Wall hanging – stopped at an interesting place.

I promised the misdirections and inevitable problems. Hanging the medallions was a somewhat trying case-in-point.

I was happy with the initial set hung…..

… but as I continued, the piece began to feel more and more sterile.

So I took a few days trying to address the problem from various alternate conceptual views. At the juncture below, I had taken 6 strings and marked them forward and backward with the Fibonacci sequence (2, 2, 4, 6, 10, 16, 26, 42 // 42, 26, 16, 10, 6, 4, 2, 2) and spent an afternoon playing around with various curves, cascading placements, spiral- or centrally- emitting patterns. Achieving an effect pleasing from all angles was hampered by the pallette-to-medallion ratio. If the medallions were smaller, I would have had more flexibility to create enough iterative levels to make something work.

And, of course, given the size of the piece, this entire exercise required lots of standing WAAAY in close, adjusting medallions, then another hour or two sitting on the couch and walking back and forth through the room.

The final composition — left in an ‘interesting’ (probably not final) place for now, looks like this:

This does not give you the sense of what it’s like to walk BY it. I’ll see what I can do to give you the feel of being up next to it.

How this all got started.

For those of you near me, you know that I have had scant resources or energy this past decade to engage in creative endeavors. And now that I do, I find my need to create engulfs me like my need for food or sleep. Some days, *more* than my need for food or sleep.

But to begin again — to re-begin — is frightening. And I can only attribute my ability to do so to the gentle care of a dear friend who watched me working to be brave enough to be clumsy and flawed, and showed back to me that – really – there was something kinda beautiful in that. In being clumsy and flawed.

The truth is, every creative endeavor is a re-beginning. The process is – by it’s nature – immersive and obsessive, and full of brilliant and ridiculous mistakes. It’s full of vague and inspired ideas that, once you get there, don’t work at all… but may then later emerge in a body and form the idea was *supposed* to have. And even the stupidest mistakes, in most cases, lead to some truly fucking brilliant solutions. But these days, there are so few shared creative spaces, so most of the brilliant and enervating moments are lived alone. And all we see on the Internets are the exquisitely executed, perfectly photographed products. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.

I don’t want perfect. Not here.

I started this to keep myself honest to where I am — because if I can’t stay brave enough to wake clumsy and flawed, day after day, then I lose my ability – and I suppose my inspiration – to do this.

It’s been my hope, too, that other creative mates out there – met or unmet – will post more of their process as well: the annoying minutiae of the work; playlists of what they were listening to while making such-and-such piece; the Grand Ideas that just didn’t work; and more importantly, references to the people in their world that they talk to who help give shape and form and direction to their work.

Family of 3

I’m a convert to the Black Ops edict: ‘one is none and two is one.” So I found 3.

Uncalibrated

it seems that during the move, the blade on my circle cutter got offset by about 1/16″. thus, most of what i cut the other night are unusable, or usable only with some additional attention….

… the medallions i’m using are shiny silver, but i do not want the color or glint of the medal anywhere in the piece. my first step has been to paint each medallion with a coat of flat neutral Krylon, to prevent silver-glints from any slight mis-cutting or misalignment. fastest, smoothest solution. i’ve moved the base medallions so much now that some of the paint has chipped off the edges, so some of these are going to need some manual, 10-hair-brush touch ups before i hang them.

after gluing a pip to the medallion, i check to see if there is any over-hanging paper. any paper circle larger than the medallion is carefully sized using fine-grain sandpaper. it’s a hell of a lot more precise and mistake-proof than trying to trim with an exacto knife.

The unknown unknowns

the plan has been to mount the pips on the palette with ball-end straight pins: reference both quilting and the mounting of specimens. the single-colored pins available to me, however, come in either crime-scene yellow or the chromatic aberration known as ‘pearlescence.’ the only option was to buy a box of cheap pins and paint them. in between the kits and cut-outs and pre-printed needlepoint patterns, i found a tiny display of Testor paints. an old man with an oxygen tank in a wheelchair, a chubby 10-year-old boy, & i huddled around the tiny display, each trying to find what we could use from the anemic options while not interfering too much with each other. 2/3rds of us could have used way bigger fonts on the bottles.

periodically, the topic of ‘what differentiates Arts from Crafts’ comes up amongst creatives. i have one answer: crafts are a murder of day-glo and primarys.

400+ pin heads painted. i’m to the part of the project where words like ‘painstakingly’ and ‘patiently’ give way to ‘annoying.’

Palette up.

palette is mounted on the wall. using a base of a camping mat proving to be problematic — it wants to dip and bend depending on the temperature of the room. a better choice would’ve been solid styrene packing foam that comes around some high-end electronics, but had none on hand. certainly, nothing in the size i needed. oh – and free. did i mention free? we like free here.

figuring this stuff out is three-quarters of the fun: i need something lightweight enough to attach to a wall, with enough internal structure so that it will (a) hold its shape and (b) not crumble when i attach the pips; receptive to fabric being glued on it; and thick yet giving enough that i can poke pins into it.

the pips will be secured to the palette with straight pins — much like butterflies mounted for display.

the color is deceptive here: the fabric is deep royal blue velvet upholstery fabric.

Cutting more pips

did some mental math last night; i need to have around 360-400 to fill the space as i’d like, and looking at the collection as-is, i’m currently feeling to need for more color. evidently, my moods have changed since i began this project.

my great-grandmother used to quilt — she would talk about the “piecing” and the “quilting”: two separate processes; the first choosing the fabric and determining what fabrics go where in the final composition, based on pattern, color, etc. i feel a lot of kinship with her working on this piece, tho compared to the rather structured and planned-out art of making a quilt, i feel more like a spider on LSD weaving a web.