Creative process, part II (BoyBubbles)

WARNING: EXTREMELY LONG (AND SELF-INDULGENT) POST
(yeah, she’s doing it again)
If you’re not interested in pate de verre (or rambling philosophical art talk), skip this post

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the how of creation, not the why or the technical whats and wherefores. And I’m figuring that I could improve my own creative processes if I actually understood them a bit better (as opposed to thinking I just head into the studio, mess around for awhile, and–hey, looky–out pops art). I have no idea if that’s actually true, but I sat down and documented my thinking behind a recent pate de verre piece, Boy, Bubbles:

Now, in the picture above it’s not quite finished (still some coldworking/hand-padding to do and I’ve got to do something about those edges), and I’m not pretending it’s any great art. But the compressed timeline made it easy to document.

I’m finding that my best work comes when I give myself assignments and tight deadlines, just as I have in my professional life. When I simply play, the results are more variable and I tend not to like them as much.

In this case, the assignment was to do a pate de verre bas relief panel for a demonstration at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. I wanted to show wide variance in texture and depth, use strong colors (I had other pate de verre samples that were extremely neutral in color) and demonstrate the effects you could achieve by controlling powder shading and transparency.

I also wanted the piece to be fun and–because I have to look at it–tell enough stories that I wouldn’t get tired of it. That meant it’d wind up in a series I call “Vignettes,” which are probably the closest thing to personality studies that I do. (The self-portrait I did, below, is one)

So, first step was to find a subject. Since I take a LOT of photographs, I had lots of choices, and I paged through my candid shots to see what hit me. After a half hour or so, I kept coming back to the one on the left:

I took it several years ago at a wedding in the rural midwest. The bride and groom had requested that guests see them off with bubbles, not rice or confetti, and supplied us all with little bottles of soap solution. The kids in the party immediately jumped into bubble contests, except for the boy above.

He appeared utterly fascinated by the technical aspects of bubble-blowing. While the other kids laughed and pelted each other with bubbles, he was doing a Morse code kinda thing, building sequences of bubble streams, totally focused on the outcome. I snapped off a couple of shots with my little pocket camera, and just liked the way the light and angle played with his preoccupation.

I had my picture. Now the trick was figuring out how to get it into glass. Suspending his bubble hand in front of his face would be cool, bring the image to the viewer and make it easier from a technical perspective. There’s a natural relationship between soap bubbles and transparent glass that I could exploit, too. And I purely love sculpting the kinds of folds and swirls in the boy’s shirt.

I started messing with the image in Photoshop, manipulating the image to bring out the topology, shadows and highlights (above, right). A lot of the time I’ll convert the picture to greyscale and start playing with contrast and shadows, but this time around I got a better definition out of the color version.

I was already identifying casting problems; for one thing, the bubbles coming out of ring-thingee would require narrowing the investment down to a small neck with a much larger opening underneath, a real pain if you’re investing a clay model because you have to get the clay OUT. The hand would have similar problems if physically detached from the main piece and much higher than the plane of the face.

It definitely would be easier to model in clay, take a silicon of the clay and then do this in wax, but I didn’t have time. So…alter the model, make it touch the face and the “wall” behind it, bring the thumb under to keep it connected. Make the ring-thingee larger and rounder, put a great big bubble right at the end so the clay would stay visible (and removable).

At about this point it dawned on me that, although the picture was all cute and Norman Rockwellish, it wasn’t particularly interesting. There was absolutely no tension in an obviously well cared-for boy on the sunny open plains, blowing bubbles.

But if this were an inner-city kid, if the sun was going down and he was hustled indoors before he was ready, out of the dangers of the night… Hmmm. If spirtually, he was just like the boy I’d photographed but hemmed in by brick and grime and the danger of the streets… If, for just a moment, he closed his eyes and was blowing bubbles in the country instead of wistfully hoping for grass and trees and some way off of an asphalt playground…ok. That would give me some tension.

Add symbols of confinement. Brick wall, concrete sill, blowsy artificial light spilling out of a window. Homey jail cell kinda look with subtle vertical stripes. Push the perspective, too, distort it to increase the feeling of confinement, crowd the body parts together so they couldn’t possibly be real. Exaggerate the twilight, boost the mustard yellow against orange, but stick to grimy-but-primary colors. Make the bubbles reflect the grime, not the glory, of a city sunset. Ethereal but grubby.

I blew the sketch up to the required size, laid out my base and covered it with a layer of clay. Then I traced a light outline of my primary landmarks (below, left), started thinking about how to get the three-dimensional depth I needed as shallowly as possible.

Then I started blocking in, building up and shaping layers of clay (above, right). The boy’s face is sweeping diagonally toward the bubbles, creating a sense of movement, so I wanted to make the strong jawline follow the sweep and keep the action flowing. That meant dropping it at a steeper angle than in the photo, and tilting the head back a tad more dramatically.

The chin and the nose would wind up at about the same height, and the forehead would fall away into the base of the piece, exaggerating the angles and giving a greater sense of depth. That would mean less glass needed, less thickness, less annealing headaches and just generally less of a hassle. (Although with the daggone hand and bubbles, I’d have plenty of annealing hassles, I knew that already.)

At this point, I’ve got an hour or two of refinement to do on the face, making sure the planes align sensibly, and getting the hand into shape. (below, left) While I’m doing that (it’s kinda mindless), I’m thinking about how to get the ring-thingee and the bubbles positioned over the face and what kind of bridge I’ll need to construct (i.e., the hidden clay underneath the hand that allows me to get the clay out of the investment easily and get the glass IN once I’ve got the mold).

One thing I learned, early on, was NEVER to concentrate on getting one part of a sculpture to the point of finish by itself. If I do that, the rest of the piece never seems to catch up. And since I don’t often stick to the original plan but grab opportunities as they arise, I’d most likely have to redo the finished area anyway, which wastes time. Besides, knowing I’ve done all that work in one area tends to inhibit me from trying anything new.

So I bounce all over the figure working, and when the boy gets close to done (above, right), all of him arrives pretty much at the same time. I’m a little nervous about that hand, but now that I can see him clearly, I can start boxing him in. I lay a “windowsill” around him that I’ll also want to serve as the frame. And because I’ve been bugged about how to get the bubble ring-thingee to work, I also lay that in (below, left).

If you look at the sculpture against the original picture (above, right), you can see how it’s evolved to fit technical requirements (as well as the whole urban thing). You can also see some of the “bridge” for the hand and ring-thingee–the clay underneath will be carefully trimmed back and made the same color as the hand and background (at that point). You hopefully won’t really see it.

The ring-thingee is ‘way, ‘way out of proportion to reality, but part of it will be hidden by bubbles. Besides, it’s a key point in telling the story and I want people to get that it’s a bubble-blowing ring-thingee. The original, tiny rectangular thingee is less recognizable.

The brick wall has been really bothering me. Technically, it should stand proud of everything except maybe the bubbles and the tip of the boy’s nose and hands. Practically, though, I don’t want the wall to become the most important thing in the piece and–since I’ve already decided to make it a glowing, blackened red-orange–it can easily overwhelm everything else.

So I build the wall around the boy and keep it far back. (above, left) It doesn’t make much sense from a practical perspective–the only way it’d work in real life is if the boy was embedded in the wall–but I like the feeling of close confinement. And it’s now putting me in mind of medieval manuscripts where all the heralds and musicians and such are painted with such lousy perspective that it becomes a signature for the era. I kinda like that.

One note on working methods: When I’m doing these bas-relief panels I tend to work them on a makeshift easel, just as I would a painting. I tried working them flat on a turntable, as I do other things, and they just didn’t work out–the closer to the top, the more icky they became. If you look at the image on the right, with the boy flat on his back, you’ll see why.

Oddly enough, I find that every one of the Vignettes winds up best viewed at slightly below eye level, standing a bit to the right of the work. I should probably get a taller easel.

BTW…those aren’t glass bubbles on the clay, they’re plastic. I got tired of trying to make perfectly smooth clay “bubbles” and stuck acrylic half-spheres on there instead. As it turned out, they’re actually too flat, but I love the surface texture they gave. I’ll move the bubbles around quite a bit for the rest of the refinement; was never quite happy with them.

More refinement, invested the clay and then spent about four hours digging the clay OUT of the hand and bubbles (as predicted). Now the mold’s ready for filling.

Up until now I’ve largely been in control. I’m putting clay where I want it, forming it until it works for me. Post-investment is where I start to panic, creatively speaking

No matter how much I THINK about color, till now I’ve been working in a monochromatic silvery grey. The piece has been textured and refined to work in grey, and I get this absolutely horrific certainty that any color I add will only screw things up. It doesn’t matter that I’ve colored the image online and made sure things work, that I’ve got prior examples that it works, that I love the colors. For the next few hours (or sometimes days or weeks, if I’m really invested in the model), I’ll agonize and test colors again and again.

Finally, the impatient part of me gets fed up with all this dithering and reaches for a jar of powder. No matter how many palettes I’ve run through during the panic attack, that jar will invariably be the color I’d originally planned to use. Go figure. One of my working goals is to shortcircuit the whole panic thing and just put down the first color unditheringly, as soon as the mold’s ready.

Once I get the first layer down, all hell breaks loose and I’m coloring, tinting and packing with abandon. The original palette is at best a guideline because I’m just packing in whatever looks good. So much for careful planning.

In this case, I had it easy. I hadn’t had time to fire transparent “bubbles” that I could embed as investment inclusions, which would normally be the preferred way to do this. I needed to get this all in one firing, so instead I sifted down a layer of clear powder, topped it with a little pale aqua and a bit of olive green (for the grubby part) and then started chunking in coarse transparent frit, the coarser the better. To simulate some iridescence I added blues and corals and greens, all of it in chunks as large as I could fit in the mold.

Doing that broke the color panic and I started filling in with abandon. I had a lot of fun with the bricks, adding blues and purples and greys and greens for the “grime.” Later, I’dd add my favorite red of all time, Pimento, in a light dusting behind it, with splashes of Medium Amber. Any reactivities between colors would read as more grime, which was great.

Filling an open-faced pate de verre mold that’s as deep and variable as this one is a bit like making a contour map of a model. You start with the lowest areas first, bring them up to level with other surfaces, and then start the real packing (see below).

Technically, I should keep the surface thicknesses completely even for pate de verre, but there are too many opportunities for the packed frit to collapse into deeper parts of the mold, creating gaps on side walls. Instead, I’ve got to accept that there will be some parts of this mold that are almost 4 inches thick while others won’t be much past a quarter inch, and anneal accordingly. In the above picture, I’ve filled in the “low” spots, i.e., the surrounding sill, the bubbles and the hand. I’m just starting the powder layer for the shirt.

I prefer starting with a solid layer of powder, both for color and because I like the surface it gives. If the mold is sufficiently wet, you don’t need to mix the powder with anything. It’ll simply land on the surface, absorb moisture and stick.

Behind the powder, though, I’ll lay in frit tints, i.e., powdered colored glass mixed with BE Crystal Clear fine frit. I’ll coat the fine clear frit with a very thin layer of water, dump in my color, and shake like crazy to evenly coat the clear particles. What I wind up with is little “hollow” spheres of color, which both lightens the color and (if you do it right) gives interesting luminosity. Probably the last “creative” act in this process is to decide how rapidly to move from color and shading to “light,” i.e., colorless clear.

That’s about it–the rest is more production than creative. I’m still not sure how I’d classify my creative processes, but what surprised me about this exercise was the vast number of decisions I was making and changing along the way and the level of planning. I’d thought I was pretty spontaneous and changeable, but in fact most of this stuff arrows straight to the original goal. Interesting.

I’m not entirely sure how that translates to anything useful, but I’m working on that part. But hey–identifying is the first step in improving, right?