Weekwhacker
February 13, 2010
Why does there seem to be so little time when you’re facing the future, and so much when you’re looking back?
It’s mid-February already? How did that happen? Eeek. I’ve got to get on the ball. Now. I’ve got a show at Guardino’s in late March/April and another, OGG’s Spring Glass Gallery, at the end of April, and I’m not nearly ready.
I *am* getting stuff done. Dayjob stuff is moving along. And I’ve set up two shows in the last six weeks, one in the Mayor’s office at City Hall. I’m in a third, and I’m working with the Oregon Glass Guild to set up a LOT of exhibit/sales opportunities throughout the year.
Quick note to glassists: If you live in Oregon or just over the border in Washington state, this would be a GOOD year to join OGG. We’re working hard to get your glass in the face of just about anybody with a checkbook.
Folks told me that I (or rather, SHOUT!) showed up on the email blast and home page of one of my favorite blogs, Susan Lomuto’s Daily Art Muse. Very cool surprise that’s sending all kinds of web traffic to my portfolio site, cynthiamorgan.com. I KNEW I should have gotten that bloody site rebuilt–it’s not really ready for visitors. Sigh.
The available kiln has pretty much constrained my work to open-faced relief panels; I can’t fit mold-plus-reservoir in the kiln, not in the size I like to work. SHOUT!, however, whetted my 3D appetite and the fact that I get the pedestals at Guardino’s while Leah gets the walls just exacerbated it. (I’m teamed with the marvelous Leah Wilson for this show)
The show is themed around water. I’m having a blast designing watery stuff and playing up blue, green and straw-colored glasses.
There are 15 people inhabiting this sculpture and eight of them can be seen in this view. Can you pick them out? (Hint: rotate the piece about 15 degrees and half of them will disappear entirely)
And wow–I’m in love with sculpting all over again. Creating in full 3D, not just bas-relief, is as ecstatic as I can get with my hands in clay (the movie “Ghost” notwithstanding).
Sometimes the brain disengages and I just watch the hands. They know what to do. I don’t care if everyone else hates it, if it never sells, if people call it sentimental, old-fashioned trash and a thousand galleries and competitions turn up their noses…it just feels right and I’m having fun watching it.
I’ve finished the silicone for Currents Repose, the sixth piece in the Guardino show (left). With luck, the wax will be done by Monday or Tuesday. She and her 25 pounds of glass are still small enough to fit in Scooby-the-Skutt, albeit with some skullduggery.
The seventh, Currents Breaking, is not. Not by a long shot, so I’m renting a kiln for her. So far, the only thing she’s been breaking is my heart.
She’s also an example of Les’ More Syndrome (say it out loud), named after my friend Les Rowe-Israelson, who WILL expand a piece to fit the available kilnspace and just a bit more. I twit her about it all the time, but it’s clear that, in 3D, I have the same disease.
Breaking started out as a nice, simple curve with wave action. As usual, she sprouted a face, the face became an integral part of the work…and all of a sudden she’s 16 inches tall and requires probably 40 pounds of glass to complete. She poses some pretty problems in casting–I *NEED* to take a class or five in large-scale casting because this make-it-up-as-you-go-along stuff can’t continue–and the one now being siliconed, right, should more properly be called “Breaking II.”
Breaking I was killed by an extension cord, with a lot of help from me. I tripped over the cord while carrying the base coat mold across the studio, smashing it into about 20 pieces. (In retrospect, Breaking might not have been such a hot name.) I had decided to skip the mastermold process and work directly from the clay model–which is dug out of the mold and therefore destroyed. When I make silicones, I never need them again. When I don’t…this happens.
Fortunately, the memory of her was still in my hands, so I rebuilt her from scratch in about five hours. I actually like the second one much, much better, although she’ll be a more difficult cast. I’ve still got the process slideshow online, if you’d like to see her in rotation (I use these slideshows to check my progress while I’m working).
And so Breaking is on her third coat of silicone right now, three more to go before I can make the mothershell. Pouring the wax and steaming out the mold will be a royal PITA. In my dreams these pieces will someday make enough money that I can be a REAL sculptor, one who sends the model to the foundry and lets them do all this nonsense while I just create.
For now, this is where the week goes…
Hey–whatcha workin’ on in twenty-ten?
January 1, 2010
The new year is a time for lots of new direction, projects, ideas, etc. So I’ll show you one of mine, if you show me yours. 
This is roughly 18 inches tall, another one of those “won’t fit the kiln” projects that’ll get silicone master-molded, filled with wax and stuck on the shelf somewhere. It didn’t start out this way, BTW–originally, this was a long, flowing shape for another project, but I discovered a tragic ancestor* and all of a sudden it grew people.
The sculpture that wouldn’t die. Part III. Period.
December 20, 2009
OK, so where are we? Oh yeah. At the end of the first firing of Triangle, this was the tally:
- One destroyed clay sculpture (getting it out of the mold kills it)
- No silicone master as a backup
- One spent plaster/silica mold
- About 8 pounds of unfused frit mixed with talc and hence garbage
- One giant glass donut that should have been a sculpture
Drat. This stuff should really come with an undo button. Fortunately, *I* come with a REdo button, so after a buncha work this is what I pulled out of the kiln:
SHOUTing, part II
December 13, 2009
SHOUT is a big (for me) piece, and probably the most difficult glass casting I’ve done to date. SHOUTing, part I was about the problems I ran into. This post is about how I fixed them.
SHOUT caricatures domestic violence, and as such needed to be large, looming and menacing. I wanted the pieces to interact with each other, at angles that would change the viewer’s perceptions based on how the piece was lit and positioned.
Unfortunately, my little Skutt bathtub was made for glass fusing, not casting, which meant that (a) it was too shallow and (b) probably couldn’t heat evenly enough to support my original design (which connected the figures through a thick glass base with lots of stressful right angles). I could have done it with a work 8 inches tall…but SHOUT needed to shout. (The final piece is a bit more than 24 inches tall)
So I shelved the project, and went on to other things while I puzzled it out.
Caricaturia
October 25, 2009
Ever get so busy doing art that you’re not actually doing art?
That’s been me for the last two months. It’s been that long since I actually sculpted. Made molds, fired glass, did a lot of coldworking and waxstuff and display designing and openstudio-ing, but actual SCULPTING?
Nope. No wonder I was getting antsy.
Yesterday afternoon I hauled out the clay, sliced off some bits and started in.
She’s the first in a series of nine caricatures, part of an idea I’ve had brewing for at least a year. She’s a lot smaller than I normally work, only about a third life-size. I get this terrible “what if I don’t really know what to do” anxiety whenever I open a new bag of clay, but she pretty much flew out of my fingers, as if she’d been waiting right at the tips.
Update: Finished her brother, #2, and am halfway through #3. I think I’ll just keep posting these in the same slideshow as I get through them. I’m not gonna jinx it by talking about who these people are, but I suspect you can tell if you look closely enough.
Anyway, I want to get these churned out, mastermolds made and waxes set up so I can start playing with these. I haven’t decided exactly how I’ll cast them yet–there are three good possibilities fighting for dominance in my brain right now–but I have plenty of time to think about it.
Conversations with light
September 24, 2009
Light and I have been in conversation as far back as I can remember. Most times, I just listen. Sometimes I get to talk back. Rarely–too rarely–we sing.
And it’s beginning to feel as though we’ll sing, soon.
When we sing, the light becomes a tangible thing, flowing like water, etching everything in its path, and I finally, blindingly, understand in my bones the definition of “illumination.”
Flutterbye
September 18, 2009
“I just love the way you put faeries into all your work. That’s what makes it soooo special,” she gushed, “I luuuuuuuv faeries.”
She was looking at “I Dreamt the Jacobean Rose,” one of several samples I’m pulling together for a prospective client and, frankly, it ain’t of a faery. Especially NOT a fashionably flirty flower faery. (say that fast five times)
I don’t want to stamp on anybody’s religion and I’m not making fun of people who luuuuuv faeries (well, maybe I am). But I have a sneaking suspicion that if there really are non-insectivorous winged beings hanging around peoples’ gardens, they SPIT on cute and fluffy. A little less giggly nectar-sipping and a whole lot more pounce-chew-gulp.
Hmmmm. Some day I might sculpt my version of real faeries. It won’t be pretty.
Playing with glass blocks
September 6, 2009
Fresh-from-the-kiln color samples (well, I coldworked them a bit) These are mostly earthtone pate de verre shades I'm testing for a client.
The reward for patiently, carefully weighing and mixing and packing frit into little plaster cells, then documenting the result? You get to play with blocks (right).
Those of you who’ve been to the studio know my obsession with color tests and frit mixtures. I have LOTS of these little things.
The cool thing about frit is that it can hide or show the true nature of the glass. In sheet or rod or cast form, black glass looks, well, black. Stretch it thiiiiiiiiin, though, or cut it with enough clear…and you get dark violet.
Baby-poop brown (NOT my term, a friend calls it that) makes one of the most beautiful clear saffrons, dark blues dilute to periwinkle, etc. And the only way you’re gonna know this stuff is to test it.
34 of the samples in the above picture were made with about eight colors of frit. (The 35th, the little blue tile at bottom left, is a Gaffer lead crystal sample I needed to test for another project.)
I once tried to build a full catalog of readily available tints but it seemed to be a never-ending battle; every time I’d think I’d nailed one color of glass another permutation would pop into my brain. At 7K plus samples, I hadn’t even started the blues yet.
So I sat down and figured out how many combinations I should test:
- Total number of Bullseye glass frit colors: 109
- Total number of Bullseye frit sizes available: 109 x 4 + 1 (Extra coarse clear) = 437
- Standard frit tint test panel: 10 tints (0%, 1%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%)
- Total number of standard BE single color frit tints possible: (437 X 10) ^ 108 = 1.5e+285
Uhm, that’s a really big number. Bigger even than the US deficit. Add in all the possibilities from an additional 241 Uroboros 90 frits, and the calculators stop giving me numbers and just say “infinity.”
Or in other words…a WHOLE lot of possibilities.
Now, realistically, not all these combinations will produce tints that can be distinguished by the human eye. Some of them will be splotch-on-splotch instead of true frit tints. Many will react with each other to produce the same sludgy brown, grey or black. Too many involve opal on opal, which cuts translucency to zero in pate de verre and makes the piece look painted. And some are, frankly, just ugly or really, really blah.*
In fact, far less than a tenth of those possibilities are what I’d call “practical tints,” i.e., stuff that I might want to put into my pate de verre.
That’s still a lot. And that’s only for single-color tints.
Now add in multi-color tints, which is mostly what I use, and you head right back to infinity. Plus, whenever I have a solid color field I tend to “drift” the color, i.e., combine lashings of pure color with frit tints in layers, to add depth and interest.
So if I do nothing but make color tests constantly, keep four kilns going without stopping, until I’m 98…I probably STILL won’t get to the blues. Sigh–now I don’t feel like such a slacker.
A year or so ago I abandoned the classic wedges and ice cube, for flat tiles with texture. They’re better for visualizing how the color will look in a real piece, and the changes in thickness give you an idea of what some depth will do to the shading. They let you play with surface finishes–firepolish gloss on the smooth back, coldworked, velvety smooth fronts.
The results are infinitely more satisfying on many, many levels. I like looking at them, handling them, arranging and rearranging them, checking the way the light passes (or doesn’t pass) through them. And I’ve noticed other people like playing with them, too–one neighbor plunged up to her elbows in color samples last week, saying “They just feel so good.” (One buddy asked if she could string one as a pendant and wear it–’way too heavy, but hey)
So…I’m working on ways to exploit that. In the meantime, I need to get these things up on the wall because honestly, I think they look good just massed like that. I’m gonna get them mounted, maybe even make up sets for sale. We’ll see.
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*I was politely chastised for accusing Dense White of producing tints that were “nasty” and “dead-looking.” It does that for me, despite the rest of the world’s ability to use it to make ethereally dreamy pieces I love. Of course, in my youth I was also clobbered for telling a doting mother that I wanted to photograph her toddler because he was so ugly he was adorable. I have since developed more tact but apparently only for people’s children, homes and small animals. When it comes to peoples’ glass, I seem to be just as brutally honest as ever.
Presto! Change-o!
August 25, 2009
Wanna see what I’m dazzling the neighbors with? Watch:
[Read more]
Studio peek (slideshow)
August 17, 2009
Got a LOT accomplished last week, thanks to a Laurel & Hardy moment which canceled a bunch of appointments and left me housebound. Took advantage of it and finished a bunch of mastermolds, fired a kilnload of color samples, all kindsa stuff. –happy sigh– I just love checking a bunch of stuff off my list, even if I have to do it sitting on a heating pad…
Still hunting for that elusive perfect investment mix, the one that holds detail beautifully, lasts through the entire firing and then lifts off a VERY clean casting in a single piece so I have almost no coldworking to do. Have achieved it twice now…and both times were (naturally) the times I was too busy to actually document what I was mixing up. Drat.
Time for some serious testing.