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December
8, 2011
At right are the King and Queen of Norway looking at a stainless steel peace
pole just dedicated to them. The peace pole was installed near the entrance to
the Hoversten Chapel at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They plan to
use the site for gatherings and ceremonies of peace regularly each academic
year.
November 23, 2011
This is a 2 foot tall prototype only partially constructed. It is stainless steel and copper. The final piece would be 8 or 10 feet tall (probably 10), about 3 feet wide, and with a top not shown here because I'm still searching for a source for the material for it.
The text would hug one edge on each side running from top to bottom in letters an inch or two high.
It is only partially constructed because I don't need to do any more work on this particular phase of it. I already learned what I need to know - the order in which to make the welds. On a shape like this that governs whether later welds will be able to be brought together in smooth, tight joints.
November 1, 2011
A
prototype of the first four feet of a peace pole designed for a city in a
northern latitude where it is dark half the year. A single light source inside
illuminates all of the faces of the sculpture. The white page with text on it
would be text etched into the stainless steel. The text is 50 translations of
the word Peace. There would be that many on each flat face. I show it only on a
piece of paper here.
I put this here to show someone, but afterwards created something a bit more complicated and abandoned this design.
October 18, 2011 - Some things cannot expressed in words.
October 17, 2011
This is the Chinese word for Peace. It is made from melting glass onto copper. I'd like to make peace poles out of this. Unfortunately, they would cost about $5,000. Also unfortunately is the fact that I'm a bit bored making the same ones over and over. I want to make something different. Perhaps I'll make one like this to put by my front door.
September
11, 2011
I was asked to make a dedication plaque to put inside the school to which a
7-sided copper peace pole had been donated. I made it to match the peace pole,
except for the frame, which also is copper, but has a different patina.
August 5, 2011
I don't make artists' statements, but I might start collecting them. I don't
want to ridicule artists, but the statements they currently are taught to make
in art school, and then are required to make when they are out of art school,
can be difficult to distinguish either from parody or from a world in which
sociologists have taught artists how to write. For instance, the following is an
artist's statement interspersed with my translation of what he is saying.
"Within this body of work, I wish to go beyond the typical scenario of photographically presenting an object of personal adornment in isolation."
The jewelry will be worn by a model.
"I believe I can engender, within the viewer, a strong emotional reaction by placing the wearer in an unusual fantasy environment."
There will be a set.
"The styled environment is theatrical in nature and visually relates to the objects form language."
It won't clash.
"This encourages the model to emote a reaction to the situation, and a change in the models’ persona is observed."
She acts.
"At the moment of animation all the components are captured in a photograph."
We'll shoot it.
"While the wearing event must end, the captured image will endure and continue to communicate with an audience."
We'll post pics.
He has described advertising. Open any magazine. Watch any commercial.
I am not meaning to say anything critical about that artist or his work, only about the people who require artists to write like that. I know artists some years out of art school who find themselves apologizing for statements and work required of them at certain points in their careers that linger on the internet like embarrassing photos taken freshman year at a Frat party.
There are epochs in thought and culture that get kidnapped by mindsets that cause heretics to wish there still were viable places to go live alone in the woods, the way Einstein must have felt in Berlin during the First World War, or the way any artist in the last twenty years might feel if not of the opinion that the highest achievement of art is propaganda.
July 26, 2011
When
it is raining or the sun is too bright, there is a piece of plywood that I set
on top of the doors to the wagon in which my torches are stored. It makes it so
that I can use the torches without rain falling on the work or the sun blinding
my ability to see the color the metal is turning from the heat of the torch. But
when I took down the plywood one day, I whacked the light fixture by my door and
shattered the glass. So this evening I made this steel one that can survive being whacked by plywood. It's going to happen again.
July 24, 2011
Today
I created a 2-foot tall sculpture that only is a rough study for something that I want to
make that will be a different shape and will be taller. It is copper, hammered
into shape, with melted glass torch-fired onto it. To get the glass the way I want it
might not be possible with a torch though. I might have to build a bigger kiln.
That would slow down progress a lot. But I have another idea for how to
approach torch-firing it - something else that will require lots of
experimentation.
So other studies will be appearing here (if I remember to shoot photos of them) partly because this is solace for me. No politics. No statistics. No deadlines. No struggle to stay within someone's budget. Instead it's just me and some copper on a quest. I think that might be one of the ways to finish the sentence, "You might be an artist if . . . " You might be if you keep doing in spite of it costing, not paying, on every front except an aesthetic one.
Routinely working at an art form, with no success or payout in sight, means that you will have an already honed means of expression available when events require something being said, like already having learned how to construct sentences that are decipherable before the need need arises to explain why the law currently proposed is insane.
The United States Supreme Court ruled that sculpture is speech, although this particular piece might be saying nothing more than that the sculptor needs to try again.
May
10, 2011
One of my current projects is developing a peace pole trellis, a structure
on which flowers and plants grow to make a living peace pole. There is a page
about it at this link.
March 6, 2011
For
a while I've
been melting glass onto metal in an effort to make better peace poles. I keep
trying to make them better. I also try make them cheaper, but this isn't a way
to do that. This way consumes lots of time and the materials are expensive. But
it appears as though it is going to result in some very cool peace poles.
At right is a sample showing the first two letters of the Turkish translation of the word peace. I have samples of experiments like this one filling up boxes. The glass melts at a temperature that is only about 480 degrees F lower than the temperature at which copper melts. And some of the effects I produce require exposing it to temperatures higher than the melting point of copper, but too briefly to melt the copper - too briefly if everything goes right. Often it doesn't. One of the things I practice is how not to incinerate what I'm working on.
It's not like being able to work out designs on paper or in a computer where you can sketch something, discard it, sketch something else, and work through thirty sketches in a day. It takes hours to try one iteration of some of these experimental pieces. There are so many variables - hotter fire, longer fire, more fires, more glass, additions to the glass, manipulation of the glass while hot, layers of different glasses, thicker metal, faster cooling, oxygen-free cooling, etc. Each one can entirely alter the result. Each one requires running through the whole preparation sequence again to find out what the effect will be. Once something worth keeping results, there is no guarantee that repeating the sequence will reproduce the same result. When it doesn't, it can take a long time to figure out how to reproduce that one good result. Was it the humidity that day? Had the glass been contaminated with something with which I want to contaminate it again?
When I tried to make a larger version of the experiment shown, it would not work. The way I fired it needs to be recreated on a larger scale. Now I'm investigating building or buying additional equipment for that. As I do, I wonder if anyone ever is going to buy a single peace pole made like this. Google changed its algorithm last week. My ranking dropped. Will anyone search long enough to find me now? Perhaps I should have spent less time working on the art and more time working on getting people to link to me, like the sites that now rank higher than me.
January 1, 2011
As you can see in the postcard, I've been working with fire during the last
year as I develop something new for next year. So this fall I built an incendiary wagon. The floor, walls and inner roof are
steel, so it's fireproof. Above the steel inner roof is an outer roof that is
corrugated and rust-proof. It will reduce rust
to the rest of the structure and shade it from summer sun. The wagon is where I keep the acetylene and MAPP
gas and oxygen and such away from structures that are flammable. It is
ventilated top and bottom all the way around to prevent any buildup of gases.
I haven't posted a photo of it yet because it is not finished. I'm waiting for it to rust more. The exterior is supposed to be rust colored. The roof hangs over the front and back reducing the amount of rain that hits those sides, so those sides are not developing the rust finish as fast as the other sides. I expect that sometime this year they will.
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