Stall, rest, heal

Late April and May have been physically challenging to say the least. Whirlwind of pain, medications, confusion, illness, lethargy, maybe even a spot of existential panic.

I've not been in studio often, and when I am, I am more drawn to looking at very old pieces of past projects, or raw components for making larger things, than I am to creating a new project.

Handmade sheet glass from pre-2010, filled with air pockets and imperfections.

With family on my mind, I came in one day, delirious & discouraged, and created a portrait for each of us. I never did like how they turned out, but I preserve them as-is, as a testament to how I felt about my kin, that afternoon, that week, that year.

Left & middle undecided which is Mother and which is Child; right is Father. To the right a small grease marker sketch.

Detail of Mother?, flat black gouache and Phano grease marker.

Detail of Father, poured gouache and MSG solution, scratched with patterning.

Personal challenges abound this month, and yet symbolic objects, tiny projects, omen-like scribbles continue to emerge from my shop, egging me on, making me make.

Insanity, and now a lull

The studio has been turned upside-down for the past week working on a prototyping project. Although the finished product hasn't come to fruition yet, I thought I'd share some pictures from the past week or so. It's been exciting, frustrating, with hardly a moment to breathe.

Smooth-on's Rebound 40 brush-on rubber product

A quick sweep with a heat gun works wonders in smoothing out Castilene surface while leaving the cold core structurally stable.

An old pal & wonderful artist visited, and performed the Ceremonial Setting-up of the Table in a corner of the shop. He may or may not drop in from time to time to do a little work and share some of this space.

Asymmetrical table love!

Always an adventurer, that one.

Exploring the Choi residence's dirtier corners.

April studio purge

Things are in flux at the studio I work out of, both inside my space and out, so I thought today was a good day to completely wipe clean the "gallery" wall, put the salt experiments in storage, and start fresh.

Close-up of the only thing on the wall. Flat black gouache, crystals and sequins.

Mail came today! From Greece, New Zealand and from Bullseye Glass :) Just a couple of nose rings from Etsy plus kiln shelves, kiln posts, and four sample packs of their full sheet fusible line. This will help me order glass in the future without any guesswork; their "striker" colors which change tone after hitting a certain temperature have already been fired, eliminating any confusion.

A deadline I've set with a new client prototyping a clear cast tank....

And lastly something silly I spilled for myself before locking up for the night, because I believe in the restorative powers of "not taking yourself too seriously" on days when you've taken yourself much too seriously:

High glitz

I haven't had much time for the studio until today, Sunday, and I got in early before everyone else, basked in the sunshine pouring terribly, beautifully, through my skylight, and played with a few things....

A sort of sketch with origami papers, saltwater and gouache.

Crystalline little coastlines.

I added some crystals and tried to re-imagine the scale. What if these were a distant range of mountaintops?

Gold and silver foiled origami paper. See how the salt crystals only clung to the un-foiled white paper? That was unexpected.

I've also unabashedly been having great fun playing with sequins. I source mine from Cartwright's and I have kept about a hundred or so varieties and colors for about three years without knowing exactly what to do with them. I like that they add 3D and volume in miniature doses. I love the glitter, the iridescence and the plastickiness.

Transparent colorless mini-sequins.

Using a light adhesive to create clusters solid enough for a salt pour.

Novelty sequins can be so humorous and pretty at the same time. I like the slight milkiness of the wet gum cement here.

Like lilypads crowded onto a pond.

This month, we're also going to begin shooting these sketchbooks I worked on all through 2013. The first three volumes have 50 images each, while the contents of the final book are more nebulous––this is when my paintings started getting larger more regularly, more three-dimensional, and more difficult to contain in a book.

Compiling these black books into a digital book format will be an ongoing project.

My second-most favorite pair of Dansko clogs...

Lastly, these lovely little air-plant arrangements have appeared, quietly, along the walkway by my studio. Who has put these here? I love them so very much!

Aerophytes in geometric arrangements!

A variety of results & progress around the shop...

The dyeing went wonderfully. The cats got into the skeins in the middle of the night, so they're looking a little bedraggled, but the colors took beautifully. I did a second round yesterday since the rig was already set up, where I tried various levels of dilution with spring water, and I love the results. Pastels on gleaming fibers, my dream!

They have a bit of "bedhead"...

Maybe I haven't gotten the hang of Parme Rose (some dyes are trickier than others), but I keep getting a camel-ish tone. It's lovely, but not as pink as I'd like.

Oh, that lavender, though...

I checked up on the salt-and-sequin pour. I find the result very humorous, but perhaps I've hit an end with this line of inquiry, at least for now.

Maybe a map of an island?

These crystals are smaller and more uniform. I'm not a chemist but I assume the smaller puddle evaporated more quickly and didn't give it time to develop those lavish, massive encrustations from the earlier salt pour.

My father picked me up some Aji-no-moto MSG (monosodium glutamate) from the Japanese market and I left this guy in the studio today to dry down overnight. I'm a huge fan of MSG conceptually and practically, though I use it extremely rarely in cooking (once in a while, a pinch in a pot of rice is magic). There's so much cultural and gustatory interest in the chemical for me; the idea of "umami" is fascinating; the branding of this flavor-awareness as Asian-specific is also fascinating. It's less neurotoxic and scary than people think. I'd like to play with MSG as a material for a while...

Dust from an old cup trapped in the solution.

I unboxed some murrine I created in Kait Rhoads' fabulous workshop I took a few years ago and have been arranging them loosely while imagining some fused worry stones for anxious types like me. People are so fond of the idea of murrine being a cross-section, as well as the notion that it is drawn thinly to concentrate a pattern and give a high degree of intricacy. Of course this interests me, but I also like thinking of these murrine in a totally different way: as each individual piece being a prismatic little beacon that light shines THROUGH, giving geometric and colored light projections.

Finally, on my way out the door, caught the shop owners working hard on a Sunday night...