HOME FROM PARIS, RELUCTANTLY...

While I'm still dancing in a fading memories of Paris, En Route is in the Bay Area for several days, will be home for a day & then to Florida to see his mother.

He is here spotted in one of the many stops to refresh ourselves... coffee or bieres or cocktails & to rest our feet after all the happy walking we did. I was fascinated by the complexity of its lighted ceiling.

We also used the Metro to move around the city every day. It is a deliciously functional subway system & is busy at all hours of the day. It was one of the places I indulged in my favorite traveling pass time... people watching... seeing a wildly ranging population from weary working folk from every Continent, through restlessly colorful young balancing people... lovers... shoppers & tourists... business men & buskers, beautiful eyes... lips... holding subtle stories of genes mixing... faces from whom I wanted another smile...

Many Paris Metro stations seem redesigned evolutionarily in styles pertinent to their neighborhoods. This copper-sheathed one noted ones arrival [finally!] at Musee des Arts et Metiers, which we had no time to explore... we were on some other mission.

But the streets of Paris want to be walked, particularly in the Marais, where we were. The streets in this old arrondisment are narrow... fortunately motor vehicles are few.

Simple things become poignant framed inside such long history...

I'm still sorting 600+ images, piles of neglected paper on my desk & then feeling the tug between blog & wax...

TIME!

We had coffee behind this clock in Musee d'Orsay, which has been telling time since this building was originally a grand train station & is now a grand museum containing fabulous collection of early twentieth century art... lots of the Art Nouveau which Paris is so rich in.

But then, the city is so rich in everything. We visited more than a dozen of the city's hundreds of museums. A pass is available which allows one access to many of them without waiting in line for tickets.

The crypt beneath the parvis in front of the Notre Dame was illuminating about the deep history of the Roman settlement which became Paris. It was called Luticia & these foundations were discovered when the medieval buildings, which had long occupied this space, were removed to give more air around the cathedral.

I was intrigued by the under floor heating system, which ducts are indicated by the red lights in this view.

This archaeology is covered by the grey paving seen from our hike to the top of the cathedral's bell tower.

I wonder what Monet thought about such history as he painted this one of many giving credence to this famous facade...

Directly in front of the Cathedral's portal is the Mile Zero marker. the point from which distance to anywhere was France is measured. It signified the beginning of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which Stephen has completed, albeit not on foot along the traditional route. But his feet here recall that beginning...

Inside the walls which look almost castle-like in the shot above, which I like in black & white, Notre Dame's famous rose windows offered a challenge for my camera...

Details of the old chandelier, displayed in rather decrepit state, suggests potential resurection as a bell...

My favorite of the images I made up above the roof of the Cathedral in the gallery of guardian gargoyles is this peek through a quatrafoil... showing one of the water spouts...

The Gustav Moreau museum, his studio, has a marvelous spiral staircase almost as convoluted as his work, many unfinished canvases of which were hung frame to frame in this enviable workspace.

This detail of one painting is illustrative of his work.

Another spiraling form caught my imagination in the Musee d'Orsay which is an inspiring space mentioned earlier but shown below, yet I add this curious brush also found there both because I have a bit of a brush fetish & because I have no idea what this was used for. My imagination runs a bit wild...

The vast space originally collecting trains now collects artwork from the era when is was first built around the turn of the last century.

The arched space has numerous supporting arches which have been cleverly closed to create galleries & to contain modern ventilation, in a way leaving much to appreciate of the terra cotta ceiling tiles.

There are fabulous collections of Art Nouveau furnishings which sometimes echo such space...

A model of another roof presents a further take on the mechanical aspects of basic geometry.

An allegorical figure along the roof line captured a bit of sunlight on an overcast day. We found weather that week not unlike typical Seattle in this season... light rain, the occasional downpour, & celebratory sun-breaks like this...

While I couldn't grab this rather baroque nouveau bon bitty mot of a mirror in better focus, I was seduced by its slippery shape... perhaps as preparation toward making a self portrait in a shop window candlestick.

The Musee du Monde Arabe had intrigued me on my first visit to Paris because of the system of light control on its facade. Built like clockwork or a camera oculus, aluminum leaves spiral to close the amount of light entering, not unlike mid-eastern latticework, taken well toward some mechanical extravagance.

Its collection was more interesting than we had time to absorb, yet I saw inspiration for bells in these animal shaped ewers.

The Museee des Arts Decoratifs was an exploration I made first on my own, knowing such to be a more personal interest, but Stephen joined me for a second visit, when we took in the section on publicity & a fascinating exhibit celebrating the color RED. It is housed in a wing of the Louvre, as seen from this view from the Tuilleries gardens.

It had two rooms displaying jewelry, inside which no pictures were allowed, as if one could use the rather disfunctional lighting to grab any image. I was disappointed in not being able to see some pieces at all, nuch less to veiw into their fullness of form or function. But it did BLING!

These pieces were not there but they are of a style which was an early influence. I saw them in the Musee de Cluny...

The older Opera Garnier is the one with Chagall's ceiling paintng, but we were staying near the Opera Bastille which is a modern building.

BASTILE...

Remnants of the ancient prison are to be found in the Place de la Bastille Metro station which delivered us near the Zen Center where we had a studio much like the one we enjoyed on my first visit. Removed into a courtyard we enjoyed delicious quiet with the capability to make morning coffee & to sup simply, as we did several times. This view of the cicle shows the Opera building which replaces the centerpiece of the revoution with a glassy facade.

I have loved this gilded angelic figure atop his column centering this traffic circle as one of my first landmarks from my first visit. The "M" designates the Metro station we used.

We enjoyed the more usual attractions like the Eiffel Tower at night...

& the Arch de Triompe.

LOUVRE...

The Louvre, of course, is worth one's lifetime, being perhaps the largest trove of art in the world. I've only ever spent only two days there... now I can only look forward to the completion of that study.

The old palace is enhanced, in my opinion, by its new pyramid entrance, under which has been dug deep into the ancient courtyard, making a reception area & cafeteria... as well as an entire shopping mall! It provides a connection between the three vast wings, allowing one to trvese what one used to have to walk the entire peremeters of.

This time I saw the Mona Lisa... at a moment with a smaller than predictible number of the consumers of Iconoplasty who have caused this institution to be displayed like a corpse on the slab behind glass as the last defense, knowing there must be cameras recording every visitor's every move.

Life in peril naturally becomes some surprizingly calm version of herself... That's her allure!!!

I found many stimulations toward work I would want to do toward the "Table Slave" series... or for bells...

I am reminded that a hippocampus I saw in the Uffizzi was the original notion which evolved to become the SEAHORSE Bell... It would seem I am entitled to revisit that idea... I do prefer living in a world which offers at least several choices...

I've always had a thing for tassels... which were one of my symbolic signatures when I was a young painter.

This gallery in the Louvre contained the crown jewels...

A case full of snuff boxes delayed my seeing them...

Along with these objects I'd seen only drawings of... suggesting mysterious bells...

MUSEE BRANLY

The new Musee du Quai Branly, an ethnographic museum, became an unexpected favorite... we went for three explorations & only began to apprehend how well the concept of the architecture created a rich experience of remove into the earlier parts of our psyche we tend to view as other.

An imposing glass wall running along the sidewalk claims the site from the Seine without hiding the fascinating contemporary building & shields a garden dropping gently beneath the bean-like hulk of the museum rising above. It is planted with lighted lucite rods which project color onto the underside of the building at night. The nearby Eiffel Tower disappears as the walk collects the stream of current humanity, with the request to form a queue for tickets to swim upstream from this symbolic conceptual river, La Rivere is the concept of this museum, not unlike the watery one at our back, flowing through the city,

Fortunately we had purchased passes which allowed us to skip waiting in such lines at most of the city's museums. Even-so I noted screens showing enticing images of objects from the museum to those who did have to wait.

Up out & around, one last surprising peek of Eiffel's archetype through neighboring buildings finally introduces the main lobby surrounding a large multi floored glass climate controlled cylinder rising from basement to roof, housing the storage of an immense collection of musical instruments.

Continuing along a undulating walkway with projections of water on the floor brings one ever closer to the mechanique of ducts & wiring hanging from the ever more impending ceiling, which is in fact the floor of this pod which was seen lit by those garden lights.What seemed on our first visit to be a puzzlingly long journey became an intriguing architectural concept transforming modernity into a personal expedition back into the archetypal "native" time of humans living before our industrial age. The path closes in like a dark birth canal at one place before opening into a world of ethnographic study in the main volumes of the display space. The building's interior begins to inform its exterior in an unusual dialogue.

The walls become more inviting from raw concrete to sculpted forms covered with thick saddle weight cowhide... the invitation to touch is irresistible! This hands-on aspect brings one into various multi media opportunities to interact with & to study forms of everyday art which made the lives of these peoples richly complex in what seem like simpler times. We each still have so much of that primitive heritage in our psyche. The tactile invitation seemed to connect me with my fingers in a tellingly visceral way...

Undulating interior walls formed a central canyon sculpted in this leather covered adobe so that many small carrells were formed with intimate seating for one or two bodies to share video terminals offering interactive menus of archival film, music & information, telling deeper stories to those who chose to explore further the stimulation of objects displayed nearby. These walls were low compared to the immense amorphously open space of the building. Touching that rather raw organic surface grounded one in an interesting ways while it also became an intriguing palette to inform one in non verbal ways.

I thought much about my friend Jane, whose sighted fingers would love finding tactile access to information in that leather embossed with a floor plan of a pueblo, for instance, or a temple complex in Southeastern Asia in low relief above a cast bronze model explaining its roof's form. Braille plaques would assist her with more formal language, but my finger tips also enjoyed tasting such strongly tactile information. My eyes could appreciate the lovely subtle visuals of that floor plan as well... this museum captivated many sensibilities & felt ever more right to my curiosity.

Rectilinear boxes seen from the street, attached like some space station made of modules onto the generally amorphous pod-like architectural assemblage become carrels in which to study various cultures. Handsomely lighted cases presented the huge collection in smaller studies of carvings in wood or bone or metal, constructions of fabric or feathers, weapons & tools, fashions & exotic ritual objects. The transparency & reflection of so much glass were used to blend invitations to move around through what continued to be an exciting journey presenting so much intimate & very personal history in the conceptual liquidity of La Rivere... this river of primordial time & place now mostly lost to those of us who use clocks to tell time. .

A forest of larger totemic carvings commanded some of the lofty space, sharing it with several mezzanines floating like Aztec cubist clouds, continuing the sculpted visuals suggesting more of the hand-made than our habitual geometries. These were further galleries & a multimedia space where one could access yet more of the archival music recordings & film. There seems a lifetime of study available in this museum, which continued to blossom for me. I want to return again... & again... turning three times.

WEATHER

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...

HAWAI'I: BEFORE THE YEAR ENDS...

I am aware of the date as I begin to write this somewhat after New Year...

I'm just enjoying a bit of pretense in a system older than my relationship with Monsieur Silha...

That of a tradition having a spell of deep quiet time after the studio's more external work is finished. There is a word for this quality of time: HALCYON, a mythical presence of calm seas at solstice.

These years we seem always to be rushing off earlier than my own body's timing might wish to celebrate toward more active ways what is nonetheless a poignant season.

I take my idylls now as I can find them...

This year's travel did give me a fine alternate version of that sort of celebration: we traded our smaller Island for the biggest one of Hawai'i. We flew on the 18th inside the becoming usual vicissitudes of cancelled flights & reschedules, but arrived only a few hours later than we'd expected at our Vashon friends John & Glenn's home in Captain Cook, south of Kona on the western side of the world's tallest mountain, an active volcano whose height must be measured from the ocean's floor. Whew!

As with our visit to INDIA three years ago, we observed curious juxtapositions of northern holiday paraphernalia on the tropics: Colored lights on wreaths or even garlands of pine were common, but they also hung out in palm trees! On that earlier trip, when we spent Christmas on the beaches of Goa, such things were more unexpected, but our fiftieth state could hardly be immune to such well marketed traditions. Nevertheless, my humbug is happy to be allowed to continue practicing ignoring ever more of it...

But how could even such a flaw in my character remain disgruntled when presented with the warmth, the verdant blossoms plus the visuals of even more exotically colorful fish through a snorkel mask?!?

Or decorations like this:



Unexpected examples of how the holidays coordinate with tropical fauna were the numerous poinsettias blooming in gardens & even seeming wild along the roads. The Kona side is dry, rather desert-like, being leeward of the three volcanic peaks of this mountain. These plants are Mexican in origin & love such dry tropical situations.

There is nothing quite like that color. It has an artificial quality, enhanced by that texture of flocked velvet... I found myself constantly captivated by my own weary revusion toward that most comercial holiday flower. This was my most effulgent sighting:



But, I was looking at time... timing... rhythms.

Halcyon is, by supposition, if not definition, quite damnedly ephemeral.

TEAPOT SEDONA...KATE & WILLI... KONA...

While I wait for myself to make the larger postings about Hawai'i, I will celebrate a deep friendship renewed there when we visited Willi & Kate Jacobson the 24th of December. They live near where we were visiting on the Kona coast... yes, these are friends of mine going back into the '70s. Several days later in our trip we will visit some friends of Stephen's with similar vintage...

He made this shot of Willi & me bridging deliciously dissonant color schemes:



Elliot -- whose parents made our last visit together in my first Seattle apartment, the Cabinet, on their first night away from him as a baby -- declared himself resultantly independent & went to his computer, leaving two adult couples to discover commonalities in our new & old.



Now, we are mostly comfortable in our middle aged versions of history, even as we recall what might have been more lively than we can now afford to remember... or not. We don't do life so badly now...

I remember Willi first in 1975 for some really big black gutsy pots I met early in my Sedona arrival. Later his production studio became a local institution nurturing piecework jobs for numerous folk who verged into my curass during that period. Somewhere in there I commissioned from him the tea set which we regularly love to use now on Vashon Island.



I have the first prototype cup he made for me, an archetypal form referencing the essentials of wheel thrown clay. Strength & ease... but a bit larger & more open than the final versions.



I've long loved the word Astragal which describes such horizontal ribbing. Willi explored this in the numerous manifestations as each cup took its own variation of shape & proportion. Even longer have I loved taking tea from the soulful richness of this set, particularly from those favorite cups which tuck more closely into astragalic puckering rims...



Check out Kate & Willi's collaborations in current work at:

http://www.jacobson-studio.com/