Sausage Factory

I just re-published all of the old posts that I had taken off earlier. I took them down because I was concerned that watching someone make art might be a little watching someone make sausage. It's something I'm still worried about, but, on reflection, I don't think taking down most of the old posts is the answer. After all, what is the point of a process blog if you can't look back and follow the process?

If and when I do decide that this whole project is too inside baseball, too little mystery, I'll take the blog down. Until then I'm planning to commit to the process, and put it all online.

Speaking of putting it all online, the semester is over, so I should be getting back in the studio on a more consistent basis. Fingers crossed and stay tuned.

Studio Stay-cation and The Sculptor's Reward

Working in clay IS SO NICE. It's so soft, until it isn't, which is nice, too. It smells like earth, not a refinery, and the color is warm and inviting. I turns out I really, really, miss clay. So, Friday turned out to be a studio stay-cation, working on this portrait that I started as a quick demo for 3D. Usually, having gotten all of the other distractions out of the way (re-casting the "Self-Portrait...", making crates, packing up, etc.), I would feel duty bound to go back to work on the current project. But on Friday I said fuck it, and spent a blissful morning working on something for the sheer hell of it. God, did it feel good.

In other news, we coined a really nice term in one of my classes the other day, referring to the enormous added expense and labor incurred by attempting to make work that is even slightly more dynamic, ambitious, and interesting. We call it The Sculptor's Reward.

Ahhhh....

DONE! Two weeks of nights and weekends, and I've got 4 pieces packed and ready to ship down to the Columbus Museum tomorrow. So nice.

A Short Film About Demolding

Lots going on at the moment, working hard against a deadline. Mostly consumed with casting the second "Self Portrait..." (of three). Plenty of anxiety, as I left myself no time for error, and there is always error. Thankfully, I pulled the cast on Monday, and it looks fundamentally sound. No better feeling in the world.


Demolding Process from Jed Morfit on Vimeo.

Despite the rush, I managed to make this stop motion movie of the demolding process using an app called Frames. A great app, and highly recommended. I should have shot more frames per second, but it was super easy, and it's a great way to show process. I'll definitely be posting more of these.

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.