To Ride A Cock Horse...

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall have music wherever she goes

That Elizabethan story seems somehow apropos for recent days... Here is our mountain, Tahoma, several mornings ago in one of those hats which she sometimes wears as Our Lady of the Sunrise...

Chapeaux & scarves, necklaces of mist & halos of linticular clouds, lifting in vertical series above her, all can be parts of her drag in our daily views of her from Soundcliff... when she isn't hiding altogether for weeks behind her foggy dressing screen. Is she having bad hair days? Or is she off visiting her sister Shasta for tea? I do suspect she travels in some manner, being volcanic at root. But what a cosmic white horse that mount might be!

All those nursery rhyme bells & rings suit my version of this story to accessorize her further. I love playing jeweler in a mythology of her court! I am working on both ring designs & bells at present... One is the original wax study of the ROCKING HORSE BELL which is currently already in production as a smaller version. This older, too large wax has been sitting on my desk for several years beckoning with a certain elan which the production version lacks.

Its original deep purple color has faded to a faint translucent blue in the sunlight... It was beginning to crack. It has often wished to be saved into metal, if for no other than archival reasons, like a drawing. Even for that degree of preservation it needed some repair & further resolution, so I've enjoyed following the impulse to pick it up again this week.

Each year as I begin the design process I go into a box of waxes, put away during the clean-up for Open Studio, which did not reach completion during the last season. These come out again on the desk to stimulate new consideration. Often designs have joined this lineup for several years before finding enough fullness of attention & maturity to become part of the production line. Some, like this horse, are studies or preliminary stages. This wax seems to have retained some deeper values, even as it has another version already in production.

This original carving was always a bit too big for wearability, but it has a wonderful aspect of "toy-ness" to it... rocking quite nicely! I recall an era when I was working with a play therapist who turned me on to the notion of archetypes which is so important to my thinking ever since. I discovered Jungian validation for an old habit of playing, well into high school, in the sandpile on the farm, making architectural models when some of my uncles believed I ought to be working in the fields. I discovered my own version of farming as I made arrangements in sand trays with toys & objects from the therapist's collection about which he would later make lively analysis.

I love playing in the real with objects which have aspects of importance for holding deeper idea. Sacred play. Important toys. This bell wax seems to have taken on some of those values, so I find energy to bring it along with more attention toward casting.

I have fallen in love with this wax all over again, as I must in order to do such intimate work.

Perhaps this view of the translucency in the faded wax, contrasting to the new dark wax additions will defend my emotion. I am reminded of the term the Chinese use to describe one color range in jade carvings... muttonfat. All this light filled quality will shift after casting into the weight & surface reflection of silver... literally lost in translation.

Enjoying this moment seems indeed to be its own sort of aesthetically important sacred play...

Quiet...

I am aware of a sweet rarity this morning which I remember with such appreciation because it has to do with an exterior quality meshing with an interior receptivity to allow my hanging... suspended in silence.


Nothing absolute... I hear the odd bit of birdsong now or again of a plane somewhere far & low. I know the world has not stopped... so what is different? It is first about my not really having "started"... yet, other mornings my brain is nattering or nearly booming, even, before I open my eyes to the big picture which unfolds just beyond the comforter.

Another aspect for appreciation of quiet is solitude. It has long been rare to share quiet. I remember that from days hiking in Arizona, taking the pulse of a relationship with a companion on the trail... Some times we would find the sweetest conversations with our eyes & ear open & our mouths shut. But that was a rare thing.

Most humans seem to need to fill time with chat. Silence has come to suggest a lack of connection, when it could also be filled with the subtle discernment of absolute connection through such awareness it need not be sullied by the clumsy translations into words.

That applies to written words as well, I come again to know. Perhaps I ought to stop & listen without feeling compelled to write about my rare enjoyment...


Stephen left very early for a two day travel to Spokane, calling me just as I was enjoying having discovered the pot of coffee he'd made, but didn't have time to bring up, as usual, to be waiting on my bed table when I opened my eyes... It was just as happy a love-gift found on the kitchen counter!

So I have the solitude & the silence. Now comes a bit of the sun he reported having in that call from beyond the Cascades. It was dark & soggy when he left. Our rains have been reluctantly giving over to the promises of a clearing break. What we have been experiencing here is not so different than the monsoons we would avoid if planning a trip to the tropics...

Solitude, Silence & Sun breaking through what remains rather overcast. Solitude has changed by the arrival of my bookkeeper, now working at the studio's computer... I have thus also broken the silence with another conversation... So, the moment, it would seem, has passed. Yet as I return to my bed & laptop I find a second calm. I must be working this from within... Hurrah!

This depth of quiet is part of studio... That word so vague because it describes a vast variety of containers for so much, having so many forms in creative endeavor. It is, in this sense, a state of mind... a state of soul. It is receptivity. It is, like the roots of the word, about study... I feel content to stay open even as I practice again losing the delicacies of the early mood, while yet retaining as much as I can of such a gift in awareness. Having had it has reminded me of possibility. Having had it, it is mine again & now I can move with more grace into the middle processes of actually working to live my creativity.

That middle is so very different than the liminal state where one works such ephemeral possibilities so easily toward such fabulous probabilities... all without lifting a finger... Unless like some cartoon of the Biblical Godhead Pointing! But my artist ultimately must involve herself with so much more of the mundane stuffs... the middle place is to struggle with both ideas & materials.

I have brought these words through a passage which has attached the need to actually go to work in the studio full of wax, metal, & tools, yet I encourage trying to hold moments like the beginning for the energy which comes when one can allow oneself to sit for awhile gorging on quiet. Work happens best when it works through both places...

The ABC's Of It...

The week has passed with some progress at the wax desk, even as I am reminded how difficult it is, in the best of timing, to focus down into those small spaces from the infinitely larger scale of processes in ordinary life.

The scale of systems involving weather patterns, for example: weeks of incessant rain; recently with notable wind storms in addition; watching the drainage systems on the soils of our road & cliff... seeing movement; hearing in addition the fell sounds of major tree trimming work, which feels murderously unsettling... even as I look forward to the change of light for new planting; then going two evenings into the city's McCaw Hall for performances of both the ballet & the opera within the same week; all making major distractions even before those I can so easily invent for myself inside the very space that is studied to creatively isolate me.

I must travel large distances to get down into those realms inside the magni-visor's magnification where a millimeter is ten times the size of the tool I must wield... micro climates can evidence weather patterns as well.

The wax showing the most progress is a revision of a popular design, the ALPHABET bell. The original pattern suffers from a weak skirt, or sound bow, which rarely stays easily round & sturdy through the production processes. There are often designs which suffer from the fact I do the work in the real time/space of a single wax, so that it contains, like a painting, all the processes of its changes & repairs coming into reality.

The word palimpsest comes to mind even as it isn't quite so directly applicable as in a painting.

Still, the vicissitude of doing repairs in wax does leave a shadow of less solid physics in the form of wax structure weakenend by my remelting & re-fusing the material. The texture suffers into what is softer, mushier, lacking character & refusing in turn to take & to keep detail like the original.

This shows the beginning: a new, slightly smaller wax blocked to the basic shape of the original bell, with the drawing of the first glyphs. I am keeping the composition, I am simply recarving it with the production considerations in mind to make it stronger & smoother in the flow.

There is the necessity to think of the several parts of the process when the design must function in liquidity. The wax must flow out of the investment mold, the molten metal must flow in to replace the wax. Then again the wax must flow smoothly into the rubber production mold... so a good design must not unduly obstruct such important procession of such material. In fact it must do all it can to promote smooth & efficient flow, minimizing the rough surfaces & deeper porosity which can result from such turbulence.

One must begin to turn one's thinking inside out between the positives & negatives in which these processes exist during various stages. During the mold cutting I am dealing quite literally with a palpable version of such negative space as it has become filled with rubber vulcanized round the bell. Inside that shell one must imagine the liquid wax flowing. Flow is important to what wants ultimately to be sturdy in stasis...

The technique I prefer is one of subtraction rather than addition... carving away in a hard, dense wax more like a plastic than anything candle-like... so I often answer the question as to whether I draw my designs first by saying that I do nothing else. I mean, first I must prepare a sculptural ground upon which to do the drawing which would be impossible to put onto a single flat paper... so I sculpturally draw the form in the wax material, bringing it to the basic size in space of the concept, giving it the rough configuration in three dimensions. Is not even that "drawing" at some level?

I need this form to conform to the idea, even inside the search toward the resolve of that idea, before I have what corresponds to a piece of drawing paper as it would relate to a canvas if I were painting. I need a three dimensional "canvas" on which to begin composing the arrangement of, for instance, the glyphs of the alphabet which make this bell's composition.

Of course, I can grab the notion of a sculptural concept on a sheet of paper, often with some useful facility to show much which can be extrapolated or groked as a larger idea having fullness in the round. I do draw in that way as well, but sculpture obviously has not just a front & a back, but exists equally at where paper has only invisible edges....














Thus a finished wax exists as the result of hundreds of drawings made on material no longer there... erasure as drawing, perhaps. Or would that be some sort of negative palempsest? I'm deliciously wallowing in these concepts while you are probably confused while I attempt to share parts of my play during these deep nights working...

Argentium Mist...

This morning light seems full of new clarity & brilliance, inside the remnants of last night's fog. I worked at the wax desk last night until after 1 o'clock this morning... which sentense contains the paradox of my prefered schedule. The extraordinary time deep between ordinary days has always been creative elixer to my artist...

The water of the Sound seems to be driven toward some errand in the south, moving with a deep determination & wasting little energy making waves of any stronger texture than a rather angry corduroy. I've been attemting to catch this photographically, missing, of course, the long low loop of eagle flight that happened while my fingers wrote on my laptop, sitting here with coffee in bed, watching this show.

My attention is torn & leaking between these ways... digitally recording a life rather lived more organically. Understanding the impossibility to resist attempting to capture the expanses of sensory light. The wax work is calling, even as I am hungry... Stephen says there are bagels in the toaster oven. offering the additional promise of at least a bit of the time together which was postponed last night when he was getting home from a day in the city just as I was getting into my wax groove.

So I can eat, retaining other apetites, & return to the wax... I've begun recarving the Alphabet Bell... I want to make it a bit more compact, tidy, & thus easier to produce, while retaining its original composition & essense.

Waxing While The Moon Wanes...

The time capsule begins to break open, having protected through the dark annual passage what is to be birthed anew on this side. In my case this is represented by a block of hard wax... I have begun to carve. This seems mundane... Applying tools to inert matter. Is it really a birth? It is actually still much about gestation. I am working again with the early visual & sculptural parts of my process after so much dreaming in dormancy. The evolution begins slowly... Haltingly.

Already I have several mornings invested in this first paragraph.

There has been a log boom passing, pulled by a tugboat, yesterday about this time... full of sea-lions barking. Another tugged two days worth of barges, both piled full with squashed automobiles. Several large ships, this morning or last, have come up or gone down the channel... Still I am not inspired to write, even as an eagle of inspiration, just sighted, already has flown back into what was also true yesterday.

Chill dull greys & still icy dun descriptions... Nothing blooms in my words for this turning. Mornings are not now the time for it... These are pages of the calendar which would be lit from below & inside, by hidden coals if at all. This should be a month or two only of deep nights.

There holds the promise, like kindling unsure of the match, to come a springtime bursting with production, but first is this sweet time which so pesters those who do not know how tenuous is early creation. They fidget with its lacking even the impulse toward such promise... As being so un-formed... Yes. Or lazy...Yes. Please... Allow it to be! Or even quite too unpredictable... of course! It is necessarily thus... Let us be!

I am remembering fondly one era during which I came to enjoy the long play of a quiet dialogue with an unseen appreciator. He who might arrange some logical pretext to visit down in the shared studio of the Bothy during the hours of my late sleep above, on such mornings as these. He had reason enough to find some garden tool, yet would be more surely there to apprise & assay the night's progress in miniature, a showing of my creative process.

The season's growing collection of wax fantasies would be slowly stepping by turns into the music of ever more translucent light. There would be those who had long been discussed in conceptual thrills before being drawn out more onto pages of paper, working through known inherent problems... Perhaps even existing in several versions as schizophrenic wax studies... contemplating or mocking, even, each other's faults or possibilities. There usually would be a front runner or two, having the combination of both vitality & maturity which propel some ideas forward allowing almost too little time to appreciate their heady process of coming fully to be.

Some early introductions might be awkward impulses prized only hours ago from a block of green wax, like clunky interlopers of first meetings with Michangelo's slaves struggling out of their stone. Others might be rather more like old friends, looking in again this season for renewal & possible inclusion... knowing that in this culture not all eventual stars arrive full blown.

Like an elf for the cobbler, I would set up such show as I could, anticipating such subtle critique as might not be commented for the several more days till we might speak in the real over drinks or dinner. Such was life then, on Avalon, "the ranch" in northern California where I worked the decade before I moved North for the turning of the millennium. All is rather different now, but for the anticipation I still maintain each year in similar timing to being able to watch for myself the building of such a collection.

Not much yet to see, but, I am setting the stage, as you read... prepping & rehearsing these dances toward the private ball masque on my carving desk.

Awake Before Dawn...

Sodden silk studded with fading sequins of city lights.
Buoy's blink holding steadier beat of those
veiled inside a squall... already passed.
Droplet lenses on window glass momentarily multiply such signals
before another density obscures all behind,
into bands of dark & darker.

I'm up much earlier than usual, listening to new versions of the old chants which are habitual to my 30 year long journal process. I have long celebrated susposed incarnations I've had as monks in various ancient scriptoria... reed pens dipped in hand ground ink staining pypyrus or parchment having given way now to digital blips in an iBook!

The rain has become incessant... for at least half the number of days which would qualify us for "Biblical Proprotions". I wonder in such times how the First Nation peoples could possibly have survived here living under split cedar boards & woven cedar bark... yet, as the light brightens, inside what will not today become one of our famously celebrated "sunbreaks", I am enthralled by an etherial beauty of almost amethyst light reflecting off peckish waves green with contrastingly spectral oxides of chrome. They surely lived inside this water's poetry, as I am now learning how... having almost forgotten that other version I lived even longer, during this current lifetime, in sunny southwestern rocks.

Time to take a bowl of the brown rice I've been cooking while rebuilding the fire before coming back up to bed to finish with these words with a last cup of coffee down to the studio. There is further finishing work to do on the inventory before I can dive into yet more of these waters... I am ready & anxious to give birth my design year.

Walking On Winter Water...

Gordon & Stephen

...a few days before Solstice on Whidbey Island...

Second Monday of the New Year...

Back to the proclivity of writing on Monday, it would seem. However this mostly is to be a shorter post to front & to ameliorate my recent excess in verbosity. For any reader coming to that recap as introduction to my blog I ought to offer an apology! I am glad all that is out there, if for no other reason than that I am thus less burdened in here. Sometimes it seems I just gotta write it out or else live with some sort of cramp...

The day outside the window shows slices of titanium & well faded velvet... It has continued more or less to rain, as it was doing late last afternoon while I picked a salad of spinach, red mustard & arugula... greens made sturdy by being planted too late yet surviving the struggles with cold & Solstice dark. They made a fine winter salad with that tenacity.

The happier harvest was a batch of the Mashua tubers Stephen has been after me to dig. Those vaguely rude shapes of waxy golden white, blushing purple & pink, are the favorite wintertime treat from our garden. The vines, which covered their trellis this summer with handsome dense foliage & which were blooming during December are still green & mostly vital. Our frosts have been light.

When Doug-OH! & I dug some at Thanksgiving the crunchy starchy guys, with a zippy nasturtium bite, were still small. I found that they had sized up nicely during the intervening month. Most plant's roots had clumps with 3 or 4 in the six-inch range & then twice that number more in various finger-like sizes. We enjoy them best sliced thinly as raw nibbles, but they are delicious when roasted as well... mellowing while they soften. The trick is saving back enough to replant!


I am trying to encourage other gardeners to grow this rewarding plant. It is a Peruvian nasturtium which was grown by the Incas as a starch. It has small beautifully lobed leaves, vining densely. Leading tips are tasty as in summer salads. Small orange flowers come along to grace late fall's dwindling stock of decorative edibles. Then the winter taste bomb bonanza of tubers brings this plant to the top of my gardener's list. Let me know if you want seed...

A Late Long Slow Recap of 2005...

Begun January 2, 2006

This Great Sloshing Of Gravity...

I have worked to write something of a recap of my year before this mellow holiday mood gets dissipated into the maw of a voracious new calendar.

Our weather has calmed today after days of impressive winds & extraordinary tidal action, all of which has prompted consideration & a bit of research to remind how all sorts of forces, lunar & solar, mix in this dance of gravitational fields affecting our liquidly gaseous world... the bits of its crust on which we can stand seem rather more fragile than might be absolutely stable.

That was the sermon.

During this season Stephen & I often remembered the events of this time last year when we were in India, particularly the Boxing Day anniversary of the Tsunami. That example of geologic event overtakes any weather we’ve had... even that closer to my old home in Sonoma County where the Russian River is flooding now in California’s aspect of this system.

One ritual we said we wanted to bring home from New Years Eve in Kerala was the “Burning Of Santa” [see my India Journal on the “writings” page of my web site: GRBBELLS.COM], but we never quite found a meaningful way to recreate it. We spent that nocturne in a duet of quiet solitude... there was no bevy of spirited Indian boys with whom to dance around such a bon fire as we would need to build in the rain & wind! Burning a printed paper effigy, like the reproductions of Victorian Saint Nick which I have somewhere in the studio, was another possible mode, but, frankly we were nicely past needing that.

I had happily arrived in my own mind’s way at being finished with the string of variations on Solstice our culture has accumulated. To have a period now of new beginnings is deliciously rewarding for all those activities, both indulged & avoided.

The year held much of new experience to digest at its “second” beginning, when we got home from India in mid January & I gave myself most of another month to sit with those travel memories & the pages of my journal while rewriting toward better digestion of the most different version of world I had ever experienced.

Design Time In The Studio...

All that, plus our usual escape into Faeriedom at the annual Winter Breitenbush Gathering, delayed my design train. One might have safely assumed such rich stimulation would have shown up in my creative process, yet I did nothing directly from the Indian resource.

New designs grew more easily from earlier & familiar beginnings, like the Chrysler Building, long strongly requested, or the Peter bell, which I had first drawn several years ago. There also came several reductions in size of established designs, in a process of revisiting ideas to discover versions suitable for earrings or to offer as more delicate choices.

I intend to do several more of those this year, particularly the Dragonfly bell, which is quite large & does not have the delicacy I hope now to achieve, since I was experimenting with that open form to test how such a shape would ring as a bell.

That question satisfied, I am ready to attempt more naturalistic detail...

While I never expect to come to an end of ideas for bells I do not feel driven to add designs for the reason simplistically to enlarge the line... it is huge already. I have reached the stage where I am more interested in “grooming” the line, making it finer for all the wide exploration during the last twenty five years. I want to refine it for easier, more effective production. Many of the designs have quirks or flaws from the evolving nature of learning how to make such little castings sing.

This is the only production I have ever done, coming at this impulse-turned-mania from a career of making one of a kind jewelry commissions beginning early in my twenties. This becomes my life work, still in production, from first design to last. Of course there is remedial work to be done...

These still long dark nights have long been my preferred time to sit at the wax desk & carve new designs. It is my deepest ritual. Curiously I must find peace at being artist for this too short period, while then moving too soon into shepherding the molding & production toward being ready for the sales & promotion which eventually supports the cycle of this business.

Each year there is the dream to evolve more fulsome dialogue with the foundry’s capability to accomplish more of this without my close attention. Last year I began a concerted effort to facilitate that. The story of the year became quite complexly other...

Foundry Woes...

There were horrible casting problems during June & July with a new, highly touted, alloy which among other difficulties did not make resonant bells. Innumerable waxes I had spent many weeks prepping were simply lost. We even lost track of the losses, while trying to figure it all out.

Then came a health crisis for Larry, one in two partners who began Outcast & Company more than a decade ago. After learning that some of his health difficulties might be resulting from accumulations of metallic residues in his body, he retired. His childhood in the great atomic desert & his working years in a foundry were taking an obvious toll. I do remember often seeing his wacky humor enhanced by a respirator, although what is sufficient protection in such environments?

Another lesson for us who work in such trades.

James had to deal with Larry’s sudden departure by taking over the casting as well as his more usual management of the business. The small crew of Outcast & Company were required to redouble efforts to get back up to speed during such a perplexing & disappointing time. James kept putting the best face on it, believing, as he had to, that the bad luck would come to an end. Plus he wants to be superman...

He recruited & accumulated skills of associates toward what seems now a fine shop. But none of them had much experience with the complexity of the bell line.

Counting On Complexity...

Even I have difficulty sometimes, looking at a particular part, knowing to which bell it might belong. In the beginning years I used the same clapper or loop for several different bells... or different parts constructing variations on a design. I often carve optional clappers, with which to experiment from the start.

We learned again the difficulties of keeping track of a line with more than 200 designs; each made up of at least two, often three, parts, perhaps as many as five or six; in all the states from molds & waxes, through the casting; finishing; & assembly processes; in three different metals; at multiple work stations in several shops; on both sides of the Sound...

Thousands of bits of data one must only hope tracks what will ultimately become bells.

All this is further daunting, if not made nearly impossible, because they may indeed actually “evaporate”when castings are incomplete or if these tiny objects flip out of hand during polishing into one of miriad hidey places extant in such working environments. Of course we expect & anticipate some such attrition, so we can usually bring through enough of each & all to eventually construct a useful stock of finished bells for me to market.

One could easily spend too much time counting & keystroking, attempting to keep track of them in computers, notoriously hungry for such input, it becomes counterproductive. Nonetheless, we obviously needed better communication systems to keep us on track.

Thus, I watched the year devolve into a delicate confusion from all my early goals, anticipation & planning. Slowly discovering these problems & the curious complexities of failures was difficult for us all.

I began trying to work more closely with them. Teach/learn is a useful verb for me... one process. Later they worked with me to try to keep what I was needing to fill clients' holiday orders coming through the chute, to simply dance inside what seemed our curious fate...

Fate would give us one more big jag, right in the middle of the autumnal push toward the holidays. News of Larry’s checking himself into the hospital, then of his heart attack... his death... finally brought the most intense blow.

I could now only allow whatever it took in support of James while he grieved limping & limped grieving through to the end of the season.

Annual Report... the Business of Little Silver Bells...

I had begun my design year late because of the India travel. I'd had a surprisingly successful private showing in March, while visiting Stephen's mother Helen in Florida. In May, I again had great sales during the Spring Open Studio Tour here on the island... thus my stock was beginning to look sketchy.

The new designs would not be available in time, so I decided to forgo what used to be my largest annual show... the American Bell Association [ABA] Convention... which was this year also in Florida... late in June's heat... & too many miles from any beach.

The ABA is certainly the first of the bells’ several larger appreciative audiences. However, because I must fly & buy five days & nights in a hotel, garnering only 9 hours of sales time, Convention becomes an expensive show. It is an involving gathering of friendly collectors who love having their leisure to schmooze with each other inside their multitudinous passions for bell collecting.

I’ve made many friends over the twenty-plus years I’ve attended these festas. They are a lively clientèle who have mostly learned not to assume that I share their passion, which I do, to the extent of my sample line... plus... a much deeper appreciation for the way they feed & teach/learn that passion in me. I may not collect more bells than my own line, but ultimately GRB Bells seems acceptable & satisfactorily anachronistic to them... so we can happily trade energies.

Strawberry Festival...

I concentrated on the local instead. A second year learning how much fun it was to do this outdoor show under the canopy I’d acquired for the experiment. Stephen likes to help me since the situation offers him lively potential for networking the Island. We come home to our own bed the one night between two concentrated days... while writing an equivalent value in sales.

The Bells continue to surprise me with the delight they create in various venues, but it seems improbable how many bells have been reliably consumed by our local population during ongoing cycles of these three annual events.

Sixty Turnings Of Leo... A Decade Of Love...

There was then the confluence of two big events at mid-year: Our tenth anniversary, sometime in May, plus my 60th birthday, late in July.

Stephen had arrived most visibly in my life at the costume ball I invited into my studio, the Bothy on Avalon, Sonoma County. He is my plum for that significant moment of balance on the fulcrum of my century.

What I gave myself then, I don't need now... still we had two celebrations here, beginning with a dinner party of chosen brothers.

It was a rare treat to be feted so richly & truly. I did not lift a finger, except those filled with morsels of delish & glasses of delight! All was presented with even more care & love than I ordinarily attempt when I'm playing host to them.

That I received a retro mink coat, skilfully wrapped & wrapping, suggests something projecting my tastes in couture. meet Rita.

The next morning brought us to coffee, fruit, savories & sweets from the bakery as we roused to re-gather, preparing for an open house which lasted the entire day & evening, while bringing 4 or 5 dozen more friends... I have good excuse for my blurring of details inside such heights of social abundance!

We took a road trip into Canada... [link later]

We did Camp Parkview in August... [link later]

We did another Barnett Family gathering in September... [link later]


Diving Into Pixels...

I went digital with images this year too... buying a nice camera as a part of my birthday... although a bit later, in Denver... on our way to the family gathering.

Dwight had shown me his wonderful camera the year before & I'd decided I wanted the same model, so this year he facilitated my purchase of a barely used one, a fine bargain! Thank you, Cigale!

Its Zeiss lenses make it less than "easily portable", so it is mostly intended for use in the studio. Stephen has great capability to travel shooting with his small camera.

I have had too little time, of course, to really yet learn all of this camera's complex capability, but I am anxious to continue exploring it during the upcoming period of design time to practice capturing more of the studio process, & eventually to share some of that on my web site. I have long wished to be able to offer a time-lapse visual sequence showing a block of wax dissolving into a finished bell, with an audible 'ding! at the end.

I'd stopped making film photographs for most of the last decade, so I am discovering in these forms new life for myself, at an age & stage when I might otherwise more easily have let myself slip into that evermore comfortable "old-fogy-dom".

While I do not yet feel called to the i-pod craze, I am using i-tunes to expand my musical world in this "digital life". I have always loved radio for my working time because it simply can take me places, especially inside my headphones, without much direction... except for finding a good guide. NPR is sadly becoming more mainstream & commercial, but "inside my box" I am finding a new universe of that lovely old form to explore... one of my current favorites features Persian Classical music.

Nesting Soundcliff...

We talk about color on our walls... while retaining, since the remodel... a quite basic Navajo White. Color seems daunting to this old painter. That dragon, “drawn” several years ago above our tub hangs increasingly as loose shreds of blue tape from the ceiling... awaiting evolution of the dream into proper paint... oh! look at those dophin!

Needing a new kitchen range, we hope to switch to gas... which would mean a propane tank... which in turn would want to be incorporated into our long postponed remodel of the shed... which needs at the very least a new roof, but which really wants to bloom into a new writing space for Stephen... with a sleeping loft to adding guest space. We are working with several contractors now to ascertain what all might be involved. Some drawings name it a “cottage”...

Oh dear, am I ready for this?!?

LANDMARKING...

So, when I ended the year having written the best business ever, I could only feel grateful & very blessed. Where might the bells take me next?


Twelfth Night plus one, the calender is clucking... I'm finished!

Prepping A New Year...

This morning has been full of delicious frustration begun waking from dreams also described by that phrase, to see curious flotsam on the water while he brought me coffee... a tide full of logs decorated by juxtaposition of large orange floats which proved their appearance as markers for crab pots when a boat came to claim & reset them. The new moon tide has brought this curious visual which frustrates for not knowing the source for such chaos nor the story that is continuing to unfold on the screen of the window. It has been raining quiet storms all week. The gray is nearly a blinding loss of contrast now, the logs still floating off in the distance...

We've spent hours in bed with that pot of coffee sharing another delicious frustration with our dueling iBooks while continuing to discover this thing called blogging. My brother Jon recently shared an address which has blossomed an entire universe of postings around popular gay culture the likes of which we had no idea existed! These are not exactly web sites, although they share some aspects. They actually are blogs basically like this one of mine. Stephen has been working around notions of blogs inside his journalism projects for several years, so it is interesting that I am the one who decided to dive into my own before he has tackled one for himself.

This is another day intended by each of us to take more care of business less involved with this sort of sharing, but... more of delicious frustration! We know these days are rare & fleeting. We have the good sense to savor them in this sweet form of communion.

Now, however, I do not have the hours I'd intended to write a recap of my year for this posting... perhaps that will come tomorrow. I am committed to make pate from the too-big-for-the-cats package of chicken livers he's brought home. Perhaps we will take some to the dinner we are invited this evening.

Yesterday our trip into the city included more shopping than is usual for us before enjoying dinner at friends who live downtown close to the Market. I got more equipment for the digital camera which is currently my major new toy. So, we continue to enjoy our low key version of the holidays visiting with friends & playing happily together without the usual constraints of external scheduling.

Tourmaline Fading...

Nesting at Soundcliff...

These recent mornings of incessant rain have been waking me early. I am obviously becoming rested inside the luxury of more sufficiency of “unstructured time” which I hold as my precious preference.

I suppose the rain becomes some deeper invitation to more generously grant myself permission to follow both an inclination to get up earlier than usual, as well as to stay abed if I wish, than I might if I were trying to protect myself from the more usual notion of a certain less interior imperative from clock & calendar.

I feel the need to continue trying to explain myself on this concept, butting heads with the Puritans, albeit with a growing bit of celebration, knowing it now meets with more of understanding & appreciation inside this house than when I first arrived with the desire to slide into a day rather than tackling it with the “Silha energetic”...

The gray of this morning has taken the description of “Totally Faded Tourmaline”. We continue the exercise Stephen has shared from his beginning days in the Northwest... creatively naming the myriad grays of our atmosphere.

I bring a jeweler’s vocabulary grounded in gems & metals to his softer abstractions. Weather is so ubiquitous & local as to be supposed a poor writing topic, yet it does so much to describe interior mood. He wrote haiku on the ferry. I’ve use it similarly to practice verbal descriptive techniques over my years keeping a journal.

I am beginning to find desire to go back into the studio it has been nice to abandon awhile during the holiday social time, even though it was also the scene of much social energy during this season of bell sales. There is the need to do the inventory & ready the books for closure. Once that business is settled, I can begin to indulge my artist’s needs.

Like the recuperation inside this “slugdom” since Solstice, the rhythms of my work wax & wane to quite literally wax again... now it is the carvable variety of that word I begin to crave, as has been my seasonal habit for years.

[I note my discovery in that sentence of the same letters forming those two words... crave to carve... carving such craving into new work.]

After the rushing holidays I can submerge into the quiet remaining winter nights to nurture & birth what has been gestating in the fertility of the year’s production & sales seasons. Observation of public responses & reactions during the Open Studio time, plus their suggestions for designs adding to the collection of my own curiosities nets fodder enough for three or four month’s research & absorption at the wax desk.

By now the still low & late sun has broken through to glaze wet surfaces with a weak but welcome warmth... still fading the tourmaline depths of the Sound. Tahoma has been invisible of late, taking her own rest, no doubt.

Christmas Eve...

The quiet light over the Sound at midday Christmas Eve feels right for the container Stephen & I are creating for the rare event of spending the holidays at home. There is little need in us for “all the trimmin’s” as might be considered “usual”. We will not have a tree...

We are happy to be spending time in that even rarer mode of being without the constraints long-standing plans & expectations. We mostly are following communicating about & following our momentary moods, rather more as we like to do when we travel, taking advantage of blissful ignorance inside the world of options which exists when one hasn’t booked every moment of one’s time months in advance.

I have for so long & often preached a life of that sort of spontaneity, but I live with a prime example of the other camp. This is perhaps the sweetest gift he could give me for this holiday!

We will soon go shop for last minute provisions toward our intimate evening’s meal of the oysters I suggested impulsively when he asked yesterday what I wished to eat. We also need some ingredients for the sorbet version of a Cumberland Sauce we are inventing to take for dinner tomorrow at our friends Merna & Rob.

We had a delightful day in the city yesterday, beginning with managing to get from the late-running ferry through all the traffic in the rain to arrive at the Harvard Exit Theater just barely in time for a matinee showing of “Brokeback Mountain”. The film left us stimulated & sad for its bittersweet story. We would easily recommend it for both inner & outer beauty plus a deep sensitivity. It will be quite interesting to watch how it is received in the audience of the larger world.

Then we went to the Pike Place Market for a dose of the festive shopping spirit before going to the foundry for a glass of wine with James. By then we were ready for the dinner we found at Shea’s lounge in the Market. Scallops for him, Ahi for me, sharing our plates as we like to do, even when the preparations range so divergently as they did from my near-sushi to his rich brown sauce. A good red wine & an amusing server brought us to full joy with our communion, remembering other dates in the Market. His Grappa took us to Tuscan memories & my cognac was for an old acquaintance. We came home for a sweet finale to our day with each other.

All this to get to my wishes & hopes that each & all might be enjoying this second deep evening of birthing...

PEACE & JOY TO OUR WORLD!

Solstice Too...

This morning is Halcyon indeed!

The water is satin. Tahoma is showing herself, although perhaps not for long. Earlier all was a brilliant gold the color of monks robes from the east of dawn, but I went back under the comforter of my own religion with less appreciation than the sight warranted.

The sky scumble still offers fantasy fields of multiple rhythmic reflections inside subtle silken shadows on the palpable atmosphere, in a richness of greys if not that earlier color ... already I can perceive that the light is returning in this new year. Again I note the slippage of our paper calendar from reality. If our world is out of kilter, perhaps we need more properly to align ourselves with the origins of a sky god & an earth goddess who dance so definitively while we fuss with our rituals of ignorant imitation. The main event has happened while most of us are still in frantic preparation!

So be it... On with the show! We will participate to the extent we can find better versions of seasonal enjoyment without most of the frenzy. Today the plan is to go into the city to see a movie... probably Brokeback Mountain... before joinig a party at Outcast & Company, the bell’s foundry, & later to have dinner .

Solstice...

22 December 2005
Soundcliff

The morning after Solstice is a bit like Boxing Day for its slight sense of letdown, except that there is another louder celebration yet to come...

This basic planetary event has slipped ahead on the calendar of that later celebration which overshadows it in our culture. While it is simple to prove & even to understand what is the primal event defining this season, that observation has been relegated to be a curious footnote in most people’s minds... now, why in the world would not Terra realize that the proper day to shift on its axis should be December 25th?!?! Our entire culture shifts in preparation of that!

If you don’t get the joke, you might be addicted to telling yourself other fibs...

So this gorgeously stormy light does not hold with the notion of one of those mythic days of quiet weather named after a seabird, believed to be the kingfisher, about which Pliny observed: "Halcyons are especially remarkable for this- the seas and those who sail them know the days when they breed at midwinter, on what are called "Halcyon days", during which the sea is calm and navigable, especially near Sicily. They make their nests a week before the shortest day, and lay a week after it.

The Kingfishers who live in our cliff could not trust what might be true about Sicilian mid-winters. Still we have had some recent days which temporarily demonstrated such mild qualities. Hopefully there will be more soon.

Today’s wind is roiling the water into white capped darkness, struck now & again with slashes of hard low light breaking through the clouds opened by its force. I’ve not seen our Kingfishers, But birds like the gulls & a lone hawk struggle to tack into it or soar with it at incredible speeds. Atmospheric colors shift almost as quickly. Tourmaline & aquamarine might be descriptive.

We celebrated yesterday’s shift toward any gardener’s delight at the promise of lengthening days by being quite lazy. The deep family of friends we with whom we usual circle to mark the earthy holy days was broken by other constraints & contingencies until later last evening when we simply made a nice dinner with our island-local god buddies.

We had noted the moment of the shift still abed with coffee, which is my favorite way to celebrate almost anything. A beach walk gave opportunity to cut some cedar boughs with which to do a little decorating. Neither of us is prone to ornamenting a tree, so we do not have much history with that Victorian tradition in the usual sense. It is rare for us to be at home for Christmas. We get to make this one up from scratch! We will keep it quite simple.

We see this as an opportunity to gift ouselves with visits with friends & to see a few movies... taking in some of the invitations to parties along the way.

Today I have several clients coming to shop in the studio. I’d made myself unavailable for that yesterday, no matter that one is our State Representative...

I will soon be content to let the biz slide toward a peace less populated, after all those who have recently so nicely energised my working space... which happily is back to being a bit messy again, of course,

There is now nought but to run the rapids of the hyper holidays... wheee!

Ho 'ding! Ho!

The Second Open Studio Weekend...

Another Monday morning posting does not mean I will be regular in such timing, but is instead a result simply of having worked again all weekend. While I have long loved a pattern of writing journal in bed with morning coffee, this blog version of that has no easy rhythm yet...

While I continue to fuss inside this format I can report that the second weekend of the Vashon Open Studio Tour matched the first in activity at GRB Bells. We make a bit of a party around this Island institution with a table of goodies. Morning sweeets segue into afternoon savories, thanks to Stephen's attentions. Wafting scent of cinnamon, cloves & ginger from a pot of hot spiced cider greets visitors before I am able to articulate my own verbal welcome. The tinkling bells' song from those hundreds of silver beings on the displays quickly brings folk along deeper into the celebration which we offer for those making the trek out to our home on the edge which we call Soundcliff, being both a description & a prayer.

The studio is one of many tucked away in corners of the Island not usually so publicly accessible. We suggest walking the short distance in on our narrow road since the situation for parking is a bit limited. It isn't much more of a hike than walking from the parking garage at any mall, but even on dull wet days we can offer expanding water views through the alders as one approaches our garden. If the day is clear, as they mostly were for this tour, our panorama might tease with fog or clouds before opening a peek toward more fulsome sunbreak vista including Tahoma [Mt. Ranier], inside the weather over Puget Sound.

The bells are a palpable expression of the joy usually more jingoed about in this season than JINGLED... they make their own music & dance a genuine jig! While working so closely with them all year, first in their silent waxy states, before the visually dull rough-casts begin to hint at resonance, I must hold faith in my intuition. I must use my imagination to find hints under their dirty surfaces at mid-polish toward a more finished complexion. All that before their vabious parts get strung, hung, wire-wrapped, & clappered together finally in forms which give them voice.

They truly ring intensely for me during that latter process, yet there is another sound I want...

I am most fully rewarded when their rhythm is rung by other hands, thus eliciting in addition the sounds of a rare delight as visitors discover their own relationship with this ancient archetype. My curious work is vindicated in a complex duet of tinkling sounds... human entrancement with something metallic.

Silly silver bells. Little toys. Ding-a-ling jewelry... miniature bits, perhaps, of poetic profundity in the physics of cast metal? Something alchemical happens... I feel this peculiar joy whenever a bell rings.

I take yet another sort of reward during these Open Studio days in the tidy ambiance of my freshly scrubbed studio. The sound system is quieted from its usual duty of masking the whine of flex-shaft & polishing motors. The recently installed track lighting showing off the results of all the previously less pristine processes for the bells displayed on wall panels, ready to sound off at the least touch... & a flow of visitors responding inside this magical space.

I hear the question frequently whether I ever get tired of the sound of the bells. No! That is a big part of my pay-package.

I have stopped fighting what could be made as a case for my own idiocy in a world gone similarly mad in quite other directions. If this niche I've spent nearly 25 years exploring is wasting my time, then so be it. Indulgence in joy becomes its own exponential reward.

If I were still struggling to share that joy it might be different, but each year I have become convinced again by the way they continue to find appreciative audience. They are it...

JOY!

During that period some years ago, when they were being produced & marketed by others outside my studio, it was easier to listen to the down sides of more standard business notions which suggest this line of 200 designs is too much of too little. The economies of scale are delicate. I'm mostly happy that I'm a little man. A little sensitive guy. A little foolish & a little silly if I must be... which probably helps if one wants to do a business in bells. But, while I make little silver bells, I make a big bewildering range of them!

GRB Bells writes an ever surprising business on this small island. I am always amazed how many bells find homes here. Vashon might be similar, to this big bell tribe. All those choices allow lots of the essential variety for personal independence to celebrate, as befits living harmoniously on an island.

I could estimate numbers that we have already belled some 10% of our population, yet still we sold more bells at this event than ever before!

This year has continued to see the off-Island business growing as well, from the web site GRBBELLS.COM & in the several shops across the country who also help sell GRB Bells. Nancy Shaw & Company in Mystic, Connecticut, features the bells as ancillary to her selection of antique & estate jewelry, all year 'round, but with a special promotion during these holidays. Isadora in Sedona, Arizona, & Emily Benoist Ruffins Design in Taos, New Mexico, both have long been active purveyors for the line in the southwest. The latest venue to join our network is Fremont Jewelry Design here in Seattle.

Now this rare day of writing must shut itself down to accommodate a trip into the city. Life in the studio might wish for a well deserved break after accomplishing so much of preparation toward the fulfillment of other seasonal celebrations, but, this artist is married to other whirlwinds... we have appointments & parties, plus an exhibit to attend!


I love the other-reverence for this season from one of the list serves I receive:

"There are only three more shopping days before Beethoven's Birthday!"

Second Thoughts...

As I have spent the time to set up this format for the exploration into playing with a blog, I have had occasion to wonder the "why" of it.

My life is complicated enough without another method to write what used to be as simple as picking up my book & pen to write while having morning coffee in bed. [except for the difficulty of maintaining inky rapidographs!] I've written a journal inside bound blank books for 30 years... I have a trunk full of them. I also have written letters which I photocopied top mail to a list of family & friends. I have a bit of a reputation for sharing such musings in a particularly well developed calligraphy. But... after resisting for much longer than most I finally got a computer four years ago & I've taught myself to type with enough facility that I now enjoy using the keyboard... much to the detriment of my previous mode. I do not pick up that blank book nearly so frequently...

Thus I am curious about blogging as an experiment to facilitate the process with which I have several histories. Will it become a comfortable way to journal in a new way, or will it bog down in the digital complications which frequently irritate me? Will it continue to irritate me with the general lack of my prefered aesthetic preferences? There is so much of simplicity lacking on "pages" such as viewed on this machine. There are too many choices I would prefer to avoid for their attempt toward clarity inside what looks like a cacophany of fonts & design not remotely my own. Computer screens are full of predictable & mostly ugly substitutes for pen & paper. Still, this presents other possibilities as well... I will counsel patience for this period of testing these new waters.

So much of today has been about the nuts'n'bolts of setting up a format on which to begin. I've watched the day turn from occasional brightness on the more familiar waters of the Puget Sound as Sol tried pushing through the standard northwest overcast before what becomes near-dusk-at-noon in this season. Our exposure on this eastern side of the Island denies us much of the afternoon sun on even the best of summer days, but around winter solstice, when the low sun disappears behind the trees to the south, even before reaching those in the west, it only increases the effect of the shortness of the days at Soundcliff!

This was the first of two Holiday Open Studio weekends for which I have been preparing for months. The weather was dry & often even pleasent, so perhaps that helps explain the wonderful turnout. I was busy the entire time & wrote a record business. The bells continue to create joy & wonder for new clientele as well as many who have visited the studio for years... thus creating goodness for me in turn!

One part of that was an excuse to pursue this recurring impulse to "blog"...