studio panorama

if you click on the image above you can get a pretty good view of the studio currently. I was shooting the panorama for a little booklet i was going to make to take with me to new york, but i have gotten more into the photo stitching software than i have gotten into the adobe indesign software i was using to design the booklet. i like getting up on a ladder like this and really stepping back from the work, sometimes i get tunnel vision because i am so caught up in the work and forget to look at the bigger picture.

studio ramblings and stir stick ordering

some frames i found braced up with c clamps

Somebody was throwing away all these perfectly good wooden frames. They are actually the frames used to brace acrylic vitrines that top off pedestals in sculpture displays( I get these from the various preparator jobs i have been doing around town). On the left behind them is a similar set of frames for bracing vitrines that have been turned into a spiral patterned sculpture. with these new ones i think i will be painting them a certain spectrum of colors related to the pigments i have been using in my drawings. Once they are in their final arrangement they should resemble some sort of 60's era art piece, far out! sometimes i am just amazed at the sheer amount of material out there in the world that has found it's way into my studio, and into my output.

So i keep working on my practice round of stir sticks, which are slowly becoming their own discreet piece. Now that i have a better understanding of the room i will be working in at the dam stuhltrager gallery I am pretty sure i will be building a structure that moves out from a central tube and wends it's way around the existing walls of the space. Although I still have not seen the space, I do have diagrams and have had a few explanatory conversations with the gallery owner and now have a better understanding of the space i will be working in. The primary focus of the installation though as always will be the transformative power of labor, namely mine over the course of 14 days. I am confident, as with past work that the process will dictate the end result of the piece. With only four weeks until i fly up, I have to be careful to focus my nervous energy on something other than the impending installation. So far it is working, I have been focused on other work around the studio, namely the never ending task of "getting organized". I used to be really hard on myself for not keeping my studio more organized and jumping around from work station to work station and piece to piece, leaving different piles of in progress work along the way. Now, though I understand that cleaning up the studio becomes a source of new work, as i get side tracked organizing the various detritus of other projects, and playing with the materials that are part of the never ending renovation of the studio, i discover new directions and material usage that i would not normally have found. When things settle i plan to tackle the parts of the mdf wall that got water damaged, but i keep getting distracted when i realize how cool the bulging shapes caused by the water damage in the mdf wall actually are.

Below the stir stick weaving is probably closer to the shape i will begin with in new york, but really won't know until i start. Brooke(the blurry red streak in the background) came to the studio so we could re-finish a couple bertoia chairs that i found.

The process of ordering stir sticks has been interesting so far. Of all the art processes i utilize consumer techniques and bargain hunting has become indispensable to my work. I am tired of trying to get different price quotes and may just go with a supplier that is reliable and sells the sticks i am familiar with so i don't have to do something like open an account with a whole seller or send a certified check to Canada, which scares me a bit. I am also anxious about getting to new york, starting the piece and then running out of materials, but then i remember new york is a big city and i should have no problem liberating additional stir sticks for use in the installation.

practice makes perfect

it has been a little while since i actually wove some stir sticks. since i am committed to a couple different woven installations over the next year and more might come up, i figured i should get back in to it. i thought instead of weaving them into existing architecture i would go for free standing piece. Honestly i needed to time myself again and see how many sticks i can weave in an hour so i can better estimate how many to order for the upcoming show in new york. I know i have about 12 days there, with ten hours a day average work time, and i am weaving about 1000 sticks an hour now, the piece below reprents about 2hours, with a few collapses along the way but now that the basic structure is made i can really sail through my time trials. so based on these numbers i should order around 120,000 sticks. that would make the piece bigger than the sumter piece. this doesn't make sense since i had more time in sumter, but i guess because i had to spend so much time weaving into the railings and going up and down on the lift that i didn't keep the kind of consistent pace i should be able to in the gallery. i think i will order 100,000 sticks though because it is a nice round number and if i get through all of them and still feel like using more i can always hit one of the several hundred starbucks in the new york area.




i like this structure and i will keep following it through to a logical conclusion.

the bird, brancusi and the artist studio

I am always looking for that overlap between the art world, the real world, the design world, and my world. Although brancussi is not a direct influence on me and my work i am aware enough of the history of art and contemporary sculpture to understand his influence and where it overlaps my production and work. I also see the re-emergence of his influence on contemporary design. I have pondered before the fact that art has begun to look more like design and design more like art. I think this trend might be the result of the re-evaluation of both disciplines undergoing scrutiny from within the ranks. I have seen an over abundace of imagery in the design world making use of the artist hand or rougher marks, and have seen fine artists move away from the presence of the artist mark moving towards a pseudo professionalism and high design aesthetic. I think for the artworld this is a reaction against the faux naive tendencies that swept the artworld a few years back. In the design world i think it is an absorption of the the faux naives work, which is a good thing. Design could stand to soften the edges. as the regular world gets over designed designers will experience the same disgust with slickness that artists have started to feel. For brancusi's part he stands as a good marker of design meeting art meets the early artist studio blog.

brancusi self portrait in his studio

embodied in his art were readily absorbed into the fabric of contemporary home design and products that his work no longer looks like art but rather like home goods, computer mouses, trash cans , light fixtures and anything else for me i know brancsusi more as the subject of an iconic photograph of the artist in his studio, than as the maker of a work of art. his art has always been easy to miss in museums , since it is usually cordoned off by ropes and can't compete with buildings it is housed in. the principalsmichael graves has designed for target.
new thought
although i doubt handwriting and the handwritten word will lose their immediacy as a graphic element, i have noticed that scrawl and handwriting have emerged as design elements. I guess this is the ultimate custom font. this reminds me, i am still working on making a font based on my handwriting since time and again i have been told i have "unique" handwriting(unique is code for sloppy and illegible). But back to why bracusi matters to my practice. every time i feel the tendency to set up my tripod and set the timer on my camera to document myself at work in the studio, it is not just an act of narcissism but is a connection to bracusi's legacy and the artist who creates and tracks his development within his own private world.

this is a sequence of photos showing what i did with an old railing i found on the side of the road recently
first i cut off the supports

then i cut the square stock steel into smaller bits
then i made a rough drawing of what i wanted the "basket " to look like. I think making the break from strictly process work to image based work provides a balance for me and helps me complete the circle between my drawings prints and works on paper and my sculpture and installations
For brancusi, the image of birds in flight gave inspiration to much of his output, and lately i have seen the bird image re-occur in contemporary design and packaging. i always ponder why this is and i think it might be part of a larger movement back towards nature derived imagery and away from design or purely computer based imagery for designers.

the quest for stir sticks

i have become an expert on wooden stir sticks. it started as an innocent exploration and blossomed into a full blown knowledge base of the tensile stregnth and construction uses of stir sticks. I know that in order to complete my installations i need the 7" rounded end wooden coffee stirrers, the birch ones, made in china. From various stages of trial and error i know the flat end and the 5.5 inch round end wont work, i know popsicle sticks are too rigid and too short. Knowing exactly what i need and knowing i need 10 or more cases(100,000 sticks and up) for my next installation in september, means i have to call manufacturers and distributors and research the cheapest and easiest way to get multiple cases from point A to me here at point B or to point C where i intend to make my installations. Most of the times the distributors i have been calling for quotes have just asked out of curiousity what i am up to with that many stir sticks at once. when i explain, they seem to understand, I guess as much as any one understands why someone would need 100,000 stir sticks.