Like Frying Bacon

As you have probably noticed (all two of you who read this blog) I haven't posted anything for the past two weeks, but this time I have an awesome reason for not doing so and that reason is this:

Welding. Say it with me, welding. W-E-L-D-I-N-G, roll it around and contemplate it. More to the point my last two Saturdays have been spent at the Rochester Arc & Flame Center taking their two day eight hour sculpture class that uses the MIG welding process. The simple way of explaining it is that its a lot like using a glue gun. The longer way is that a consumable wire electrode is fed through a torch tip like gun with an inert gas to shield it. A circuit is made (with clamps and things) which make an electric arc that melts the metal together. You also have to hold the tip of the gun 1/4th to 3/8ths of an inch away from your welding. Too far away and it spatters and pops but when its the right distance away it sounds like frying bacon. 

After practicing laying down beads, it was time to have fun practicing with scrap! From left to right I have a lousy abstract sculpture, a cool  doorstop, a base for a bud vase, and a small wall hanging. Personally, I like the doorstop and wall hanging the most along with the final project for the first day of the class:

A Universal Positioning Device (To borrow the one of the instructors' jokes!) To us laymen it is a stool and a surprisingly handy one too. Bonus fact: I cut out those cross braces with a plasma cutter, which was lots of fun and easy to use, except it shows every stop, start, and jittery hand movement you made.

Day two was eight hours to work on a sculpture you designed. I decided to go all out since part of the reason I took a welding class was to work in a larger scale. It took me an extra hour and quite a bit of help, but I ended up with

THIS FREAKING AWESOME FIVE FOOT SEVEN INCH GIRAFFE!! There's nothing to say about this other than it's a big ol' animal sculpture and I made it. Other than being wildly happy about it I already have a million touch up plans to make it even better. Of course because of all this I've been eyeing MIG welders in catalogs and staring at a short TIG welding workshop also offered by Arc & Flame because apparently TIG welding, although difficult and finicky, can be used in jewelry.

Enjoy this giraffe head detail before we must return to college arts, which also has had a lot happening on that front, from Runway 5.0 to me finishing my super secret glasses project.

Science Fiction Flashback & Studio Blah

While prowling around the internet recently I found out that the Star Wars concept artist, Ralph McQuarrie, had passed. It's interesting to look through the images of his work and to find out through the article that he was responsible for much of the Star Wars aesthetic. It also hadn't occurred to me that Star Wars does indeed have its own distinctive aesthetic as compared to other sci-fi franchises. Perhaps it's because I was more of a Star Trek kid?

Nothing thrilling happening on the studio front; my love-hate relationship continues in ceramics, the details are driving me up the wall in CAD, I'm doing super secret things in jewelry and finally finished a piece in metalsmithing. My nested vessel went from this:

To this over an all too short spring break:

During which time it gained the title Sea Flute and coincidentally resembles this lamp at ARTISANworks which is a take off of Maryling Monroe's white dress in the infamous photo of her standing over a street vent.

I swear I made Sea Flute before I even saw the lamp, I guess curving, flared forms are in now? For anyone who missed it my thoughts on ARTISANworks can be read here in last week's post. Ciao until the next project lurches towards completion!

Working Artisan Works

Last week was a lovely spring break and an excellent time to go exploring one of the well known art "galleries" near my hometown. ARTISANworks is its name and selling art is their game sort of, more on that in a moment. Several people have told me how amazing this place is and that it's the greatest art place ever with so much to see  and something new every time you look.

Thus the exterior and interior of the front lobby to ARTISANworks. Yes it would be difficult to spot the place if they hadn't painted the building teal, yes the entrance isn't very obviously delineated, yes it is that dark inside, yes there is that much stuff around and some of it is not artwork.

You are at least allowed to take photographs and I have here the "safari" set up next to the front desk, the main event room (I think it's called vertigo heights on the map) and then at the end of some hallway where you can see an example of one artist's work which is to reproduce items in wood. In this case its a ford truck from the 20s or so....

Here it's a four foot pencil sharpener next to the actual object peeking out on the pedestal to the right. I don't know who the artist is exactly, since much of the work is unlabeled or not clearly labeled. Rather frustrating when you want to know who did a particular piece and quite a problem when you have art ranging from Terry Gilliam-esque clouds to full on paintings and sculptures mounted/hanging from the ceilings much like these:

There are also artist's studios around the building from which you can deduce who is where on the pecking order based on size and location of their space. But, on this particular weekend no one was actually at work in them. Speaking of studios, ARTISANworks feels like someone took an average studio with all the nicknacks and interesting junk artists tend to keep around their work spaces and expanded it to encompass a whole building. It results in stuff ranging from as big as a working firetruck from the 60s down to decades old bottles of developer chemicals from Kodak.

The sad truth of the matter is that certain people's jewelry benches here at the college have more interesting things on them and they have the bonus of being ordered. True, you personally may not know what that order is but everything clearly has its place. There is no logical layout at ARTISANworks, probably an indication that they only add items and don't take things down. I'm not asking for a neatly ordered museum display, I'm asking for some guide post, some marker in this tidal wave of stuff. Many of the rooms and areas of the building are themed, but none of them are obvious upon walking in, except for the Frank Lloyd Wright style room. 

All of these complaints are a moot point as ARTISANworks markets itself as a unique venue to hold an event. This ability to rent areas for birthday parties, retirements, and corporate brouhahas gets top billing on both their website and brochures, not the artwork. It's not even a particularly wonderful place to have an event too since there's nothing to keep the general touring public away from your private function. (the state art teacher's association happened to be throwing a party at the same time I went to visit.) Even with these basic issues though I was able to find some interesting things my family and I liked, but coupled with the high price of admission, I don't think there's enough to make me come back again. Next time I think I will try the First Fridays at Anderson Alley instead.

Image dump time in case you can't get enough art in one sitting! Here's a nifty painting hanging from the ceiling,

This is a little shrine to Kodak which is kinda bittersweet given the whole bankruptcy currently going on. 

Once again I don't know who the artist is, but I rather liked the colorfulness and controlled drips and splatter of the watercolors. 

I loved this clay piece that looks like a mermaid sleeping on the sea floor and still don't know who made it or what it's called, but it was one of the few works posted with a price tag. It was 3,000 dollars for the sculpture and 2,000 for the glass top table it was sitting on.

And last but definitely not least in my truncated image tour of ARTISANworks is this wicked cool silver sculpture thing hidden way up top on a shelf in a small room about 1950s dentistry. Its metalsmithing and it's so awesome, completely unexpected, and nicely crafted too! 

Taking a Breather

It's that little moment in between projects where you're finished or close to it and haven't quite figured out exactly what to do for the next one so this magical thing called time, or at least the illusion of it, appears.

I have been trying to use the time efficently to get a head on designing eye wear but I am having much more trouble than expected. See I have the concept, I have the lens I want to build it around, I just can't come up with the design! Above is the closest I've gotten to a coherent design but I have no idea what to do for the arms of the glasses, and I am getting off concept of my whole virtual reality thing.

While I try to salvage my glasses idea (I am seriously considering the application of LEDs)  I have  also been throwing a bunch of cylinders on the wheel in ceramics and am so very very close to finishing my metalsmithing project. The bowl fits into the base at least and yes, I did forget to take pictures of the whole thing too. I'll have more images to deliever next week or so when I'm hoping to get a lot of art stuff straightened out, among other things, so I can plow through and maybe even finish something early!

Get A Move On

I stayed up late in the studio last night with this as one of many motivational songs that really explains how it all works the night before a due date.

And here is the final piece, which I totally forgot to take a picture of on a model. But it is based on Pac-man and the idea of level 256 where the arcade game glitches out, hence that large 3D mutated Pac-man with wires and Parcheesi pieces "power pills" coming out of its mouth. This part also sits on the back of the back of the neck so that the piece is all normal looking in the front until you walk around to the back where there is the wild and crazy thing. It is also a box clasp type closure that mostly works, yay for beginner's luck on that one!

I'm fairly satisfied with it, so far as it came out exactly as I had planned it to, but there are little quirks about it that bug me, mostly under neath the heading of craftsmanship. Still it's on to the next which is proving to be harder to design than I thought it would be...

Brewed to Perfection

This post has been percolating for at least two weeks for your enjoyment; since I keep having to revise it again and again because so many art projects became due all at once. First the fun stuff: somehow I came across this link to a 87 minute documentary on hulu called Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade. Though not the best documentary, it did explain to me a lot about Twin Galaxies, Walter Day's desire to keep track of arcade high scores, and a good portion of where are they now for the guys who had the top scores.

Through the interviews you get a sense of what the arcade culture was like and their perspective on how and why it died so abruptly (Home gaming surpassing the arcade as well as rougher clientele showing up to  arcades). It's still difficult to imagine what arcades were like having missed that entire period of video gaming history but virtue of having been born in the 90s, but it sounds awesome.

While not "researching" games I have been camping out in the studio working on a few things and completing things at a rate that feels way too slow at times.

CAD class at least is quite fun and I completed the first project a while ago, which is this sweet wind up robot. I thought I was on to something different with my color scheme, but alas looking around the Internet there is at least one retro tin wind up robot with the same green, red, and yellow. At least the design is different, toy makers and sci-fi filmmakers didn't base too many robots on an egg shape (Robbie the Robot comes closest).

Next is ceramics, which is still not a favorite medium of mine. The left is a coil built vessel with red and black slip with sgrafitto in it, post improvements. My snake pot came out of the raku firing well (middle picture) but it didn't clean up as well as I would have liked (right picture) the snake was supposed to be a blue-green, but I guess I didn't slap on enough layers of glaze. At least it looks kinda ancient? Anyway on to Metalsmithing...

Where my angle raised vessel is almost the shape I want it so I can start worrying about building the base and ordering some super special awesome materials for it. I got a good start on the catenoid, though I get the feeling I'm doing it wrong, judging by the interesting blisters I some how gave my self hammering it and the charming surface cracks it developed. It's now a gamble as to how complete this will be by the due date since I have been focusing most of my time on jewelry.

I have the chain together and I just got the clasp soldered together last night. Tonight I have to round up some two part epoxy in order to add my last minute decorative doodads to the clasp. The cheese grater holes inside Pac-man's mouth will have a rats nest of colorful wires glued in; left over from when I dismantled three Genesis controllers to make a little model chair for intro to 3D Design. The big copper loop will get a cut in it so I can string on wooden Parcheesi pieces, spaced out by brass tubing, which will also conveniently cover the break in the wire.

Now provided I don't get distracted by attempting to beat lousy and unusual games in the the Pac-man franchise or by such paltry thing as sleep or dinner I should be able to finally finish this necklace and get on to designing the VR glasses.

My Bowl is Buoyant

Bam! There, now this post isn't a lie! My bowl for metal smithing is indeed an appropriate vessel for sailing through the calm blue pickle. Truth is, I haven't got any really interesting in progress pictures (they bore even me) so let's discuss the next project. It's eye wear, and boy do I have ideas! First, some back story:

Yes back before the Xbox and Kinect even existed the Sega Genesis had a motion controller called the Sega Activator in about 1993 or there abouts. This got me thinking about how games were always meant to be immersive; exemplified the most with the virtual reality craze of the 90s and video games awkward transition into 3D. Case in point YouTube's side bar helpfully had this video about a Sega Master System add on called the Sega Scope 3D:

I'd never heard about it because no one in America ever cared about the Master System, no matter how good it was technology wise. This commercial is closer to what I want to do with the eye wear project  but I can't discuss the details with out first covering the most infamous of all misguided virtual reality 3D gaming devices, the Virtual Boy. 

No I don't have any damned clue if you were supposed to strap it to your head or not. But, I have heard many stories of headaches from staring too long into the device's red LED display, and the noise and weight of it couldn't have been much help either. It apparently did produce some sort of 3D effect using the concept of parallax motion though it never took off and is kind of a forgotten "console" in between the SNES and the N64. It only ever had 22 games released and was taken off the market mere months later. 

The idea of going through all sorts of trouble to experience an altered game like and flashy new reality only to have it turn out to suck and have not been worth the cost (both to your wallet and your dignity) will be the basis of my project. I'm planning on having a pair of glasses that alter your perception of the world and sure they will look all cool and glitzy, until you realize that do little more than sunglasses. And oh yes sunglasses WILL be involved...