A little more art

Last week in sculpture we had a metal-and-found-object project on the theme of "humans and nature."  I went for the idea of trying to portray how Bucks County has changed over the years, in three phases:  the wilderness, the farms and the big fat suburban houses.

Obviously it suffers from scaling problems.  A much larger base would have helped, also allowing the three phases to be clearly separated.

It turned out to be very mixed-media, including plywood, terracotta, polyester felt, sandpaper, two kinds of wood veneer, aluminum wire and sheet, metal primer, acrylic paint, plants from my garden, some ceramic figurines and an old MicroMachine from the '80s or early '90s (whenever I was still collecting those little things).

For 3D Design Fundamentals the week before, we had to turn in a fruit made completely from wire, and a clay prototype and sketches.  I used a chilli pepper for no better reason than that I had one in the freezer.  I'll admit that I did cheat at just one spot:  The three main wire frame pieces are silver soldered to a little bit of copper sheet which represents where the chilli's pointed tip snapped off.

Fun with polymer clay

A collection of ships, rocketships and space pods, in various scales, which I made over a period from high school (the little blue and yellow spaceship near the right) to just last year (some of the retro-style rocketships on the left).

The big blue-grey battleship, made in 2011, is something of a magnum opus for my polymer clay work.  It's a great medium, but it has its limits; unlike the semi-flexible plastic MicroMachines uses for certain sci-fi merchandise, thin elements in polymer clay WILL wind up breaking if you so much as carry them around in your pockets.

3-D design and intro to sculpture backlog

I've already published my second assignment in 3-D design fundamentals, Project XYZ, so let's back up a bit.  Our very first assignment (which I didn't initially post since it didn't seem like a major one) was a representation of "order" and "chaos" and the connection between them, in string.

Order.  From Middle English ordre, from Old French ordre, ordne, ordene (“order, rank”), from Latin ōrdinem, accusative of ōrdō (“row, rank, regular arrangement”, literally “row of threads in a loom”), from Proto-Italic *ored(h)- (“to arrange”), of unknown origin.

Chaos.  Borrowed from Ancient Greek χάος (kháos, “vast chasm, void”).

In Greek mythology, everything arose from the primordial chaos.  Thus the basic concept here is that order is made from chaos through action (as Death has said, "THERE IS NO GOOD ORDER EXCEPT THAT WHICH WE CREATE.").  On the other hand, order is inevitably destroyed through entropy, thus the string leads from chaos to order and back to chaos.

For this assignment, obviously the result was going to be very abstract.  If I'd had more time, I'd have used a lot more string and glue to make "chaos" more three-dimensional, and a thinner frame for "order" so there'd be more emphasis on the string and not the wood, also tried to make it actually look like a loom and not just evocative of one (though as built, it was effective enough; several people told me they thought at first that it was an actual miniature loom).

The third assignment (after Project XYZ) was for a word or letter in 3D form.

"In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
 En arche en ho Logos, kai ho Logos en pros ton Theon, kai Theos en ho Logos.  -  John 1:1

I wanted the image to look imposing and eternal - which is ironic, because this heavily recycled terracotta crumbles easily.  You can't really see it because of the angle, but the base bowed up in the middle dramatically as it dried.  On the right near the bottom is the protruding butt of a bamboo skewer I used to reinforce the base, revealed as the clay shrank while drying.

Our third assignment was for a polyhedron made of flat material.

A mysterious artefact from forgotten ages.  Who knows what message its strange symbols encode?  (Answer:  nothing, I made them up as I went along.)

Technically this is a truncated hexagonal pyramid, in 0.005-inch sheet brass.  I chose a relatively simple shape because the embossing (done with a dried-up ballpoint pen) is very time-consuming.  The shape is closed with silver solder, which practically ruined the flawless burnished finish I'd given it before folding.  I managed to correct it somewhat, but it's still rather ugly.

We've had only one assignment in sculpture, a piece on "community and identity" done at least partly with casting.

About 12 or 13 years ago, my high school literature class was reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, and a classmate said something about an archaetype (I believe a psychological archaetype, but I may be misremembering) of the "self" represented as a figure sitting in the lotus position.  That notion is what I based this image on.  It's personalized in that I for one cannot sit in the lotus position comfortably, but I often find myself sitting in what could be described as a degraded form of it, with one shin (both knee and ankle) sitting entirely on top of the other, and my head resting on my hand.

The sculpture is investment-cast in concrete from a clay original; on the left is the study for it.  The left foot didn't turn out, so I built a "shoe" by pressing thick concrete directly onto the stump.  I also rasped some detailing in (pants pockets and other clothing details).

Things That Aren't Here Anymore, part IV

The limbed trunk of one of Newtown's dwindling number of huge old beech trees, on the front lawn of a house between George School and Newtown Friends School (it belongs to one of them, but I'm not sure which).  I took this photo last year.  I don't know when the trunk was finally cut down, but it's gone now.

Dead tree trunks are rarely of much interest to me, but this one was kinda neat.  With its sides mantled in vines, I always thought it looked like a cliff or mountainside.

Too much is never enough

Battleship Bismarck in the famous Baltic camouflage paint scheme.  All polymer clay with only a bit of wire for the masts.

Swastikas?  No, even if I wanted to include them, at this scale it's impossible.  Those are just smudges.

What is that scale, you ask?  I estimate it to be between 1:6500 and 1:6600.  For reference, I believe naval wargaming miniatures "mini out" at 1:6000, with larger scales being more common.

Project XYZ

This is the first major assignment in the 3-D design fundamentals class I'm currently taking, creating a sculpture with shapes defining it along X (width), Y (height) and Z (depth) axe, made of flat, intersecting segments.  Unfortunately our professor had to go on some sort of business trip and the professor who substituted last week had a very different idea of what the assignment involved - our regular professor wanted only right angles but would've accepted closed structures, while the one who covered for her wanted open structures but would've allowed curved lines.  I wound up following both restrictions.

I initially wanted to make a castle, but using an open structure would've required far too much work.  Instead I just went for the front wall with its two turrets and fortified gate.  Even just that required several hours of drafting and calculations to ensure the pieces actually fit together.

 I used cardboard, and initially wanted to cut with a box cutter, but after the first stroke left me a ragged lower edge and a jab in the thigh, I instead resorted to tedious punching and sawing with a hobby knife.  As you can see, the pieces are actually fitted together with slots.

 The whole thing is assembled with paper tape and the edges sealed with strips of scrap paper and glue.  A classmate pointed out that the tape remained visible through the paint and perhaps glueing the main pieces together would've been preferable.

The paint is spray-on metal primer detailed with cheap poster paint.

I don't like this thing.  I dislike the whole XYZ sculpture style.  I think it looks like a boxed craft project for grade schoolers.

Things That Aren't Here Anymore, part III

Newtown Station in the summer of 2004, 21 years after train service stopped.  Newtown used to be the final stop on the R8 line, which passed over Neshaminy Creek and behind George School.  The abandoned tracks can be followed as far as the creek, and fences are regularly installed there which George School students just as regularly cut through so they can hang out on the crumbling bridge.  After 1983, service was cut off north of Fox Chase, although the map at the Langhorne station wasn't replaced until 2000 or 2001 and, if I recall, just had corrections scribbled on in permanent marker.

The other end of the R8 line is in Chestnut Hill.  If I'd gone to Crefeld* 20 years earlier, I could've strolled down the road and dozed off on the train the entire way.

The little shelter, one of the few relics you could easily and safely stroll into, has since been removed, although another one remains at the still-operational SEPTA bus stop a short distance away.

The parking lot, such as it is, remains, but the name of the station has been co-opted by a group of expensive Toll Brothers condos behind the station where Frost-Watson Lumber Corp. used to be.  It was, ironically, the fact that big builders such as Toll Brothers have vertically integrated their own lumber yards that drove companies like Frost-Watson out of business; they weren't needed anymore.

* I don't know when the name changed from Miquon Upper.  It is always stressed that Miquon Upper and Crefeld are the same school; nothing officially changed except the name.