Artist's Blog
Archive Eight
January 25, 2008
On
intentionally distressed paper I created a rough draft of a wall (or door)
hanging. Roughly 100 translations of the phrase executed in blue ballpoint pen
with the occasional skips and gradations normal for ballpoint pen. The paper is
3 feet long. The text is about 5 inches wide. At right is a detail from it.
If it were to be hung on an office door, I could write the door number and the name normally listed on the door between lines of text, but in hollow type like the rest of the text (click above right to see), only larger and with white space separating it from the rest. I'll have to make an example of that to show.
Room 2808
Janet Rambert, Ph.D.
Department of Conflict Resolution
January 29, 2008
The previous artwork with the 100 translations was a rough draft. I'm
working on a final now in a 90 pound, acid free vellum.
February 6, 2008
The final draft of the peace art has a page at peace
art.
February 13, 2008
I'm
figuring out my taxes. I spent too much on peace poles last year and lost money
(isn't that the definition of "artist"?). I've got inventory and equipment as a
result so I think I'm ahead, but I'm not an accountant. I discovered a college's
PO Number never turned into a check five months ago. Someone else in my position
would have discovered that four months ago. I should pay more attention to
money, but I just can't get interested in it. It's not what peace poles are
about. And I feel guilty about the prices I'm charging already.
This handful of rivets arrived today. It cost $90.00.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
For months there has been a "Coming Soon" note posted in place of a picture of a five-sided stainless steel peace pole on my home page. The rivets are for that. Finding rivets of a high enough caliber and then testing them in salt water and in sulfuric acid over extended periods of time to make sure that 50 years from now there will not be a brown streak running down a peace pole as a result of a rivet reacting with acid rain took time and money before I finally settled on these and ordered them. There still is another material that needs to be tested for that peacepole that, coincidentally, today at long last I was notified was being shipped. Because this stainless steel is different than the stainless I used previously, I have to test two versions of the material being shipped - more time and money. Some year I should try to resist experimenting and improving and investing so much in making these better.
February 21, 2008 - The fiftieth anniversary of the
peace symbol.
The
artist Gerald Holtom had been looking at Goya's Nohubo remedio at right and
felt the emotions and saw the shapes that lead him to use the semaphore signals
for the for the letters "N" and "D," for Nuclear Disarmament, and created this
symbol for a planned protest.
May 28, 2008
I was in California for a few days. The Unity Center in San Diego flew me
out to participate in the dedication of their new peace pole. Since I was in the
ceremony, I could not take photos. They say someone did and will forward some to
me. If they do, I will post a few on this site. I've been to ceremonies before,
but this one is a good reference for people planning their own. More about it
can be read here.
May 18, 2008
This
is another model of a design for a peace pole I might make someday out of metal.
The text would be cut out so that light shines through. I made the
model to experiment with what size the text needs to be on the outside and what size
text needs to be on the inside to enable looking through the outside text to see
the inside text and be able to read it.
This would need to be made out of steel that is between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. It would be very durable, but doing the artwork to alter each of the letters to make them work for this application, and then cutting them out of steel that thick, could make this a $10,000 peace pole. It could be let to rust or it could be painted, even powder coated, or it could be made out of Core Ten Steel (if I can find a piece of the right thickness). Its shape and the thickness of the metal give it its strength. It should last a very, very long time.
Shown here it has a smooth round shape, but it might have to be made from a series of flat sides in order to keep it from being a $100,000 peace pole.
The nautilus shape feels simple and elegant, but I'm not sure about it for peace poles. I don't want to step too far from the visual vocabulary established by having all of these be poles, for continuity and recognition. But maybe it is not too far afield. I'll have to think about it.
May 17, 2008
It is possible to be too creative for your own good. Repeating things that
work is a good survival instinct, but often I'm not capable of it. I wake up
thinking about how to make things better. If I do make something better, it
would seem reasonable to make it again. But I want to make it still better. I
can endure only a limited amount of repetition. Which adds to the reasons to be
weary of the $100 peace pole. I believe such an inexpensive peace pole should exist to bring peace poles
within reach of people with smaller budgets, but I am not sure I am the person
who can continue making them. Besides the fact that some of them are as much
trouble and as time consuming as poles that cost ten times as much, depending on
who is ordering them, there is the repetition factor. And there is the fact that
I don't have time to finish prototypes of new designs because I'm too busy with
repeating things like the $100 peace pole. If I don't remove it from the site, I
might have to raise the price. Either that or limit the language choices so that
I can
pre-make them off-season when I'm not so busy. Even then, the repetition is
going to be the end of me.
May 16, 2008
I've been rewriting other parts of this site rather than posting here. I've
been rewriting it in part because of questions that have been asked. When
questions come in, it helps me
understand
what I need to do to this site so that questions are answered before they are
asked. Work on that is what I've been writing instead of this blog lately.
Also off and on I have been folding paper to resemble cross sections of a new design for a peace pole. Today I took one of those ideas and created a four foot long section of it full scale out of heavy paper. I didn't like how it looked when life-size. Back to the drawing board.
And wouldn't you know I didn't think to take a photo of it until after I had collapsed it and put it in a garbage can.
May 11, 2008
It
might be that I keep designing new peace poles because I never like them. People
write and call telling me how much they do when they receive them. They say that the
photos on this site didn't do them justice. Etc. It's nice to hear. It helps keep
me going, but I never like the peace poles myself. I want them to last forever
and cause people to stop in awe and wonder and live in peace. I won't be happy
until they do, so I'll never be happy. I'll just keep trying.
Above left is a rough sketch of the cross section of a bronze peace pole in development. It has seven sides with translations on three levels for a total of twenty-one. It is about a foot in diameter. Its height probably will be between twelve and fourteen feet.
May 5, 2008
I wrote a while back that I wanted to design a peace pole that was more
lighthearted. I want to, but wrapped around my mind is fact that my country
tortures people. That leaves me speechless, quietly staring into space, hearing
the echo "my country tortures people." I was diagramming a new metal peace pole
and it did not come out light hearted. Perhaps I could buoy myself up in order to feel
lighthearted and end up with a new peace pole design that is lighthearted. But before I do, I
can't help but respond to the fact that my country tortures people. It's
not new news, but the fact endures.
April 23, 2008
Someone emailed saying,
"You used to have adhesive templates that lay on a peace pole so that one can paint 'perfect letters with a paint roller or a brush.' These were $25.00 each plus shipping.
Do you not provide these any more?"
Apparently the page leading to that information had disappeared from my site. I thought I should add it again and checked my "Make Your Own Peace Pole" page. It wasn't there. Someone important in the peace pole movement had asked me to take it down months ago, and so I did, but they never would answer when I asked why. So I put it back up, or thought I did. I believe it is important to help people with that. But apparently all I had done was put back the link to it. It was a dead link. That page used to get visited frequently. In the months it has been dead, no one clicking on it ever mentioned to me that I had a dead link on my homepage. Maybe I need to find someone who will comb through my entire site looking for other mistakes and glitches.
I found a very old backup on a storage device from which to recreate the page. It has taken me until after 1:00 in the morning, but I have too much to do during the next weeks to do it any other time.