February 10, 2009

Studio Update #366

Drying water putty

The large image is the progress since I originally started it long ago. Slathered in water putty after I spent an hour sanding off the liquid nail I used to adhere it to the masonite, this future wall prosthetic's next step is another sanding, and as you could guess, it's gonna be a doozy. This water putty stuff is really great. It's similar to plaster but with higher tinsel strength. I had learned about it from the facilities guys at my last job. They were using it instead of wood putty. We'll see how it sands out.

I also did some sketches with ink and water. The color from my favorite one (which sorta looks like a dong) came from the unwashed interior of the squeezie thing with which I applied a big puddle of water to the paper. Once the puddle had a shape that worked, I added black ink by touching a wooden, ink-saturated skewer tip to the surface. I really like the results.

January 25, 2009

Studio Rooftop View

View of LA at night from the roof on my studio

Not much studio progress to speak of. I have a few things in-progress that are about halfway finished though.

CAA is coming to LA in February and I'm looking to get enough work done so I can have a little shindig at the studio where people can see some of the things I've been up to. Got a lot of work ahead of me. Nothing worse than going to an artist's empty studio.

December 25, 2008

Happy Holidays!

Here's wishing everyone a happy holiday and that it will someday snow in Los Angeles. As you can see, we'll sure be ready (E looks super desperate, huh?).

December 8, 2008

Sunday Development

My development environment

No studio time this week. I had a really long week and went to bed every evening at around 9pm. Felt really nice to just fall into bed that early, knowing I didn't have to be up until 9pm the next morning.

It took all week to catch up on the sleep I missed out on while camping in Joshua Tree last weekend. And yes, we really did freeze our F#@king asses off. More so than I imagined. We only had two thin blankets each and the nighttime temp was at least 40°. Doesn't sound too cold, but believe me, it was.

I'll post some pics soon. I had them ready to go but my trial on Aperture ran out before I could export them. Now I need to come up with $ to buy the app (which is very worth it). When that happens, many a beautiful picture will be posted.

So, my Sunday (and Saturday) has been spent making websites. I never post much about it because I don't think most people want to read about coding, but I found the above image nice enough to post.

The application I use is called TextMate and it allows you to customize the look of different types of code. After spending a while working in black on white I switched to light on dark. Over the years I have tweaked the colors to suit my needs which is what your seeing, my personal theme. Kinda corny, but pretty none the less.

I've also been working on a new version of this site's design and functionality. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it over the holidays (I'm pretty far along). That is, when I get my client work done. I have at least two weeks off for the holidays and I plan on spending the days in my studio and the nights on web development.

November 27, 2008

Untitled and in Progress

Untitled and in-progress

I spent more time in the studio this weekend. It feels like I'll soon be able to quit starting my posts with some form of the sentence/disclaimer about how I actually got some work done. It's part artist's guilt, part a need to update whomever is reading my posts and part a refusal to be nonchalant about how hard it has been to make progress on structuring my life around what I really want to accomplish. And as most artists that struggle to make time for the studio know, it's a big deal to get even one day a week in their studio.

Ok, no that I got that off my chest...

As I've mentioned multiple times before, I'm working through some works-in-progress from the past couple of years (boy, I still can't believe it's been that long). While at the the UTD/Southside residency I finished a series entitled "Pets". At the time, I had edited a couple of pieces out of the series as the forms weren't quite right. I held onto them though, in the hopes that I would be able to find some sort of closure. The problem was that the forms had more of a subtractive quality to them as if they had been carved rather than being built from the inside-out (they were made with individual pieces that were wheelthrown and then put together with added handbuilt forms). I wanted to see if I could bring back an expansive quality by adding to them. In way, I liked the fact that this let me take more risks since if the pieces failed, it wouldn't have been too much of a big deal. Besides, the hard part was over, the firing. I hate firing clay, something always goes wrong and you end up losing a ton of work.

I've wanted to work with pantyhose since graduate school (do you see my serious face?). First, as way to realize forms I would later make into pots, then, as I moved out of making pots and fired clay in general, as a way to alter preexisting forms. The only thing I'd done with it so far were the Teapots Altered piece. So this weekend I took what was leftover and stretched them over the piece shown above. It wasn't easy and I ripped it in a few places where the clay was a little sharp. Once I got both of them on I showed it to E and she recommended trying silk instead of nylon. I agreed. I wanted more of a sensual look to the form. Getting misshapen forms to look sensual has a lot to do with what I working towards in general.

So what you see above is a first draft. I've got a list of things to get for next go-at-it and I always like buying pantyhose (not that it's a regular habit, and not that there would be anything wrong that...).

The swoopy number is a clay study for another wall prosthetic. Most of my ideas for this body of work are moving towards pattern and repetition. I always hesitate with repetition (to a fault at times) because it's so often abused . The formula usually goes "Hey, that's a great piece I made there, but I really need something to fill a gallery... I know, I'll just make a shitload of 'em. Awesome!".

I'm a little fuzzy on why I'm looking for more pattern/repetition but the wall prosthetic currently in-progress should give me a better idea as to whether or not I'm going in the right direction.

Now I need to get ready for camping. E and I are going Joshua Tree for Thanksgiving and from what I've seen, the place looks great. I just hope we don't freeze our asses off (btw, we're going to freeze our asses off).

Happy Thanksgiving!