Better Moments

Blogger is giving me a hard time about the picture layouts, and I'm not interested in spending a lot of time figuring it out. 

In brief; a decent day. The photo at top shows where I started, around 9:30, and the photo at bottom shows where I ended up, around 4:15. In the middle is an image of one of the joys/frustrations of the home studio arrangement - a monitor that reaches to the studio. The good news is that this means that my wife can pick up the two older kids at school and leave the baby napping. The bad news is that he inevitably wakes up as soon as she leaves the house. In my better moments I remember that having the luxury to do what I love in the morning and have lunch with my son in the afternoon is a great privilege. In my lesser moments I am not as grateful as I should be. 

In these pictures it's a bit hard to see what's changed, which makes me a bit nervous. If you look at the bottom section however, particularly at the leaves, you can see things shifting, moving, gaining definition. I think I'm finally starting to get familiar with the leaf shape, and the feel of the plasticine. In my better moments I remember that I am actually only working in the studio one day a week, and I try to be patient, and enjoy the process. In my lesser moments, I step back, look at how far I have to go, and panic.

Plasticene Choreography

Continuing to make steady progress in my one-day-a-week marathon.

I think this is some of the hardest modeling I have ever done. It's not that the forms are particularly hard (although the grape leaves are no picnic), as much as the composition is so complex, and working with plasticine is so slow. Changes can't be made quickly, which means I need to visualize a lot of moving parts that I can't actually see, which always makes me nervous. I have come to be very suspicious of what I think will work vs. what I can see is working. The closest analogy I can draw in my own experience is my limited experience with choreography - trying to compose multiple movements on dancers in space as they overlap in time turned out to be one of the hardest creative exercises I have ever encountered. Particularly because, at the time I refused to use video recording. In those days, I was still more willing to trust what I thought than what I could see.

 

As I get close to the bottom, I'm having to figure out what that space is like. Does it remain a constant tangle all the way to the bottom, or does the addition of the fisher cat and the chicken require a more rational, dimensional, space? Questions like that keep me up at night.

New Business Model

For the time being, I have decided to limit the scope of this blog to the (more or less) present. I've been feeling a little anxious about the amount of information I'm leaving in my wake, and have decided to  make my digital life a bit more like my actual life; things happen, and then they go.

State Of The Arts

Watch Jed Morfit, artist on PBS. See more from State of the Arts.

Produced by the excellent Susan Wallner. Thank you Susan!

Mama's In The Arbor

Good progress today.

It's hard not to panic in the face of so much detail, and such slow going, but so far so good. I keep reminding myself that there's no rush - nobody's waiting for me to finish this this, there's no deadline - so just relax and enjoy it.

Easier said than done.