CONDENSATION...

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...

CHTHONIC TIME...

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.

SPACE ODESSEY REDUX...

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.

GINGKO WAX EVOLUTION...

I have been deeply involved with the new GINGKO wax for the last week.



I record here another stage in that slow progress.
Compare the current shell against the thickness
shown in the photographs of the last post...
Obviously much of this work has been interior.



Thus I have also worked the clapper through two waxes,
learning its need to have full 'round presence.

This design has taken a softer, more round shouldered aspect.
Something evolving out of a deco notion,
which I remember now & again with the phrase
"like a Studebaker"
describing some quality which is often
vaguely embarrassing for some reason.



My quintessential Studebaker
would be the black one my uncle Vernon owned
when I was a 4 or 5 year old kid
in northwestern Kansas in 1949 or 1950.

My memory goes on a unique adventure
with my father's thus rather exotic twin & his wife,
leaving my parents at home,
running away to see the picture show in town.

Inside thiat space capsule I first became entranced by the
sweetness of smoke...
curls from his forbidden cigarette remain
seductive in my boy baptist mind.

These memories are rather liquid...
I've been dunk-juggling them most of a lifetime.
So I dance as carver describing a dynamic of slick bullet points
projecting from resistantly responding curves.

Aerodynamic automobile design works
with similar considerations as the flow
about which I have been writing.

This carving wraps a good deal of such energy around the shoulder...



Refining it differently than the version now in production...

SCULPTURE IS DRAWING IN SPACE...

These images are either side of a wax
toward a bell design begun several years ago...
I have no idea whether I will ever finish it.

They become rather like "emoticons" for this post.

[There are numerous photos later in this post,
feel free to scroll down at any time you are tired of reading...
Remember: you may
click on any of these images to see a larger version.]

I've been silent of late. I arrive here now to show explanation...

Winter is design time in my calendar of decades' habit. I go quite non-verbal as I dive into form... waxing, literally, along with the requisite equivalent waning, of course.

Wax being my medium... I struggle with both it & these words.

I come to some notion that music might often exist first in the physical form of its instrument. While I do not consider the bells "musical instruments" in any strict form, they do make sound... they have voice. Voice out of numerous, inexplicably variable, qualities a particular form my wax carved imaginations might acquire translated into metal.

The very hard wax that I prefer is even so quite a non-resonant material. Still, nearly all materials have resonance at some level, be that a sustaining ring or a thud nearer to the death of sound inside near silence of plush.

Or of that deeper chthonic time-space noise which is mama magma's gift.

I must believe, then, that I can project, from what I feel in the "hearing bones" of my imagination, how the sound of this wax bell might resonate when cast... honed through subtle changes due to polishing of that master, then the shrinkages of second generation waxes replicated by a rubber mold... those parts of the involved translation of a production bell into my line... all resulting hopefully in a "good voice"...

That is some projection!

At this stage I am working with the visuals as sculptural form, both positive & negative versions which must consider the ways molten metal or wax will eventually flow into the several interim molds requisite for translation by the process of lost wax casting.

Ultimately it boils all down to flow...

Sound has much about flow in ephemeral ways. A tuba's sound resonates with its physical form; a fat column of thus more slowly resonant air pushed from loose lips. A clarinet's form produces a voice with a similar column of air yet quite different for its direct form... & its origination of breath through a reeded mouthpiece.

A violin, however, dances with air in different ways... horsehair scraping on gut amplified by crafty negative volume inside woodshape... more ephemerally about material vibration & less about breath.

All sound evolves from vibration of material form, columns of air, oscillating strings or the resonance resulting from a strike between two material forms... the strike of hand on a drum's head or a bell's clapper upon its sound bow.

Bell sound is then first of all... percussive.

So I play with wax as both sculpting the essential visual shape of the idea so as also to promote the flow of materials requisite for its production & then, to an even greater degree, the flow of vibration within the resultant form.

Such process rather becomes one long "negative" drawing by strokes of removal.

Drawing in three dimensions toward the center... A drawing on paper can never, no matter how many variations, accommodate very well the development of a design that must exist in fully rounded space. But by the time I have made all those drawings into my wax, I have carved a bell.

Beginning with a block of wax I "draw" first with a saw, then with files & burrs, constructing & construing a 3D "canvas" into which I can continue to draw with stylus & graver-like tools. I draw lines moving around the ever-refining wax form, erasing with broader strokes, refining surfaces for more drawing. Deeper into form then the ever more finely realized idea can find surface & form on & in which it can develop. Eye-mind-hand sees ever more completely what ultimately becomes, for me, a rather fully rounded universe.

I get to experience then how much less than god-like I am at creation. My waxes are such small universes, with such limitations. Yet they are 3D forms inviting sound... a possible fourth dimension.

I would only invite some fifth... that of delight in response to that sound... I get to observe a certain satisfactory proof of that, often while the bells collect their humans at the displays in my studio.

Drawing becomes whittling. I repeat the common story of Michelangelo explaining that his sculpture was simply removing whatever might be extraneous, releasing the form trapped inside the rough stone...

I must trust there is a bell inside my chunk of wax. I must celebrate the little bit of knowledge I have about what makes a good bell. I must draw it out... inviting solid chunk to reduce gracefully down into a shell thin enough to imperceptibly move, to vibrate pleasantly when its clapper strikes... all at miniature scale, still... audible.

So the bells have to do with time in intricate ways. Resonance, at base, is time.

Then, as I have danced with the bells these 26 years I have come to appreciate their archetypal rhythmic replication of the primitive calendar. After winter solstice comes gestation of new life toward the sexual market of spring. Then look forward to the various lessons one can take in the resultant long harvest.

So there is some pressure. My goal is now to produce what will support such ultimate harvest. What I am working on now might not come to market for a year or more. Still... I am more actively working to push it toward production in time for this season's long harvest.


The MONSTERA DELICIOSA that fascinated me in Hawai’i broke my fast into this season’s creative spell... this wax is now waiting for me to refine my touch toward finishing it.

This constricted medallion, a detail on the BON MARCHE building in Seattle has long captivated me with its simple wheat & flower forms supported by dramatic deco spirals.

The CLADDAUGH bell I carved last year was legitimately critiqued for having a four leafed clover instead of a more proper shamrock. I have set out to correct that...

I would say more about my carving ruminations but for the knowlege that those are better & best stayed, sub-verbally attempting description of subliminal experience.

Most recently a new verion of GINGKO bell has been ariving, carefully reducing this popular design slightly into more comfortable size, as well as to explore evolution rounding the "cow bell" form into an even more graceful hand & hug...

I am exploring a repetition of ribbing in these designs, a pattern which affects & is much affected by flow: of material in casting as well as the microscopic flow of molecules along surfaces during polishing...

These last views, into the developing sound chamber, show the loop from which the clapper will hang... growing out of still too thick walls...

Resonance, visual & physical. Elusive. Ephemeral...