Month: December 2009

Thursday’s Tile: Observing the Obvious

At one point in the earliest days of tile-making for the Five Senses Bench, folks thought of just putting the obviously-related body parts all over it. That would have been pretty fun, but, as there was really no layout and no real themes then, the concept just kept growing associatively and soon left the body-parts-alone realms.

However, there are plenty to choose from for this year-end photo essay. I think there are more eyes (and a wider variety of them) than anything, but there are plenty of hands, ears and tongues. Only one nose, though!

Enjoy this selection of one from each sense and may your own senses stay sharp and artful in the coming year!

Seeing Eye

Hearing Ear

Smelling Nose

Tasting Tongue

Touching Hands

Share this:

Outside Adjustments, Inside Surprise

A few posts ago I showed ya’ll the results of my figure sculpture studies with Cynthia Siegel this past semester. I wrote that post before Cynthia reviewed my work and,  following our brief but thoughtful discussion, there is a bit more to share with you concerning the Two Hour Challenge sculpture of runner Maggie Vessey. Up top is a shot as close to the angle of the source photo (below) as I could get.

Here’s why it’s great to have instruction: Cynthia pointed out aspects of this pose that, given a bit more time, I might have addressed, but one never knows! I will just list these points and you can see for yourself:
1. Maggie has thrown herself down, and is maybe still a little bit in motion. She may have even been rocking slightly. Her butt does not rest on her shoes, as I have modeled it! And even if she was completely still, a runner’s muscled thighs and calves probably wouldn’t let her fold up into a compact Child’s Pose. What I have made is resonant with wet clay not quite being able to stand up in the air AND with the strong emotional folding in of the figure.
2. Maggie’s back is arched. I have modeled a sway back! I kept trying to keep the clay up in the torso, but did not get this all-important line. I feel pretty sure, given more time,  I would have restated this until it was fairly accurate. After all, it is the one view I did have!
3. The proportions of the negative space and angles of limbs needs compacting. I have elongated things. Arching the back correctly will help this problem too. The lower leg shin needs to curve upward more.
4. The arms are pretty well done, but they aren’t inserting into the back correctly. There is more of a transition that includes the shoulder blade and that web of muscles….that alone would help with a better back/shoulder curve.
5. Muscles are convex. My thigh muscle on this side is concave…I got it strong on the other side, though!
Now for the Inside Surprise! What drew me to this photo was the memorable and compelling emotion. That’s why I saved it for over nine years, wanting to align with and honor it in a piece of art. Far more than realistic replication, for me, that emotion was the most important aspect to capture, even in a short academic exercise.
Every item I still need to adjust to make the figure’s Outside more true arrived because I was paying more attention to the felt narrative I wanted to express. I got into this position while sculpting and so did Cynthia in our talk! Cynthia even put the whole pose into motion in her discussion of movement and musculature.
If I draw, I craft one view, with many others implied, if I’m lucky. If I sculpt, like it or not, I must address all views, even the ones not easily seen.
At one point in our talk, Cynthia and I picked up this smallish sculpture and discovered the Inner Truth of this pose. I treasure this unrealized, expressive, protective, intimate inside view!
Here is the fearsome power of misery, anger, defeat and the active defiance of all of it too! This is what arises in me when I look at that photo and what my hands wanted to make.
Ultimately getting the figure accurate, in my personal view, is meant to support the message of the work. Like a musician bending notes or playing ahead or behind the beat, a sculptor can choose to simplify, abstract, or distort, too. And if they know where academic, even photographic, realism lies, they are that much more agile in expressing their intentions.
Ultimately, keeping the Inside alive while Adjusting the Outside, sounds like a life skill as well as an artistic one, and in that case, I’m signing on for the duration.
Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: Season’s Sensations

I just got back from visiting The Five Senses Bench in the thin winter light. I went there looking to collect shots of hands, eyes, noses, ears and tongues — which I did and will show you on New Year’s Eve — but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the sights and sounds, smells, tastes and feel of the holiday live there all year too.

So here is my first Blog Photo Essay: Season’s Sensations from the Five Senses Bench.
Enjoy and Peace!

 

Hearing
Touch

Smell

 

Taste

Sight

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: A Grotesque of the Sensorial

Here’s an odd little blue guy–seems more like a guy than a gal, right, even though he is Ken-doll smooth? You can locate him on the fourth corner/knee area of the Five Senses Bench, between Hearing and Smell.

Some of you may recognize the odd little blue guy as a sensorimotor homunculus, a representation of how our cerebral cortex perceives information from our physical body, only partially based on the number of nerve endings and capillaries that are present.

The science around this is fascinating because it delves into the nature of consciousness. If you take a thoughtful moment to gaze at even this simple of a representation, it is a tiny leap to realize just how literally Hand-to-Mouth our existence is! Are we really very much different from lobsters?

There are other alchemical, philosophical and even psychological versions of homunculi (the plural!) and they seem to hold the idea of the person within the person, the man in a lab beaker, the boy in the bubble. What wholeness lies within? I’ll let you explore those threads on your own. For now, let’s just keep it to this particular physical representation and its place on a Five Senses Bench public art project.

We haven’t really talked about the public art part of this project, but even in the beginning the idea was to place this bench somewhere on Cabrillo’s campus, and it was understood that it would be visually acceptable to nearly all viewers. You know: no gratuitous violence, gang symbols, pornography. That was playfully easy.

When the bench was still under construction, I had a teacher from a nearby school, who was scouting a field trip for her Kindergarteners, ask me to cover up a few tiles: the knife, the small pile of poo, the mermaid’s boobies, etc.  I obliged her by taping over them for their visit, but I felt compromised and lousy about it and vowed never to do that again. The bench was not being installed on a kiddie playground, but a college campus!  Let’s keep it acceptable to adults in a semi-public place and never, never, never censor it again!

If you want the most up-to-date, scientifically accurate representation of a sensational homunculus, though, it must include the genitals, thusly:

Oh, my! That changes things! Attention teachers at nearby elementary schools: be glad we did not have this as a model for the odd little blue guy! But really, that bench image, along with all the others, is meant for entertainment and pleasant discussion, not a neurological lesson, and it does that just fine without scientific replication, as do most other depictions of a sensorimotor homunculus out there.

Curiously, though, the homunculus is always male. Would a female be differently proportioned or would the differences just be in the genitals? What would a dog’s version look like? An eagle’s? A lobster’s? Someday we might know this.

As it turns out, the odd little blue guy is a fantastic conversation starter about our physical abilities to perceive the world around us, including what we can touch and see, smell, hear and taste sitting on a mosaic bench while we eat our lunch in the sun and light seabreeze.

Share this:

Bony Proportions and The Two Hour Challenge

This past year I have sought out the teachers who can tell me what I want to learn in ceramics, a practice I definitely want to continue! Sometimes they are wise colleagues, but more often it has been certain college instructors. Last Summer it was Tiffany Schmierer at Skyline College in San Bruno, CA. This Fall it has been Cynthia Siegel at Cabrillo College in Aptos, my regular haunt.

Cynthia is an exacting master. When she communicates, she expects attentiveness, responsiveness, engagement and active execution. I revel in that! She means what she says and has scads of expertise to share. So, without writing a chapter and a half about this semester, let me show you, mostly in photos, what transpired.

The photo up top contains the digest version of weeks and weeks of exploring reference material for the skeleton. Rather than just making figure sculpture(s) all semester, Cynthia recommended that I delve into the human bony proportion canon of Robert Beverly Hale, and then set about carving a skull, ribcage and pelvis set on an armature in order to have that learning ‘go deep.’

Folks, I was daunted! What the hell kind of shape is a pelvis? I must have made three of them, each stinking on ice. How to translate 2D drawings into proportionate blocks of clay and then ‘find’ the pelvis or ribcage or skull in each one? How to make a temporary armature? How to keep the soft clay from stretching out of its boundaries? How to breathe any kind of life into such an attempt, even if I never plan to fire or keep it? (Hint: find those S curves!!!!)


The photos here show how far I got…..hours of searching for those shapes, consulting with Cynthia and adjusting. It was grand. I am not done, but it is just possible I can’t be. Here’s the work in infinite progress. Skull looks a little too round in the photo, too much like Jack Skellington. (Not done!)

What can never show is what went deep inside my mind and sense of touch and form in space from this exercise. It is forevermore beyond cognitive because it lives in my muscle memory too.

That could be the end of our story. It certainly was the end of the semester as next week is Finals. Bony Proportions Skeleton: Check! But, Noooooooooo, Cynthia wanted more from me. She issued this Throwdown: Take two hours and make a figure, any position. Don’t worry about finishing, just bring it Monday to the Final.

What a genius assignment! It allowed me to translate my newfound skeleton framework knowledge into a narrative and to use that knowledge while it was still fresh.

I chose an old newspaper clipping of a local high school runner, Maggie Vessey. She had just lost a race badly and apparently had thrown herself down in the Agony of Defeat. I had kept it because it was so evocative. Here was my Two Hour Throwdown subject! (Pun intended.)

The challenge was to find the skull, ribcage and pelvis positions underneath the clothing and the muscles, to add the appendages and breathe life and gesture into it. At least that is what I wanted out of my two hours. Not getting lost in the details or perfectionism were other factors.

More challenges came from making a 3D piece from a 2D shot. Just what might her left side be doing? I crouched into this position and my own body gave me suggestions. Staying on task, lively and attentive is sometimes a problem for me, so I was proud when I did not stray from my task for more than 4 minutes the whole time.

Here are shots of the result:

Wow, is what I have to say…not because the piece is so stellar, but because it is evidence of a whole new way of understanding the figure. I am so glad I got to experience my skeleton knowledge while it was vivid. One less vague area with light shed on it. Thanks, Cynthia!
P.S. Since 2000, when this photo of Maggie Vessey was taken, she has gone on to be 2009 World Champion in the 800M. Go Maggie!

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: Wrathful Offering to the Five Senses

Naughty or nice? Buddhists might contend E, All of the Above, conflating dilemma horns into the whole animal. The Five Senses Bench, too, includes some tiles that are beauteous and uplifting, some funny, some rather crude, and some, like this Tibetan Wrathful Offering to the Five Senses tile, that function as wake-up calls to everything. That is, if you can read the stylized symbology.

If you didn’t click over to the Wrathful Offering to the Five Senses link, that’s OK. And if you did, it doesn’t really tell you what you need to know, so I will describe what you are looking at: Several upside down human skulls at the bottom are holding organs. Above them are a tongue, two loose eyes on stalks with ears behind, and between them an upside down heart. On top are more waving clouds and other common Tibetan/Nepalese imagery. Flames edge it all. (And I am sure someone more knowledgeable could make more points and connections for you.)

The whole is meant to appease wrathful deities, and maybe scare the bejeebers out of us humans with its upsetting dismemberment. But it goes beyond that as a Five Senses Bench tile: it is a very real balance to maudlin treacle.

Nothing I say here is meant as judgment: maudlin treacle needs love just like wrathful offerings. In the grand scheme of things, maybe this bench will contain a Whole beyond anything we currently may think it is. Art is open to waves of interpretation over the centuries, even millennia, which this bench thing can certainly last for. Case in point:

Yesterday I watched a passle of pre-schoolers on a field trip swarm the bench. They were all eye-high to seat level. Eye-high, too, to this particular tile, which rounds the knee area between Taste and Hearing. Did they see it?

Or did they spend time with what was in front of their faces that they could recognize, thereby forging new neuron pathways? Did their teachers point out anything? The knife? The Butt Stop tile? The soft-serve poo tile that PMcN gleefully created? Or did they just experience colorful mosaic enormity and then run down the slope into the nearby wildish Glen?

Well, whatever…they looked with 3-year-old wonder that will become 30-year-old wonder in a twinkling. If they came back in 27 years, I know for a fact they will think the bench is much smaller than they remembered, but it just might contain more narrative that they can hook their lives to. It is a magical object either way.

Anne Lamott said/wrote one of the finest perspective giving lines ever: “A hundred years from now? All new people.” Must remember that. Naughty or nice? Both!

Share this:

Thursday’s Tile: Not Just Plain Vanilla

As a kid did you ever take a nip from the bottle of Vanilla Extract, quickly finding out that its alcoholic bitterness in no way resonates with its unbelievably enticing aroma? Well, I did, anyhow. Decades later I got a similar vanilla shock: vanilla beans actually come from an orchid??? Wild. Wacky. I did not know that.

When SR suggested that she fashion a Vanilla Orchid for the Taste area “knee” of the Five Senses Bench,  I thought she and her capable hands were just going to make something creamy and wonderful to solve the very real problems associated with making custom curve-specific tiles. My previous post about the Octopus tile on the Touch knee area explores these challenges and one solution in detail.

She was incommunicado for several months on this, working mostly in her own studio.  When I had nearly given up on receiving anything for the area, she happily delivered this whole lovely assembly of orchid flower, leaves and the most wonderful vanilla beans to go with. If I remember right, it was in four or five specifically overlapping pieces: another way to solve the fitting-a-curve problem.

The biggest form had curved just a tad too much in the firing, but had not cracked. And it was not too curved as to be un-attachable. We solved the installation problem by adding a fatter layer of thinset underneath each of the layers to make up the difference and protect the various points of leaves and petals. The vanilla beans were separate, so that made attaching their delicacy doable too. The whole assembly did not quite go where intended, but who’s the wiser? (Shhhh.)

The TakeAway here is about surprise endings: getting something surprisingly different than you expected: maybe shocking, maybe relevatory, maybe just exquisite and audacious and bar-raising. Thanks, SR.

Share this: