all!

SUMMER CAMP WITH BROTHER MARK...

2010-08-31T09:29:00.000-07:00

Stephen & I watched Fellini's 1965 film Juliet of the Spirits one recent evening & I'm saturated again remembering my history of appreciation for its seminal effects. It has remained a mental soundtrack long after I wore out the vinyl album which I played much of my college life to... becoming subliminal as I lived my own version of its archetype for these 30-plus years. I'm pleased it holds up & seemed even to capture he who was seeing it for the first time after hearing my numerous mentions of it over our years. I recommend it...

At the same time I have been editing the hundreds of photos I made last week while being a counselor at Camp Parkview. This is the camp, here on the Island, for developmentally disabled adults. Stephen & his brother Mark had been attending for some years before I came along & we three have done it together for many Augusts since.

Mark & I celebrate back-to-back birthdays during the last of July... early in the sign of Leo & we love to roar our leonine pride together. It was especially good to have him around to celebrate this year since I was mostly keeping mine quiet...

Because last year I was not sturdy enough for the rigors of camp, Stephen took his own turn this year to stay home for his own work while I went with brother Mark to this week of time special to him & some 60 other unique folk who attend... plus more than half that number of volunteers & staff.

Collectively we all are such characters it is not unlike living in a Fellini film for 5 days, if you track with my drifting mix.

Mark is gregarious... a party boy even... he loves music, especially vintage rock & roll so he loves to dress up & is ready to dance anytime, even outfitted with a life vest for canoing! He more rarely can be also a bit dreamy, as seen costumed for the drama/storytelling workshop which is led by our friend Myrna, who brings all sorts of props & masks for creating a morning of theatrical play...

While there is a scheduled evening social dance complete with a live band, we find many other times to dance. A boom box at the boat house brings music to of our boating time after dinner each evening... while some folk are out on the canoes, others are rocking out... making a lively beach party! Of course Mark loves both activities...

We play all sorts of ways, freeing our variously real interior clowns... even as we enjoy the natural beauty of dusk...

Here Mark is singing & doing the hula during a session led by our ukelele playing friend John, who was a founder of this camp several decades ago...

Another favorite session for most of the campers is when yet another Islander brings his huge collection of drums & percussion instruments, encouraging our making glorious noise!

The daily arts 'n' crafts session is another favorite time for most of the campers, with a variety of media from painting & bead stinging to tie-dying. There is always music happening while we play at projects... with occasional spontaneous dance breaks here as well.

Activities range a wide diversity... basketball to fragrant wax-dipped hands during "spa day".

There is a carnival one morning,

In addition to the dance band evening there is always a movie night with popcorn. But the most anticipated evening event is when Elvis arrives. This gentle impersonator has become a fixture... for reasons that become more & more obvious as performer & audience warm to each other. He is mobbed by his fans & does not remain on stage for long. He soon dives into the mosh pit of their joyful adulation & engages as many campers as possible, dancing & singing directly with clusters of them in physical as well as musical hugs. He is good! I'm not certain who is having the most fun... he obviously loves them as much as they do him!

Mark had a camera as well this year... I wonder what his views might show...

SILENCE BROKEN... quietly

2010-08-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

After months without posting I return with flowers to begin making amends...

I have little more to say for my silence than that I've missed this process & I'm wanting to share again. There have been numerous beginnings & several drafts are ripe to consider, including one large collection of recent photographs illustrating some stories about my spring & summer. But since I still feel some kind of block to my writing, I must begin quietly.

I photographed this nocturnal still life last night after a late solitary dinner, especially enjoying the small bouquet of roses we were gifted from a friend's garden several days ago & knowing they will shatter before I am finished being charmed by their rich color. The lilies are from our own garden & the dining table exudes scents from more than food... I am thus blessed with beauty I must simply celebrate!

Summer has always been my favorite season. Being a gardening Leo, having reached a certain age, I hold innumerable memories of the fullness inside the deep heat which brings time to bloom so lazily luscious, even in the stingy cool of the Northwest.

Silent solitude is part of such memory & this image shares words I won't write now. I have some days to mull & ponder alone all which fills my life. Rich & rare time to find my own blooming into work & play...

There is small doubt I hold my usual chatter in more than temporary abeyance, so please savor the sweet stillness of this current mood with me... even as we also know these petals will join the potpourri of memory with a certain sadness.

ENJOY!

DRAWINGS...

2010-02-05T16:38:00.000-08:00

As I was preparing for the recent holidays & our travel to visit Stephen's family in Minnesota, I worked on a series of drawings for gifts. Beginning during the quiet, halcyon time around Solstice, I chose scraps of rag paper from long ago watercolor days for their intimate size & their character, with torn & decked edges. These were to be more in the style of "cards," which in the past were presented as & along with other gifts.

My own family long ago decided to forgo prescriptions for holiday gifts & instead to celebrate & gift each other in our own ways & our own time. For years we gathered at my parents home during times of the year when we could more easily be together outdoors. Christmas in July or September was more usual. I'm happy that we let go of obligatory expectations toward wrapped gifts...

So these bon mots in pencil on these paper objects seemed suitable... they were portable & I worked on finishing several of them on the plane. They became quite personal as my pencil danced inside the mythology of my relationship with each recipient. Still, on Christmas morning, hardly wrapped with only simple bows of the red string for which I have a penchant, my gifts were initially met with understandable puzzlement amid the detritus of paper & ribbon from the pile under the tree.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me explain that Stephen's family does rather more practical than frivolous gifting. Stephen & I have long encouraged re-gifting to share from our own collections & they grok that. Still there can only happily be room for some particularly special gifts. The spice of occasional extravagance is the blessing of the season. Such is what I gave, so I can only celebrate two other examples in their fortuitous harmony. Stephen's sister Alice gave him his 60th birthday present early... a strikingly handsome Native American beaded box:

Helen's gift to me is an Acoma Pueblo black pot, equally & literally handsome for being almost palm-able. The finish is so polished it's clay must be photographed like metal...

Two fragile objects to pack for the trip home! Wonderfully, they fit each other... the pot nestled snugly inside the box, wrapped to fit in my carry-on bag.

Aesthetic gifts always transcend mundane material... like life, all is mud of our earth given breath of creation. Glass beads on a woven box; highly worked clay; graphite on cotton rag paper; poetry dancing as vibrations on air...

Back to the drawings...

Later I created bits of time with each person to explain how I came to their markings...

Brother Mark & I are both Leos, sharing back-to-back birthdays, which encourages us to growl & dance together like our own versions of such cats. This is my lion for him.

Nephew Johnny has been settling-in with Kristen for a respectable while, so my drawing to them was about the work [see the shovel?] of relationship & the sometimes electrical polarity of oneness & twoness... I had difficulty understanding when I first perceived the cover-plate-ness of the image. There are pearls in there too, of course. Those beads are an archetype in my work since I was their age. These drawings take on a life of their own!

Niece Sarah is sweet, with spiraling curves & corners to turn as she changes careers & travels to follow her mate, while following her larger heart as well...

Nephew David is living quite a story for his 21 years. I followed some intuitive path to this creature, with a spine becoming a mortar board for the journey he's on... surfing seahorse & daunting dragon in his brain.

Stephen's sister Alice & her husband John parented the 3 young ones above... they are indeed close to a perfect family, as proven by their strength holding David through the trauma of his accident, now 20 months ago. That moment forever changed their family, welding them together in creative ways. Kristen was in the car with him, but avoiding the brunt of the collision became a sturdy part of his tenuous bridge back to normal life. Sarah came home from her first job to learn her role & path into some profession more directly helpful than marketing.

This couple look to me like the archetype of a good marriage... the long linear aspect of their drawing begins with a rather stylized stamp of an interweaving knot I have often used to bring in the strength of two intersecting lines which split to join in a moment of tense harmony.

They have replicated that ideal, growing together from their different roots to repeatedly learn the grace required of parents to continue. They've done it more than once. Now they've mostly finished the form & are testing tendrils toward the new of a future back to two.

One last drawing, for a most important person, required more time than I found in the flurry of the season, so I brought it home to finish it, with Helen's playful admonition that she wanted it done well!

I could only agree to our mutual wish.

Taking lessons that the rag paper I'd chosen was rather too coarse for the effect I envisioned, I began again on paper with a smoother tooth.

This is a fantasy I have long been cogitating for my round book & I still intend to do another version there, but the moment of the turning of the year allowed me to take time meditating on details describing the imaginary history of a city or world, with Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities as inspiration. Such endeavor was so much better than beginning my year with business inventory chores! I settled into work like I've not done for some long time... with genuine pleasure. I do love to draw... & I wrote verse to make my explanation...

PLANTED IN A CRYSTAL BOWL
FLOATING SINCE SOME WISER TIME
GROWS A TREE SO ANCIENT
ITS LEAVES ARE NOW SCROLLS
FADING TO FORGETFUL INVISIBILITY

WHOSE ROOTS HAVE LONG SEEPED
DEEP BEYOND SUCH CONFINES...
TETHERING THIS CITY
CENTERING QUIET IN ITS HARBOR...
PORTAL TO A CHIAROSCURO WORLD

SOMOS UNO... WE ARE ONE...

2010-01-13T00:07:00.000-08:00

When I mentioned my recent concentration with pencil drawings to my brother Jon, he hinted toward wanting help with the logo he's been using for his blog. It originated from a tattoo he has on his ankle & the photo is thus distorted. I've long known that I can ride the horse of energies to tackle similar projects, so a re-working of the image his tattoo artist made came rather quickly.

I have numerous layers in my historical dance as a graphic artist, from high school & college posters to my own logo, which has remained a constant all my life. My business cards were re-calligraphed for each of my points of perigrination, I drew theater bills & logos for other businesses during my Sedona years. I had an alter ego named Leo Toye... but all that is quite a different story.

BroJon tells his own about how he came to wear the notion of SOMOS UNOS here...

From his tattoo:

To my versions, first in pencil, then in other ink:

The image needed to become more clear & I love working with the rhythms of hand inked line widths to imply lively space. The idea of being one vibrates life in more than cookie cutter sameness, so I played with gesture & suggested subtle anatomy. I emphasized the circling hands with stronger connection, more like a big kiss between us all, however it also glyphs magnetism & suction. Holding the differences of circle.

My experiments with color were more of the education I need in the realm of Photoshop. He dialogued a clearer version...

Now he has colored it yet differently & to great effect, as seen on his site.

I will post other drawings soon. It feels good to be playing so deeply!

CONTRA DANCING & CELTIC KNOT WORK... SUBVERSIVE POLARITIES?

2009-10-26T23:39:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to a Contra Dance & I've been musing on the geometry we dancers were "writing" in our movements to the caller's instructions. I found myself inside a new experiential relationship to the Celtic knot work which I've studied & used for so long it has become a structural part of my design language.

I understand for myself that there is a deeply ancient, broadly pragmatic, sub-verbal, mostly visual "alphabet", if not actual language. I have found, for example, identical knot patterns in Chinese bronzes, Aztec decorative work & Celtic illuminations... seeming to be a glyph of an idea. One sees it labeled as a "endless knot" or "treasure knot" in current marketing of imported oriental goods. I would observe that its real treasure is perhaps hidden in the roots of what must have been some proto-language, useful to form & hold an idea so fundamental to human consciousness that it gets submerged under what developed into the more iconic glyphs we use to denote spoken & written communication.

It seems the "idea" of an idea... not yet a symbol nor even a glyph... a path, perhaps, through the earliest brain. I sense It as spatial thinking which can have parallels to written language while yet having more to do with actual or implied manipulation of material. a practical communication born of the fingers as much as the mind. It is one way makers still think. It is showing an explanation before the meaning of words can have any basis to compare & communicate the abstraction. It has much to do with the prepositions of demonstration: one makes a knot learning what "over" or "under" looks like. What it feels like as one turns it over to verify what must otherwise be extrapolated. We still say a picture is worth a thousand words... artists might quip that we might have saved a lot of effort if language had not become the defining human accomplishment!

Maria Gimbutas has done work of an incredibly more evolved system of such notion. Her books are a wonderland of drawings of prehistoric pottery & stone carvings she catalogues into a visual glossary. I've found inspiration in them at a similar level. I have used her concepts of such iconography even more than the richly drawn illustrations of those archaeological images to inspire my work.

While Jungian archetypes dance more conceptually in similarly deep territory, they always are layered over with much complexity of history in verbal & written language. While each of the dancers last night exhibited archetypes of personality, we were involved in learning to be parts of a evolving concept of geometry... each learning the path of a pair of lines [remember learning to line up with your kindergarten [now preschool] mates? Remember also the rudimentary sexual education begun in identifying boy/girl, boy/girl?

That is the beginning lesson to contra dancing. Two lines of humans facing each other boy/girl boy/girl, partnered to the one across & neighbored to the one above... the top being the end of the floor with the musicians & the caller... two couples making a square. We eventually accumulated four squares,

Pattern begins as perception of simple formation, often linear, so we have now the conception of a warp, the parallel cords over & under which the more active weft cord is woven to make textile. Basic polarity in action toward function. Simple utility inviting new interaction into what is straightforwardly implication of further complication. We learn simple steps, spinning ones partner, then spinning ones neighbor before crossing the square with our four left hands while turning in a circle before changing partners in a do-se-do, for the repeat of what becomes a social braid of subtle complexity inside communal effort to understand bodily the pattern of those who hold thrall for this musically driven instruction.

I came to this train of thought as I began looking from inside our effort to see familiar visuals in this line dance. It was as if there were those kind of footprint illustrations, explaining with arrows the dance steps we made over the progressing course of a song... I saw we were tracing the pattern of a basic Celtic knot work border... I was dancing the wedding rings I used to carve.

Such activity is something far from my usual. A new monthly event instigated on the Island by some remarkable folk, one of whom has become a good friend. [I must write about Tom one day.] They have also begun our local Free Range Folk Choir. I was not the only novice. The form of this old English tradition seems always to have that basic social educational aspect. Its currency in this new time rather requires bringing almost childish reminders of wonder to aging adults like me.

We all were learning simple skills: basic steps, then making them again & again into processional progression. Some of us had to take remedial lessons... again!... in learning our left from our right hands, or which way the clock's hands go. Most must have, like me, reacted variously to being called tops or bottoms. Several women tried to break in while another friend was giving me a waltz lesson, whether desiring the fun themselves or believing I might prefer to not be following the lead in another man's arms, I'm not certain, but I taught my own lesson when I declined to stay with my partner. ll was all good natured, of course.

I found this happy description on the web:
http://www.sbcds.org/contradance/whatis/#Def0
... Contra dance is Real People in Real Time with Real Music. It is Real Life. You cannot experience this while sitting on your duff, VR helmet or not. Get out more often! You know you spend way too much time in front of your computer and/or TV. In other words, it is impossible to record the incredible synergy and spirit that occurs when you combine enthusiastic, connected, happy dancers, hot musicians and swell choreography. It would take quite a talented multimedia author indeed to capture just a tiny slice of that magic that takes place.

On the way to such spirit, our group experienced the curious vicissitudes of polarity, beginning with a lack of gents enough to pair everyone by external gender. Some ladies necessarily became honorary gents. While such unequal proportion too seems part of dance tradition we needed to be aware which of us were temporarily trans-sexed as we dance boy/girlboy/boy/girl. The confusion brought us to laughter any times.

JOURNAL... LIVING ONE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY...

2009-10-10T17:31:00.000-07:00

TO JOURNAL IS UNIQUELY ACTIVE
REFLECTION BACK-FORWARD IN TIME
LIVING WHILE RECORDING ELUSIVE MOMENT
BIOLOGY AUTOGRAPHED

I find myself piqued to quill by a questioning post on cousin Anjana's blog... was the bride of the wedding which we went to India to celebrate...

How much do you want to document your experiences ? Will recording them help you make better sense of your own evolution ? Has it helped you evolve in the future ? How much do you [return] to the documentation and is reviewing it interesting enough that it was worth the effort?

How much nostalgia is healthy and appropriate for you ?

I've kept a rather regular journal for most of thirty-five years, beginning seriously when at 30 I embarked on a rare journey of rich exploratory travel into a new period of my life.

While there are several other small volumes with some few pages written during my late teens, such attention was obviously short lived... only beginning dreams toward this time of my turning 30, leaving Denver, evolving toward a less urban, more solitary mode. I was ready to bring new maturity to the process.

What began as a typical road-travel diary came to include the I-Ching readings I made for contemplation during this extended solitary road trip. I was in a Jungian stage of individuation. I was working with an already well developed ego & had the time to indulge myself in deeper work, much of it dancing out of my involvement with a play therapist named Austin Delaney, making two dusty drives down to his remote retreat in Baja to spend time sifting & soaking in sandbox symbology.

My use of words like "play" & "dancing" for describing such adventure of my life began then & I celebrate that they still are some of my most preferred & useful verbs.

I now have a trunk tightly packed with the collection of bound volumes accumulated over these years, plus another matching trunk of photocopied letters written back when I tried to share similar writing with family & friends. I consider these papers part of my journal.

All these pages are handwritten, usually in the india ink [I wonder if I am I a fan of India first by default of a misnomer?!!] from the rapidograph technical pens to which I was so long addicted... reassured by the sense of permanence that ink suggested. My fingers became almost as permanently stained. Flying with one of them was quite an adventure, as they often reacted to the changing cabin pressure by leaking or even burping exuberantly... I dedicated myself to the ritual of holding the uncapped pen bedded in a handkerchief during takeoff & landing to prevent the cap from filling with that dangerous black to ooze out when next I wanted to write. A handkerchief which long lived inside the book's covers became an archive of marks & blots from years of grooming the nibs of those tetchy writing instruments!

I've had sleek leather slip covers [barely seen in the photo above as background for a datura blossom] made to hold my chosen size of standard blank books, one for each, writing & drawing.

I became quite serious about my journal & perhaps, even obsessed!

i developed the calligraphic block style of my handwriting from my father's curious mix of caps & lower case handwriting & my art student's fascination with the rather standard draftsman's block style & those old speedball pens we used for making posters in high school. I lettered myriad signs for the department store where I worked during High School. I abandoned cursive when my handwriting was quite young, as can be seen if I try to use that form now. After years' habit & development, my handwriting has developed a strong familiarity as part of my identity & even a certain fame.

Long before any sort of writing style with the ideas words can convey, I was developing a sense of how they should look... indeed, that is no small part of how I think with words now. Committing one's everyday thoughts to such ink invites fastidious forethought... even as the first mandate is to capture the moment.

I wanted it to look good as well as being legible. At first I tried the notion that each page was a calendar day, but the accumulation waste of paper quickly became evident as I would almost never finish writing that much in 24 hours... even as I attempted using the blank trail to guilt-trip myself into more diligence.

I began to read the unwritten tales of some pages... analyzing my state or mood by the slant of the lines. I sometimes tried to project my life through it, making affirmations. That was as iffy in ink as it is in the ephemeral world... but I appreciate the clarity of idea that notion teaches: "Be careful what you wish for..."

I studied my calligraphy, practicing nuance to reveal or disguise the word's wells & walls, to enhance one glyph's relationship to its neighbors. Early on I needed to consider whether I would draw in my journal, or reserve it for words alone. I love that the proper verb for making an Icon is "to write" rather than "to paint"... so I appreciate how drawings can be "literal", but I decided that the obviously more messy process of drawing was better kept out of these pages... I maintain other books for that kind of thinking. Still my love of symbols & glyphs required some visual notes.

I played with my journal. I studied myself inside it. I was often literally living it.

Over the years the questions about to whom & for what I'm making all these words has been omnipresent & never quite answered. Writing for oneself must be what brings one to writing in the first place. Before writing what one wants to say, one must say/write those things to oneself. God knows I often sermonized & still can. I veer not enough toward poetry. I write dialogue between parts of myself & with a second person, trying to clarify what I do not say so easily in actual conversation.

For all my lack of it, I practice to simplify & clarify... realizing that is a life's work. I long wrote in curiously punctuated [or often not!] stream-of-consciousness rambles: Sentences full of parenthetical wanderings [inside more & more brackets... ] strung vaguely out between a noun & its far flung potential verb, which needed to change tense several times for all those clauses. It has taken me years to learn to think in paragraphs... indeed, my early journals & letters were often nightmare rides through my immature mind!

Because I wanted to watch the accumulation of words representing myself in ways unlike, if parallel to, my visual work, this archive has often been useful to help me see myself more honestly. As I write toward Anjana's questions about the values of the journal processes to explain one's experience, I feel my own sense of those values. I'm obviously still doing it, so I believe in it even as i must suppose I will never know the end of its story. I've heard stories of the destruction of journals in apocalyptic ritual or fits of pique & fear. I'm happier never yet to have had one of those.

I've always had faith this trunk of books would find its own journey into the unknown after me, my gift to the plague & blessing of words humans have unleashed as history. Accepting as well that they might not make it beyond the next flood [in spite of that potential protection of waterproof Indian Ink!] or fire or a slide over our edge & down the cliff, much less into another century. As an art history lover I've always wanted some of my own work to pass the test of the ages, being chosen again & again to save. I peg my second chances on my journal...

I do occasionally go back to read in the writing, especially when I'm trying to remember some detail of time or relationship... but I've learned that I often do not write what I would want to read later, being so busy with the doing that I did not have time or presence of mind to write much at all in such memorable times... I trusted to unsupported memory itself the very things I later wish I hadn't forgotten. To my frequent dismay I find boring menus or guest lists rather than the spark of excitement I want to recover. So the process is inevitably flawed, or at least, incomplete.

I have found it useful & fun to read from my old journals to someone aloud sharing selected notions of my earlier life. I see change & growth. I see ever old habits & ideas cycling new through the sense of time which has days quite full of words & those left inexplicably equally blank.

Journalizing renders present into immediate past while inviting past to remain present toward the future.

MISSING BIRDSONG IN THE TIME OF SPIDERS...

2009-09-30T14:16:00.001-07:00

As the season turns toward cooler colors & becomes typical more rainy I realize that the birdsong so abundant in the mornings several months ago has quieted. I've been missing that early morning music, while wistfully appreciating the singers' capability & choice to fly south...

It is now the time of spiders. One cannot walk through doorways or along garden pathways without destroying hours of diligent web spinning. I feel quite badly even if I thus only can see my carnage through newly web blurred eyeglass lenses... all the while reflexively doing yet more damage as I flail to rid myself of the tickling on my pate & in my ears.

Chagrined, I still must suppose that makes me just a common vandal... finding my conscience too late.

But I have been enjoying continuing to learn from watching them, reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's novel The Fountains Of Paradise which I read at least 25 years ago, in which he speculates the possibility of a "space elevator" begun by spinning a single lightweight strand of hyper-strong filament out beyond earth's atmosphere, quite as do these spiders between doorposts & bushes, dancing with air currents to seemingly fly... spanning between otherwise improbable distances & thus gradually building a series of intersecting strands to support their web structures in the spaces I must walk through.

His fantasy of then similarly adding more filaments, increasing the strength held "up" or "out" from earth's gravity, just as one can swing a ball on a string, to then lift material up such an "elevator" toward a building satellite like our space station -- without the complicated launch system we use now -- doesn't seem so preposterous to this observer!

Well, I've destroyed a lot of arachnid art once again this morning, just going down to the studio, even as I know it is being rebuilt, albeit not to the desired specifications of their original beauty & organic symmetry,,

SOUND & SALISH SUNSET...

2009-09-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a post about beauty around this fjord called Puget Sound... that word coming from the process of sounding depths. This is a very deep, very complex water-way, a submerged geologic fault zone... sometimes known as the Salish Sea when combined with its Canadian sister, the Strait of Georgia, about which I posted last year.

[Vashon Island is tucked into the bottom of the Sound...
deep in the very lower right hand corner]

For 8,000 years people have plied these
myriad river estuaries & channels,
circumnavigating islands & peninsulas...
the gigantic gouges & middens of the last ice age.
Each geographic feature obviously had other names
before those of interloping European explorers
who put their own names on maps but
who seem now quite disembodied by
what are obviously more organic &
spiritual forms of being.

Still, such mixtures continue to be our culture, as seen
here from a favorite small park with totem poles
near the Pike Place Market overlooking the waterfront.
Cruise ships at our dock juxtapose new
with the more traditional images.

Later evening, sitting in the car on the dock waiting for the ferry back to the Island, a couple of seals in the water next to us attracted my eye & my camera. Their diversion primed my awareness toward the beginnings of a promising sunset.

[Click on the images to enlarge them.]

The Olympic mountains are to the west, unexpectedly between us & the Pacific Ocean. The sun slipping low often finds a slice of open sky between our usual layers of clouds to treat us with fine color. This is always a treat. Living on the eastern side of Vashon Island, we know sunset better in its reflected form... bathing Tahoma in pink alpenglow.

Beginning low in a spectral orange, the light filtering through deepening clouds suggested a quicker & quieter denouement. We all gloried as the lowering disc seemed to pry open new lens covers to project color onto diaphanous scrims which previously had combined to block the source of such subtle brilliance.

By now we were on the ferry & my camera was only one of many clicking around the upper decks, gorging on eye candy as the contrast heightened with rain ...

Pelting us more in earnest, driven by the higher winds once we were out on the water, we photographic stalwarts crowded under the slight shelter of a covered, but open, deck grabbing with our various capabilities with inevitably faltering lenses our own versions of the final finale.

I would like to see what those with longer telescopic equipment managed to capture...

GHEE WHIZ...

2009-09-20T01:43:00.000-07:00

Our friend Tom recently returned from a long travel to India, where he has lived, & where he was working on several writing projects. He made this photo to bring home more evidence of my growing international fame...

GRB Bells obviously needs some kind of lubricant for these slow labors [See my previous post] so I suppose clarified butter might be a fine candidate. Even though I'm not eating dairy for now, it should be OK as an external application...

I uploaded these photos six weeks ago when I still could not sit at the computer for long enough to write much. I'll try to bring currency with recapitulation to continue to fill-in the lengthy gap of time I've not posted.

[Remember you can click on the images to enlarge them.]

Tahoma is my ever present, if not always visible, best teacher in the grounding I've needed during this period... here I sit darshan with her one Mayish morning.

The garden is my sandbox where I ground myself more than visually, although dirty hands don't prevent enjoying the vantage of its beds.

This bed of lettuce, arugula, & mizuna was planted in anticipation of Stephen's mother Helen's birthday in mid May, but the greens sat as sproutlings for weeks in our cold gray... not ready to harvest until after the event. We ate lots of salad from it well into July.

There were bounteous beds of cool-loving kale & red mustard for greens to steam & braise. Here is one harvest including a nice variety of the edible flowers I love to garnish our plates with: forget-me-not, wood ruff, chives, nasturtium & arugula blosoms.

It is displayed on the bed of Roman chamomile first planted to mark Gertie's grave... which circle I've been enlarging over several years. It is satisfyingly tedious work to divide this easily rooting plant giving it space to spread. I designed a plan to cut patterns into the carpet to collect new planting material. I've always loved parterres as a foil to my obviously wilder preferences...

One day a spiral began to develop...

Stephen celebrated it on the way taking drinks to the Prow Deck when our neighbor friend Taylor dropped by with his dog Oochee.

It developed over the next while to open the archetypal symbol of the question... of the quest. Appropriate for this time of actively searching for my path to health.

Only weeks later it had begun to grow into the space I'd cut out to transplant at the edges of the enlarged circle cut out of the lawn.

Another spiral grew in quite a different form in the bed close by... Romanesco is a veritable Fibinacci universe of brocolli.

Savoy cabbage is so ruffled its difficult to see that it is growing on the sme plan...

Red Orach is all about rare intense color[s]. I enjoyed tea with the sun behind it tomake me wonder how red could look also blue... like some of the silk saris we saw in India.

By now the chamomile has grow over, obliterating that spiral. However questions, quests & growth are continuity, always ready for another & deeper search... a next adventure. I've no doubt the spiral will return...

WHEN I'M SIXTY FOUR....

2009-09-16T00:11:00.000-07:00

The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Omar Khayam's moving finger writes in some early, 50's movie memory of a God-like, pen nib-shaped fingernail inking velum pages, oversized heavily bound volume... with perhaps a chorus from "Kismet" as soundtrack...

My early notions of fate were inevitably rather biblical.

A serious young man, I left the farm an unwitting pioneer joining the yet-to-boom generation about to embark on some joyfully inevitable explorations of a more colorfully sensual & sexual reaction to our starched & chromed childhoods.

But by the time the Beatles were asking "will you'll still need me when..." I was graduating from college into a revolutionary worldview making any thought of actually reaching such an age untenable & laughable by the admonition never to trust anyone over thirty.

Fate...

I came out inside a trust for my parents capability to honestly love. Putting a name to what could not otherwise be talked about. Still, no one was really very surprised, in the sense that I had always been somehow more comfortably fae than typically masculine. I'd constructed a self protective banner early on... embracing, if not actually flaunting, my capacity for difference & independence.

Fertilizing fate.

I was already losing my hair when those boys from Liverpool began changing the idea of long locks for men. I had to learn to celebrate an even more difficult difference as my own...

Bald fate.

Inevitably crossing that threshold of age, I turned thirty with more resolve than distrust. I was reinventing myself inside a short & curious mentorship with a Jungian play therapist... leaving my first long term relationship to move from Denver's city life toward the experience of becoming a more playful independent student of life & a hiker of the Red Rocks while working with other gems in Sedona as a jewelry artist. I eventually came to love solitude & celibacy during the decade of my forties. I managed to grow healthier through that difficult era, moving into my fifties richly prepared for new growth inside my relationship with Stephen, continuing the charmed life to which I've always felt born...

Fate?

Stephen is currently involved with a biographic film project about his mentor, the poet/filmaker James Broughton, whose commonplace quote here at Soundcliff has become a useful mantra for me during my health difficulties this year, implying that what fate does best, perhaps, is to offer itself as teacher.

"Adventure, not predicament."

Opportunity wasn't the first thing I felt inside the fate which seized me in late May which required dealing with a very painful systemic inflammation in my body.

Whether fate or age or simply the beginnings of a new era in my life, my being was disrupted by what was diagnosed as bursitis/tendonitus. There seem to be no drugs to be prescribed & I felt fairly dismissed after it was ascertained I wasn't a candidate for hip or knee surgery. I was referred to see a physical therapist, of which I think I got the Island's best. She has helped me explore inside & through this cramped state, finding ways to dance with the tangle of muscles, tendons & bursa which seemed a more confusing kind of knot work than any celtic design.

It moved from alternating shoulders down to hips & knees... then, & most disconcerting to my artist, it settled out into my hands & fingers as well.

My symptoms matched the list a local herbalist described as those she was working to ameliorate with an anti inflammatory diet. While I did not take her class, I kibitzed from my sideline & stopped eating wheat, corn, dairy & refined sugar [including wine & alcohol], which are considered to be the biggest culprits. Two-thirds of each meal is to be high fiber greens, fruits & vegetables. Such simplicity becomes complicated by more complex chemical theory, but all with the goal to restore balance in intestinal flora, the cause of chronic inflammation... seeming cause itself to a broad range of maladies including diabetes & fibromyalgia.

Its quite the hot topic now, so there is lots of internet information...

I believed we ate rather sensibly already, which we did... & do. Still, one aspect of my age is the experience of watching science, particularly nutritional science, change over the years. While science certainly ought to evolve, especially over the course of years, in our culture we mostly hear or read about the "science" useful to some corporate entity for product promotion... using carefully edited language about carefully crafted research... which changes with the market sufficiently that we all have noted the rather temporary aspects of such "scientific evidence".

Frankly I've learned to take "popular" science well salted. Remember that I grew up on a farm where we put out big blocks of salt for the animals, so while the saying suggests taking something with a "grain of salt" I can jokingly choose the size of the grain... fortunately salt doesn't seem to be particularly problematic on this diet.

My independence appreciated being challenged with the theory's expectation to find one's own cure. The process of first eliminating those problematic foods allows discovery as increasing comfort becomes tangible proof before beginning to experiment with adding back various foods individually with intention to test tolerances, find balance & develop a personal formula to maintain health.

I am beginning to reliably attain the comfortable results I want during this elimination phase. I've taken months while the theory suggests benefits might become evident for some cases in only weeks. [Too much of my salty reservation?] But I began slowly to observe increasingly reliable relief inside what has long been an irregular rhythm of good & less good days.

I've never known pain as such a constant. The ubiquitous "How are you feeling?" piqued a word collector's cleverness & creativity. "Crinkly" [I would spell it "krinkly"...] became a useful everyday description. It suggests anticipation that things might straighten out in spite that they would remain somewhat rippled for the memory. There was always that constant memory of the last vestige never far enough away to believe in comfort as anything quite less than temporary...

For fun I've begun to collect a hierarchy of such descriptors for pain. Above the quiet pervasive memory begins a murmuring, which increases to mumbling. Sighing can signal pain both on & off. Hissing does similar duty as both taking in or releasing out. Simpering rarely works so snipping comes along, teasing some belief in the possibility of giving it away. Creaking edges toward groaning before actually croaking. Singing is for the pure stuff. Squealing is for the hell of it... some yelping came in surprise. Screaming, yelling & keening were happily well beyond where I've needed to go, thank you very much...

This is pain I own. It is not external. No one is assaulting me. I've come to see it simplistically as a deep internal discussion sometimes verging toward louder argument between my selves: the gardening slow-foodie & the indulgent one who secretly in believes nothing if not celebrating excess...

NORTH WETS, SOUTH KEY SUN & NETTLE SOUP...

2009-03-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Creative work at the wax desk has been more difficult to establish this winter. I began the the long dark hours of traditional deep design time in the studio suffering some bizarre symptoms of a fine case of shingles which tantalized the right side of my forehead & that eye with nervy sensations suggesting I'd blown a fuse in my aura or had ants walking on my eyeball... not a state conducive to my best concentration!

Our wet was unusually cold & we had too much snow. Of necessity I let myself be slow. I elected to stay home from events I would ordinarily have attended with Stephen. It furnished excuses with explanations I can rarely find better to secure the hermetic space so essential to my preparation toward such work. I know well that non-social time is so foreign & frightening to some that they simply are incapable of realizing the mirroring wealth of true solitude. I'm happily omnivorous on that score as well!

I knew there was a break scheduled, ready or not, to meet him in Florida after his Journalism That Matters Conference in Saint Petersburg several weeks ago. [See his blog for that story: http://ssilha.blogspot.com/] for a week visiting Mother Helen. His brother Mark also joined us for some great & welcome sunny beach time on Long Boat Key, near Sarasota, where they all have spent winter holidays for some 40 years...

Of course, the calendar didn't respect that I was just finally beginning to see some progress on the waxes & would happily have stayed put to continue working in the studio, but there was this gift of a ticket...

Happily this year we scored with the weather department & I brought home a bit of a tan line! It's rusting as I write, even though I'm happy to be back waxing, so ultimately I wasn't ready to come home... such ambivalent signs indicate having had a good vacation.

The social life continued with a weekend pairing back-to-back overnight guests for whom I felt inspired to cook. Still, I managed to steal carving time in useful increments, finding some of the balance so essential inside the complexities of the life I choose. I celebrated spring by impulsively going out between Saturday morning's rain squalls to pick nettles for that soup, which has become a tradition using those weeds from our slope. I varied the recipe this time, gaining kudos from both Stephen & our guest, Kana. The original recipe follows, although I used dried Shitake mushrooms in the recent version...

Erica Meade's Nettle Stew
1 large sweet white onion chopped finely
5 large cloves garlic, chopped or pressed
4 med sized Yukon Gold potatos diced
1 large bag fresh picked nettle tops
3 tbs. quality cooking oil
aprox 2 qt water
1/4 - 1/2 c white miso
1/4 - 1/2 c high quality sesame tahini

heat oil in large soup pot. add onion, garlic,
potatoes. saute until tender. add nettles.
simmer covered for 15 min or until nettles
are limp and have no sting.
boil remaining water in tea kettle
and add to pot. in mixing bowl mix white miso,
tahini and 1c. water. whisk until
lumps are gone.3-5 min before serving
add the tahini/miso
mixture to the pot. do not boil.

[I never measure, so
all measures are approximations.]

The HUMMING BIRD wax has evolved considerably in detail & I've got the clapper mostly carved as well. I'm still feeling quite slow against various impediments. There won't be a bumper crop of bells this year...

To attempt capturing gesture as both solidity & whir is proving to be a challenge...

CONDENSATION...

2009-03-03T02:46:00.000-08:00

I am carving nocturnally in this dark season even as it also waxes toward spring...

Above shows a progression of the blocking-out process to begin the carving of a bell wax. Sawing & filing out of the raw solid a rough "canvas" onto which I can begin the searching drawing process to find the specifications which might render a bell. I've written about this process here.

Hummingbird has eluded me for years. Indeed, I'm not certain I've quite synthesized into static sculpture such blurr as seems better seen in one's imagination...

I've also been meditating into a bell for Equal Rights Washington

I relish these periods of solitude when I can hold in my mind the tenuously evolving form in ways deeper than the never distant actual wax... which, as I turn it 'round, must hold only its current form. Condensing my idea from all its previous forms, I find myself wondering whether I am pilot steering a process or the tool of some tide...

LIFE ON A SHIPPING LANE...

2009-02-22T15:19:00.000-08:00

I'm returning after weeks of dark silence with a bit of regatta, having been collecting shots toward a blog posting such as this for several years. If everyone loves a parade then this flat-lander, who grew up on a wheat farm in the waterless central plains, hopes you might enjoy this endless variety of boats as seen from our perch. I love realizing atop this cliff overlooking the lower Puget Sound... I'm most certainly not in Kansas any more!

To give a bit of orientation, here is a photograph from the air of Dilworth Point, the easternmost point of Vashon Island. Just to the south of that is Soundcliff.

[To see any of these images larger click on them...]

Stephen named Soundcliff as both a description & a prayer for this sensitive site perching some 40 rather vertical feet above the high tide. Lower tide on the rocky beach shows the result of eons... the erosion of alluvial layers built from melting ancient glaciers, rocks ground from wherever north it might still take days to drive by car, laid down between the residual clay resulting from stress under such immense weight. Still, that relatively recent construction of geologic compaction is far more fragile than any bedrock. We are rather vulnerable to rain & wave. We are indeed quite frail against tidal forces. We sit atop the cliff here... you can barely see Soundcliff just above & to the right of the two green patches of this bleak winter shot at low tide. We celebrate the stone bulkhead, even as it looks ultimately inconsequential to the obvious history...

From up here, however, even from bed, we enjoy an expansive view over the shipping lanes to & from the port of Tacoma. Beyond the water is the mountain known commonly now as Mount Rainer, but we prefer the native name... Tahoma. Here she is with one of the huge container ships which pass by daily.

We can hear them well before they come into view from the north around the point where they fairly fill the view with their broadside before turning to shrink into the perspective of distance... looking rather more toy-like as they move toward Lady Tahoma.

I enjoy the mystery of what is inside those sealed steel boxes, knowing that most are filled with the mundane stuffs of everyday trade, but at least some must be fair troves of treasure bringing finer dreams from faraway...

Especially when the sun strikes from under our fabled cloud cover to inspire such speculation with golden light!

The real treasure here, visible or not, is always the mountain...

Of course others, like these barges of crushed automobiles wending their way to further recycling behind tugboats, are obviously trundling treasure of quite a different kind...

As often come gems...

As go lumps, blending into the intense vagaries of our ten thousand grays...

One recent day I was amazed to see a barge loaded with four of the huge cranes seen in the harbors of any modern port, used to load & unload those containers onto truck beds or railroad cars to continue their journey by land. They look like prehistoric science fiction hard at work in that usual place, but in this situation are themselves a rather precarious & uncomfortable looking cargo! Birds mimicking cage?

They too fade into Tahoma's much sturdier story...

Another rare sight is one of our Washington State Ferry System's vessels sailing far from any of its usual runs, presumably out for a maintenance test drive or perhaps for training?

This colorful dowager looks like a quite the floozy version of fun for cargo of the human variety! She looks to be a remnant of our famous old "Mosquito Fleet" of ferries which once plied the Sound in a veritable swarm of possibilities no longer possible in today's economy. There were numerous docks around the Island served daily by dozens of such boats. That was before we had so many roads up on the Island. Now we are constrained to an ever decreasing schedule for the same commute to the mainland from only two docks...

Progress?

More placid times give us glimpses of small sailing craft, sometimes in true regattas...

Occasionally they come close enough we might shout to them...

Here is a view, from one ferry, of another just pulling into the dock on the north end of our Island. A sail boat uses it's engine to make it's way across the route we were using to get to Southworth, on the Olympic Peninsula. Thus I come to liken these waters unto the freeways of my Midwest filled, in something approaching Biblical abundance, with cars, buses & trucks.

A photo earlier showed our view from the bedroom of fishing boats, which during the various salmon seasons often wake us early with the racket & roar of their process. We love to eat their catch, quite literally, since there are fishers on the Island who also sell directly & tell us that the fish we are buying was caught within sight of our house, one of the landmarks they use for the rich situation resulting from the Point's sheltering of the tidal currents.

The method involves the spreading of a long net across the current with a smaller, but quite noisey boat which strains, holding that length against the flow & circling back to close the hopefully bulging net & reconnect it to the large boat in a dance of a struggle.

Our theater often boasts a troupe of 4-5 rigs all doing & repeating this process in turn as the tide tugs them past our vantage point.

In a quick pas d deau the smaller boat passes off its end & ducks under the upper line of the net to continue its roaring work, closing the lower line of the net into a purse to secure the catch which will be hauled up onto the deck & into the hold of the fishing boat... if the catch is good we sometimes hear shouts of exclamation in celebration.

More often we don't hear a thing except that infernal sound of fuel being burned.

Our fish stock is being depleted. Living so close to that life cycle we must accept only a temporary custodial joy on this fragile cliff. The clay which slumps from our garden is the major nutrient for the eel grass which, growing in the tidal shallows, hides & shelters the salmon fry [baby fish] until they are large enough to protect themselves, or not, on their years of further migration out into the Pacific. We must share our security as part of theirs.

We thus become students of the food we eat. The reality of our situation allows & requires us to make peace with this moment in time. Everything always changes & we live on an actual edge of all that. We must trust one day we too will become useful as part of that food chain. Better to accept that gracefully than the alternative of no survival at all, which is what the salmon must be trying to tell us.

More important is the message from the magestic Orcas, who do not show up so frequently as they used to, even in my short experience on this cliff... they eat salmon too. We live in each other's back yards. If they can't survive, how much oil will it take for us to learn the same lesson?

I suspect we are becoming the fossils to fuel some next intelligience...

So, I now offer an example of how much fun the problematic interim processes can be. We accepted an invitation one summer evening to go for dinner at a dockside restaurant in Tacoma with friends whose family speed boat was moored, along with many sailing vessels, in Quartermaster Harbor, the boater's haven enhanced between what once were more actually two islands. Maury Island still keeps a certain identity even as it was long ago attached as an ithmus to Vashon by filling the tidal spit with more sand to make a connecting roadway. Once the tide sloshed over to help refresh the harbor... but, that is another lesson learned lately by the prey of environmental process. Try banking on any "safe haven" these days...

Our Wheee! exuberantly spends our temporary dividends in the wake...

Motoring out of the inner harbor & around the Burton Penensula we passed the camp with the same name where most summers finds us as counselors for a group of differently abled adults. A favorite part of each day with them is canoeing after dinner out into the same channel, just as the sun begins to settle... [see Stephen's blog] Boats become an evermore intimate part of my life far from Kansas.

Since I've already strayed out of our immediate baliwick I'll hold a couple more boats which I want to share... later, perhaps. I close this already long post with a view of Our Lady Tahoma in some furious drag several days ago, with my best wishes for clear sailing into what is.

THIS IS IT, Master...

2008-11-16T01:30:00.000-08:00

Here IT IS!

[Double click the photos to enlarge them.]

The bell holding the poetry of James Broughton about which I've been posting the last month has been cast & carefully finished out into its new metal state! There is always a huge relief to see the work of many many hours secured in a safely solid, more durable material than the wax which relative softness allows me to carve.

I wrote earlier this year about this stage of raw casting.

While this photograph is a bit brutal in showing the less than ideal surface...

The casting is basically sound & looks quite legible after I began working the surface. Here in mid-process I used ink to darken the background as a test to help see which details needed strengthening

I vulcanized the silicon molds around the masters, [about which process you may read more here] of the THIS IS IT Bell, the FROG RING & the MEDIUM LILY HOOP EARRING before making photographs of the finished masters. I cut those molds this evening & look forward to seeing how the first production waxes look when I begin injecting them tomorrow.

Meanwhile here is the FROG perching on the edge of new life in metal...

BELL EARRINGS...

2008-11-07T00:09:00.000-08:00

I recently had a query from a client requesting help to replace her GRB BELL earrings, which had disappeared. This is not the first time I have needed photographs for such communication, so I've made some rather casual shots of the current samples to show for such discussion & consideration. I did not take the time necessary for properly lighting the pieces to show them in a neutral view without some reflections & high contrasts, but they do show the ideas in useful detail.

While earrings have always been ancillary to my line of bell pendants I have never really featured them. For most of these many years I had no more than a half-dozen pair made up. I sold them only on request & usually as special order. Now, for various reasons, I find myself with a wider selection than ever before, so I post them now as a bit of a catalogue which the web site for GRB BELLS does not yet have...

The ANEMONE Bell Earrings...
Petals spreading & draping to form
A delicate umbrella of sound…

The BONNET Bell Earrings...
Flower of protective enclosure
Perfect form for a hat or a bell
Shelters a chorus of blossoming voices

The SMALLER CHOCOLATE LILY Bell Earrings...
The common name of the Fritillaria Biflora
Brings a delicious rich flavor to its sweet form
Describing this bell’s tone as well

The MEDIUM CHOCOLATE LILY Bell Earrings...
The common name of the Fritillaria Biflora
Brings a delicious rich flavor to its sweet form
Describing this bell’s tone as well

The EUPHORBIA Bell Earrings...
Huge herbaceous family rich in
Spurges & purges & medicines too
Complex in form… A single blossom
Finds fascination for bell

The FAE POD Bell Earrings...
Long wishing to live miniature fantasy in
Southwestern sandstone caves … such
Rocky dreams find resonant voice now
As a silver bell home

The MEDIUM FRANCIS Bell Earrings...
A name made noble by history
So each of us may remember richly
Others who have carried it

The GINGKO Bell Earrings...
Ancient biology fans through this leaf’s veins
Inspiring complications on its simplicity
One graceful gesture
Practiced for millions of years

The GOTHIC Bell Earrings...
Gothic trefoil & lofty ribbed vault
Choir song & organ voice
Resonance & romance
Medieval strength & grace

The HOLLY & IVY Bell Earrings....
Ancient symbolic plants
Acquiring newer attributes
As archetypes of holiday romance
Red Holly Boy... White Ivy Girl

The LACE Bell Earrings...
Bell song woven by faerie fingers
For christenings
& Weddings of harmony & soul

The LATTICE Bell Earrings...
A Universal Truth
Weaving strength & flexibility
Whether in fiber or in metal
Those are the principles of resonance

The TRILLIUM Bell Earrings...
A trio of petals trilling
Thrillingly...

The WEE BLOSSOM Bell Earrings...
Petals spiking bravely
To contain & protect
Such minute notes sharing
Only closest privacy

CHTHONIC TIME...

2008-10-26T01:42:00.000-07:00

This slicing view of Tahoma last week captures something of recent moods of intensity focused at depth, drawing down attention to discerning what might be missed with the distractions of what sometimes considers itself "whole".

Time happens for rocks as well...

While I live now on a cliff of an Island of alluvial fill left, a bit too loosely piled, perhaps, while a glacier retreatingly melted only several thousand years ago, I've spent many years earlier meditating the history written in Arizona rock cliffs... eons of alternating oceans & deserts laying down parti-colored layers of sediment & dune, water & wind. Limestone intermixing sandstone... all before having become sculpted by wind & rain over eons more to make the spectacular spires & canyons of that territory. There is then the scattering of lava from the much more recent, yet now ancient, volcanoes which are the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff, known these days for skiing.

Time happens at so many speeds... place finds itself only in movement.

The slice of this spell of deep time carving wax is similarly dramatic. I do not fight these yearning impulses when left to my own schedule. While Stephen has been in Philadelphia I have been waxing irregular inside the sort of time it takes to move the mountains of wax... or so it seems from inside my magnivisors, those head strapped hooded lenses I wear to bring my vision down into the macro ranges necessary to carve the wax masters for bells, or earrings or rings... one of each has been current on my bench.

To get to scale useful to my work I must admit my gargantuan sensibilities, which often prove clumsy with a ruinous stroke of the tool. I study the flow of moods as I study the flow of material... positif-negativf again.

Years ago, in Sedona, I designed a hinged lily earring in two sizes. The smaller of those has had production problems which I am aiming to solve by re carving it. I began this wax last year, but have found the focus again toward finishing it. It fits nicely on a dime, to give you some scale.

The ear wire is fat in the wax because I can more easily finish it down to size after it is cast into sturdier metal. It is quite too fragile to refine in wax.

As perhaps you can visualize, it is inserted into the lobe from the back, the wire clicking into position so as to present the flower facing forward. While they always sell, I do not wish the bother of keeping them in stock, given the problems in the original. I trust this new version will allow them to be produced more gracefully.

Another extant design, for a frog ring has long wanted to be available in larger sizes. That is an essential consideration in designing rings: fingers & hands are perhaps the next most facile parts of the body after the face for expressing individuality... coming in a variety of sizes & proportion. One size does not fit all, if you remember the rings in Cracker Jack boxes. OK, I show my age. But after years designing custom rings I am cautious about involving myself again with the vicissitudes of fitting objects so precisely to such wildly organic variety, much less matching each with its own personal taste atop that!

Part of what I like about bells is that they is not quite so specific to the body...

I have been bringing this rarefied, focus back to the THIS IS IT bell about which I've written in earlier posts, these are shots showing the subtle progression as I refine each of the 126 glyphs as sculpture to hold as legible forms against the requisite degradations of molding, casting & polishing processes of production. The better I anticipate problems the easier all that might be...

I've spent three decades trying to teach my willy-nilly artist self that... Is this it?

From the vantage of Soundcliff I collect images of goings-on. I intend one day to post showing the variety of boats which pass by. Something more than a weeks ago I heard a repeating helicopter several times before looking to realise it was hauling a secession of utility poles. By the 4th or 5th time I was ready with my camera. I read later in the local paper the rarity of such obviously expensive method.... required by the remote stretches of our coastline, reached often by narrow roads not accessible to haul such lengths by truck.

That is synchronous with the process we are going through to have a leaning pole, holding our electrical service, replaced. The truck to deliver it has made it down our short road... the pole lays in the ditch, waiting for the crew which will commandeer our lane for the several hours necessary to set it... at their whim.

What must be the logistics of flying such poles in front of my camera's eyes?

Narrow segments of intensely focused time have allowed me to begin toward harvest several designs long on my books... I still study rocks.

POSITIF NEGATIF...

2008-10-14T02:01:00.000-07:00

POSITIF NEGATIF
NEGATIF POSITIF

To dance with an imperative from the bell divas
can be such a lovely thing...
especially when I have the delicate time for it...

I celebrate having had several weeks of
that sort of program.

The THIS IS IT wax
has resulted... in almost a full realization.

I'm down deep into carving subtle micro forms & the surfaces they support... which in turn must define themselves as alphabetical. After settling those 126 glyphs graphically, spacing them into construction of what will become the actual surface to be polished, lifted above some contrasting background of oxide not touched by the wheel... is the over riding example of

positif negatif

Not in the usual polarized way -- hence my spelling -- but recognizing the essential spatially creative interrelationships more as yen/yang.

My work is to study flow. If the flow of this idea was a gully washer, bringing what seemed impulse to the genuine challenge allowed that I could but joyfully accept this dance... It is, after all. my sorta song. Calligraphy has always been a tool of my expression.

Positif negatif exists in all dimensions... equal & opposite reactions... as you might remember how energy works. Even surface perceived as two dimensional does not exist without contrasting background depth, implied or actually three dimensional. That is what I must carve. What I must carve in ways which will survive to enhance several more integrations of that shift between positif negatif... the various molds to contain all the flow I was talking about... the original cast of flowing plaster investment around this first positif carving; the then dissolving flow of that wax as it is melted itself in the lost wax process, leaving only a negatif impression on the interior of that first, what will be wasted, mold; which then receives the flow of molten metal into the resultant cavity... CASTING so much of these mental perigrinations over work done while I've been actively design-carving this bell... into metal.

The production process continues in more of these translations. I have written & show some photos about the rubber mold making here

All that before going through the entire casting process, again, polishing out, again, the finished product... which might now be dizzy from all its translations.

Positif negatif Positif

Kilts, Bloomers & Horn Books...

2008-10-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

I am finally reading Howard Zinn's People's History of Of The United States. As I picked up the book this morning I found myself at the chapter introducing the period of struggle for women's suffrage. There was a description of bloomers, which resonated with my last curious post.

It offered a fair explanation for why women still might resist skirts. If anatomy suggests why men might choose kilts, the argument for bloomers against negotiating a stairway gracefully in heavy hoop skirts became symbolic of lingering societal constraints.

Skirts then come to represent oppression for women while they are touted by some... a minority, for sure!... as "freedom" for men.

It has less to do with anatomy than with culture.

In our phone visit tonight, Stephen in Minnesota, told of his attending a new musical at the Guthrie based on Little House On The Prairie. While he was watching what must have been a stage full of hoop skirts, I was working on a new bell wax which shape I told him reminded me of the horn books I'd heard about in my forth grade Kansas History class. They would have been in the background of any Laura Wilder story.

Since I found myself uncertain about my vague mental reference, I Googled to find images. Indeed, those do speak to the shape of my new bell, even more to the function of a horn book as to its form.

I am attempting to carve a two verse poem on a bell. THIS IS IT is a fixture in our home. Literally, as the name of our topmost deck, beside the door of which is a framed rendition of the poem. The cadence of these words is useful to bind a circles of truth with joy & frivolity.

This is it
& I am it
& You are it
& So is that
& He is it
& She is it
& It is it
& That is that

O It is this
& It is thus
& It is them
& It is us
& It is now
& Here It is
& Here we are
So This is it

Alphabet, the lords prayer, horn book... author James Broughton would, I hope, chuckle at all the notions of possible permutations in these images of antique teaching glyphs & words.

My experience with calligraphy teaches I must, especially at the scale I'm working, pay attention to the overall pattern the letters of the words inside my design. That is the overriding essential to my problem. Then, of course it must also be legible.

This distortion helps to show those divisions of graphic space I must use to convey literal meaning just below a unified surface which will sustain polishing as a cast metal bell.

So I share here the earliest waxing of these notions:

Once again I will get to attempt more than virtuosic carving, while that will eventually be necessary within the more technical considerations of flow. All those serifs could become rakes & combs for retaining air bubbles such as to foil easy production. Negative space becomes the potent essential. Designing toward process is much of my work.

POLITICAL PUDENDA...

2008-10-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

Or: Propaganda In The Time Of Tomatoes...

As I watched the Vice Presidential debate several nights ago on CNN I was intrigued by the "reaction graph" scrolling beneath the live visuals of talking podiums that indicated undecided men in Ohio seemed to respond positively more consistently to the female debater & undecided women to the male. Curious bedfellows is a term noting the obviously occurring cross pollination in our current politics. I have to wonder what many of those guys might have thought of another female candidate now overshadowed...

Politics has much to do with innies & outies... left & right... conservative of what is &/or liberal toward change, various versions of yin & yang, female & male, Venus & Mars...

The "Battle of the Sexes" was an archetypical joke line during my growing up, which seemed always to be most true in its lie. The old In & out suggests a Freudian viewpoint but Jung helps me understand better for myself the deeper layers. This is not an either / or argument. We each are wired to want to be in our own way relating to each other. We need each other. We do need all the story there is, especially in the give & take between the male & female selves in each of us... we all have our own particularly sexy ins & outs.

I heard today on one of our local NPR stations an interview with the guy who has started a business making kilts -- Utilikilts is the brand name [http://www.utilikilts.com]. He answered the question from the female interviewer about why men would want to wear skirts when she & her generation mostly eschews them. He answered so simply: "Anatomy".

Anatomy might thus seem curiously at odds with current fashion. Men have worn skirts & robes much longer than they have worn pants. Long pants, indeed are relatively recent in history... our country's founding fathers wore what were essentially tights, sometimes only barely lacking the codpieces of several generations before, which we no doubt would now consider foppish at best. Pants have their origin with the Mongol horse tribes, the barbarians of ancient history.

My father once told of his pride in having a pair of long pants instead of his more common knickers for his school picture in the period before WWII. Pants have long risen to the symbolic connotation of male freedom. Do you get the kilt guy's almost joking point?

Perhaps being gay I have some earlier, if not always easier, blending... yet I must admit I might define freedom by continuing to wear the tights I find habitually comfortable here in the NW under any kilt I might be considering.

Our best experiences have always been while yearning toward drift over some line or another... to join our own other. To procreate & create in all of posibility's bountifully beautiful forms. That coincides with what I think art mostly is, so I can talk this way from under several of my numerous hats.

Us & them does not make much sense when all of us are suffering through yet another lesson about the failure of dominance. We are smart enough to know we need cooperation even as we do not have ready tools to proceed beyond hesitantly stepping up to a line. Why can we get only so far as to confront from our own side?

The battle of those oppositions we call the sexes has always been ultimately about love, hasn't it?

We each talk from under several hats. None of us, no matter our resolution to steady ourselves in some adamant position, has the comfort of only one opinion. Such a mind has no center to hold. Weakness & instability are definitions of moving nowhere in ever changing times. We each have at least two minds... those define our freedom of choice. That is politics. The lines moving up & down on that TV graph were all about that. Those lines were dancing with each other... seemed to be courting each other.

I'll leave you to parse out the colors in current politics: black & white plus the entire range of grays, all atop the entire rainbow's spectrum; & the genders. I suggest we like & actually need all that variety.

In opera the term "pants role" describes a part now sung by a female soprano dressed to play a man, because her role & music were written for a castratto... one musical ideal for a man in a time not so long ago...

Anatomy = pudenda. Women would seem thus to be meant more easily to wear the constriction of pants.

Freedom for men might lie elsewhere...

One of my notions of that freedom could show art's history of the ideal in gorgeously naked Greek athletes training to stride as the soldiers in armies led by generals the likes, they might hope, of the queer conquerer Alexander the Great, who continues, I understand, to be a major strategical study for even today's generals... but don't ask, don't tell.

Some politicians can't seem to get beyond our current paranoia about the many faces of love. Such spectral fact is lost in a polarity of male or female. While I understand there are no small number in their constituencies who share that paranoia, I know, as do the humans they are, the fragility of trying to pin life onto such narrow construction.

Futilely they dig in their heels to shortsightedness. Too many have gay children or grandchildren to not be actively questioning that stance.

I don't mind verging toward writing a tract for being queer, however, I really want to keep the focus on how our polarities get bridged. I point to seeing that we all are in shifting roles. We must celebrate taking our own flavor of position, as absolutely good. That is our role in the body politic of a democracy. I am intrigued by the parsing of our national debates. I never watch television, yet I did tonight,,, wanting to see how the words were spoken. That medium gives me clues from body language, which allows me a rare celebration of that medium, when I ordinarily prefer to listen to those words on the radio.

I needed to look & to see...

In so many ways pants roles still abound... the female opera singer does double duty for those who feel castrated by a system they still don't know how to resist, even as they feel some need, because this system does not care for them either. The masculine myth is hardly democratic.

Can we learn from our love of our own sexual nuance? That part of us we know is unique? We've been studying that for eons... So were those naked Greek hunks parading themselves without the trousers which are needed to play that role now. Our game is the same, but I like the other teams uniforms better...

I've been kilting the issue...

ANATOMY MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT DESCRIBE GENDER... GENDER CERTAINLY DOES NOT PRESCRIBE FASHION. GENDER DANCES WITH FASHION...

In these times POLITICS IS DANCING WITH BOTH.

If I were tech savvy I would have a more seamless link to Sally's Tomato by Henry Mancini from Breakfast At Tiffanys for you to play in the background, while I share a shot of some of the harvest of green tomatoes sitting in my studio because our rains have begun too soon for them to ripen.

If a shot from the unsubstantiated internet follows... meaning that I have no proof of this image's integrity even as I submit it for being the political cartoon it obviously is... I trust you will remember that Masini title celebrates winking toward a moll...

We're all in political drag... may I have the next dance?

LEO TIME...

2008-08-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

Often a bit late, even though I am an early Leo... I have always celebrated both the 27th & 28th of July for as long as I can remember, there having been some disagreement in the family for which my clever child simply chose the most generous solution. I believed I was being correct in using the 28Th when I got my driver's license so many years ago, but the birth certificate Momma sent, when I got my passport much later, stated it was the 27Th... so in fact now they both are officially documented !

Stephen's mother Helen gave us this Op Art print by the Mexican artist Pablo Friedeberg as a nod, perhaps, to my boldly, if a bit pinkly, leonine aspects... even though I rarely actually blush. It has found a protected place to hang above the folded dining table where it gets little direct sunlight to fade its reds & pinks.

Stephen took me on a trip to celebrate. Even as I could have happily spent the season in our own garden, he has wanted to show me the garden at Hollyhock on Cortez Island for many years.

We drove, taking four ferries to three more islands from ours before taking another ferry to the Sunshine Coast of the Canadian mainland, visiting friends & one more island along the way. Ten days is more than I would have planned, but we needed that much for waiting in those 12 ferry lines! He is ever the consummate traveler! I could but continue to practice.

For now I will mostly note this travel by sharing the drawing I made in my round book while sitting & listening during the gathering we attended. This time we circled with a different breed...

I posted last year about this drawing book.

We visited the Royal BC Museum in Victoria & I was reminded of another similar version of this mask important during an earlier period of my life. The image attached itself to my searching mind as I contemplated this drawing.

An bowl carved of argelite continued such play...

The drawing took its own tack...

Later in the road trip I kept seeing notions of similar ilk... like this curious strut-like spacer on the power lines along the road, presumably it prevents the results of tangling winds...

Or the moon wheel covers of a beautifully restored auto also waiting to catch a ferry...

After dinner in Victoria we played at a luminary festival in the park near where we stayed. The Bucky balls captured Stephen...

Of the many views of gorgeous scenery I captured, here is but one, sandwiched by a deck plank's weathered pattern made by a long dead tree. That is life in the Northwest...

One more contemplation of blooming circularities is this first course dish which I made for one of our intimate dinners just before we left on the Canadian odyssey... a Hungarian Jicama Rose.

Here we are on Gambier Island with a map of the territory we are exploring behind us...

The shot was made with my camera supported atop a funny new toy of a tripod I'd discovered...

Finally... Leo brings annually these blooms to a cactus hanging over our bed. its red bringing 'round again the paprika of jicama roses & Freideberg.

THE MASTERS CAST...

2008-07-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

This draft got waylaid by work on my article Sculpture Is Drawing In Space that was published last month by the American Bell Association's magazine THE BELL TOWER. It is based on my post of February 13 of the same name.

This stage of the production has not been photographed much before & it is still timely. I've been trying to share studio processes more intimately this design year. I'm pleased to have rediscovered it.

I am taking some deep lessons for myself inside this season of translation... the waxes I've spent weeks have been lost... lost into the process of casting them as metal masters.

A plaster waste mold is poured around the finished wax carving & is paced into a kiln. From inside my original carved wax flows molten... leaving its impression which thus can receive molten silver in turn... transforming & quite accurately translating my wax work into durable metallic form... if all has gone right. There is possibility for metal being too cool, for instance, making for an incomplete casting. Or too much heat can result in a poor surface. All went well this time... WHEW!!!

I now get to analyse & amplify my carving further in this more dense material. The wax, while being the hardest I can find, is much softer than silver. Now more than ever I can tend to sharpening details... inside & out... I can develop the surface to a tighter polish.

Translation is always somewhat rough. The solidification of any dream becomes inevitably more crude at higher resolution. This shift determines the outer limits of available material. Unlike the wax, I cannot add to the form. I can only work inward from here. Growth becomes that beautiful negative so equally requisite...

Here you can see into the pores of a raw cast surface. There have been wild dialogues between my carved surfaces & hardening plaster... between that plaster surface & the flow of molten metal into its cavity... which shrinks while cooling, taking on such a deep complexion...

In these shots I've begun to use silicon brushes to start developing the surface...

The new version of The GINGKO Bell & a design inspired by the Hawai'ian vine we know as Split Leaf Philodendron, The MONSTERA Bell are also ready for the reworking of all those surfaces toward new degrees of perfection...

SOLSTICE SOUNDCLIFF GARDEN...

2008-06-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

Our first day of summer is typically overcast. Nonetheless, that light allowed color to glow from the lush growth in our garden. While there are plenty of neglected spots & even some substantial weed patches, my camera found views which celebrate the results of the cool & rainy days of our lingering spring weather.

The work of polishing out the new bell masters & molding them for production has kept me in deep nocturnal mode for recent weeks, so I have not gardened so much as I would wish. But I have been working to distribute more of the compost we've had delivered.

Our south lawn is shady, a composition of textures in numerous greens...

The Acanthus, or "Bear's Britches" has become an annual stalwart inhabiting that part of the garden. Its sturdy spikes are beginning to reach sunward...

Like the Lady's Mantle above the greens begin to give way to other hues. The spots on this plant for which I do not know a name, hint to remind me that it later sends up delicate spikes with small red flower balls. We are learning that the St. John's Wort we appreciate for its lively beauty of red & yellow blossoms-becoming-berries is also good for holding slopes, so we are transplanting the seedlings down on our lower reaches..

An area beneath the window over my wax desk seems like a small fireworks display... energetically sending sparks of healing blessings toward nephew David, [read about that in Stephen's blog here] for whom Stephen planted the Dianthus inside a bed already blooming with Lavatera, Allium, Peony, among others... plus a seeding bunch of Festuca grass!

The Allium is such intriguing sculpture...

The north yard is more open... sunnier for the food crops in the four raised beds & adjacent borders. The new deck sits on the edge.

The circle in the lawn is the bed of Roman chamomile which began as a cover for our cat Gertie's grave, which I've been keeping groomed & will soon cut a spiral out of it to plant more area. We love this sturdy ground cover for a story at the beginning of our acquaintance & I intend to replace large portions of the lawn with its fragrant softness...

The raised bed with a trellis is planted with snow peas, lettuce & a cabbage. It also supports several wind chimes, one a Paolo Soleri bell my parents gave me when they closed their house in Monument, Colorado.

The Cardoon, which is an artichoke's cousin, got tucked too closely between two Rhodies several years ago... I tried to move it, but too late, I'm afraid it has settled where it is. It is raising itself even taller in bloom this year, like the Mustard I am letting develop seed to save for planting later. It's obviously being a fine year for foxglove [digitalis]; there is an entire meadow of it nearby!

I'm also saving seed on both colors of Swiss chard that fed us over last winter. Their stalks are gorgeous structures...

A smoke bush gives the north border the wildest coloration combining deep silvery purples with orange accents, particularly on the undersides of the leaves!

A simply sweet small old variety of rose & the white papery Cistus also live nearby.

A Calla lily floats in the space beneath a Fuchsia...

Something newly fuzzy, a "goatsbeard" which Stephen brought home last week, is planted in front of a Hosta.

The birdhouse in the apricot tree housed a family of chickadees this spring, keeping the parents busy! I had hoped to see the young ones learn to fly, but that probably happened while I slept one morning after a nocturnal work session...

This year's big project has been the new garden on the clay slope north of Stephen's writing cottage, his Forge. It had been our typical clay, packed by the equipment which did the retaining wall a year ago. Steven Shaun helped me build the zig-zagging gravel path from which we could begin working organic material into that density to build tilth. I had a load of okara delivered, since it is a free resource from our local Island Spring Tofu factory. The material, derived from soybeans, is like wet sawdust. It seemed ideal for this project, but it does have some drawbacks... it can smell! We covered it with compost before the Open Studio to mask that increasing odor, since it did not have any opportunity to dry out in our weather. Even now I am only gingerly beginning to fork it up to add more mulch into some of the deeper areas of those new beds... I believe it is a good material -- I just wish it were more pleasant!

The result of all that process has been pleasing to watch as the plants we'd been collecting over several years in pots or temporary spots during that period of upset on our cliff settle into their new places, taking off better than could be expected.

The Lacinata kale plants which had been growing in one of the raised beds took up residence & have mostly tripled in growth! They are wonderful food, especially during the cold winter months, & can perennialize for 3-4 years in this climate, building meandering trunks & huge inflourescences of yellow blossoms.

The last of the iris dance with several white digitalis above a row of Sedum which also will live in their temporary spot for another year... there just was not enough gardening time between the rains to accomplish soil building in time to plant... There IS Always Next Year!

The next couple shots were made several weeks ago, when the Siberian iris were at their prime against a rhododendron.

This rainbow last week was the flattest one I'd ever seen... a rainstorm traveled through it as I watched...

Tahoma then came out to say her bon soir with the pink backlight of sunset...

SAINTE-CHAPPELLE INSPIRES SAINTE-CHAPPEAU...

2008-05-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

There is a small architectural confection nestled deep inside a courtyard of the Conciergerie , a medieval palace in Paris, which I found to be even more incredible to on my second visit when we were there in March. [See my posting of March 17th...] This small royal chapel is justly famous for its magnificent stained glass windows. Here is a link to a site which allows you to traverse the entire surround of those intensely colored stories.

My own photos are less fabulous than I might wish... the light was low & I had no tripod... nor would one be allowed in a space which is always crowded with some controlled number of bodies. One is, however, allowed to stay as long as the experience holds... so we lingered several hours to watch the light deepen during a winter's short afternoon. I was disappointed, however, to see the chandelier lamps turn on at what seemed too early a schedule. I realize most would not appreciate the loss in public safety suggested in my desire to watch the colors fade into meditations on dusk. They are lovely chandeliers...

Thus, then, came an unexpected revelation from the designers of this space... there are secondary decorations... mosaics made with glass tiles, along with ample gilding, along the lower walls to reflect such interior light. Even as the glories looming above lose the light of day, the interior dark of evening gleams & glitters without losing a trick!

But, first, here are the windows as seen in my camera.

The painted & gilded decoration are sumptuous...

Notice the niches of the statures in it in the next photographs... there is inspiration for a bell in the "temples" above their heads, carved as the wax which which I will share below...

But first, here is the lower chapel, for the commoners, below the lofty space with the windows you've seen above... the heavier structural vaulting of what is the foundation for the upper chapel precludes generous leaded glass lighting, so gilding becomes the stronger tool to dance in low light...

My appreciative study of the mechanique to support those immense panels of leaded glass, was attended first from the interior aided by the binoculars I carry to bring such lofty details to my myopic eyes. These shots Stephen made for me, because I'd exhausted my camera battery, help explain the iron strutwork into which those glass panels are held by the wires & clips I'd observed inside. Stone columns, supporting ironwork framing suspending glass cradled by strips of lead... all masterminded during what we used to call "the dark ages"!

To bring the immensity of Sainte-Chappelle down into the scale of a thimble-sized bell I chose to use one of those "temples" I mentioned earlier... which seemed useful as distillations of this architectural extravagance.

Never to approach more than a suggestion of such complexities mixing all those architectural materials... this bell anticipates, however, ringing its own stories...

This is the wax near completion...

Because the major stint of work on this wax was done over Easter I have dubbed it affectionatly the SAINTE -CHAPPEAU Bell... what are those temples but saint's easter bonnets !?!

WAX DESK BUBBLES...

2008-05-24T01:30:00.000-07:00

How better to break a fast than with bubbles?

Effervescent views of my wax desk...hinting a bit like
something from the last too long lingering post...

Segue to the Slull Bell wax I've been working on...

SPACE ODESSEY REDUX...

2008-04-06T22:33:00.001-07:00

Today was precisely the 40th anniversary of the opening of
2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY

Stephen & I went to see a special showing of it at our local theater this evening.

Originally written by Arthur C. Clark, who died recently,
Stanley Kubrick's film holds up remarkably well. I was struck by
its mostly simple elegance & rather stately pace.

One image I had mostly forgotten over the years
was that of the humans suspended
in a state of hibernation inside body capsules
to preserve resources on a space journey...
which reminded me as I watched this evening of
those hauntingly beautiful ancient paintings I've seen
on the cliffs of Horseshoe Canyon in Utah,
which show a curiously similar silhouette.

The scene depicting the murder of HAL,
the perfect computer-gone-bad,
had me wondering if I could kill mine...

The enigmatic embryo of the last scene is still a bit puzzling even if it has also become something of a modern archetype. I'm pleased we followed our impulse
to grab this rare opportunity to see this classic film.

While it is not exactly related, I will share images of the latest wax I'm working on. A re-design of the SKULL bell, the original of which has always been too difficult to manufacture easily in the form it exists now. This is a smaller version with more [ahem] life in the action of its clapper & the pendent loop.

Some bells are rather more involved on the mechanics & engineering side... so, I've had intensely challenging fun playing with these aspects of this carving. I've had to work through several attempts at impossible fantasies.

Soon the question about whether to decorate it
or to leave it anatomically bare boned will occupy me...

We saw a fragment of a rainbow as we ate
an early dinner before the film.
While this one was photographed several weeks ago
it seemed to end at our new little deck...
I'll share its promise in closing.