These past few days I’ve sort of renewed my commitment to working on sculpture.  I think it started sometime last week.  After my post at the beginning of the month I had a delay in activity for about a week, and then I realized how much I was procrastinating.  I went and found a machine shop near my office to do some work on part of my sculpture.  It’s literally a five minute machining job.  Unfortunately, the particular shop I found is a commercial shop, and they don’t handle five minute jobs.  Sucks to be me.

I’ve not found another shop yet.  I’m still looking.  These sorts of places usually operate for tradesmen, so it’s not like they have evening hours or weekends.  I certainly know where some shops are located, but it’s difficult to get to any of them without sacrificing half a work day to do so.  I’d rather not burn vacation hours or take time without pay for this job, so it’s taking a while to find a shop.  I got some ideas from a friend last night, though, so maybe I’ll have more to report on that before long.

In the meantime, I realized I was once again sitting on my haunches and not doing any work.  I have this huge problem with setting aside time for art.  I always minimize its importance in my life and to the world at large.  It’s fun, I say.  It’s playing around, I think.  It doesn’t need to be done when there are more important things to do, I lecture myself.  This is how art does not get done.

I finally told myself, in fact I wrote it down: “I’m going to work on sculpture for 30 minutes tonight,” and then the next day: “I’m going to work on sculpture for 60 minutes tonight.”  This is how art gets done. 

Since I’m in the middle of this larger sculpture with the crazy brass and clockwork lift, I figured I’d spend my extra/down time on a small one.  It’s a bit of an experiment to see if I can make a small one that’s interesting and fun.  My inclination is always to go for the complex and/or grand (see the pottery I’m decorating – Oh, wait!  You can’t.  That’s because it’s complex and has ended up taking weeks instead of hours.).  This is an exercise in restraint of scale and complexity.  This is hard for me, but we’ll see how it works out.

Coils/spirals are pretty easy to do if you don’t make them too large.  They can be pre-formed easily around a piece of pipe, and this offers the added benefit of me not having to use my right hand so much as it still bugs me a little bit.  I used two different sizes of PVC plumbing pipe clamped in a vice as my forms for the sprials below.

These don’t come out quite as nice as they look here, but with some massaging it’s pretty easy to get them nearly uniform, and while bending them around the pipe it takes the majority of the kinks out quite nicely.  I can cut these into sections and make several different sizes of spirals out of them.  None will be very large in diameter, but that’s fine with me.  This is my exercise in a more simple design.  I’m guessing I may be able to get anywhere between three and five spirals out of these.

Last night I wrapped the second coil, and having finished that, I began making one into a spiral.  Actually, it wasn’t that easy.  I held it and stared at it for a little while.  I made the coil more tidy and uniform.  I was fiddling.  I was afraid to start.  I was afraid like I’m always afraid: What if it doesn’t turn out right?  I’m going to ruin it!  I’ll make it crooked!  This is going to suck, it’s too little.  I’ll never get this right!

At this moment I remembered a couple of the prayers that I learned from the Artist’s Way: “It is my job to do the work, not judge the work,” and, “God, I will take care of the quantity if you take care of the quality.”

I sat there and said those two things to myself as I started bending.  I certainly cannot take care of the quality.  I never think my work is good enough (well, not never, but I try!).  If someone or something else is taking care of that, all I have to do is take some action, and so I let go and went to work.

After about an hour’s worth of work, here’s what I had.  It turned out rather well.  This spiral is about at its point of termination.  I can’t really turn it down any farther and still have the marble clear the exit.  I’ll likely snip it off the rest of the coil at this point.  I’ll make some more of these.  They will vary in diameter and, consequently, the number of turns then have in each.  Hopefully this will add some variety to the piece and make it fun to watch even though it will be of small size. 

I’ll bring you more as I progress.  I love building this stuff, and I can’t wait to see how it’s going to turn out. 

Oh, and Olivia, weren’t you going to send me Hot Wheels and stuff, or was that just a tease?  I was all fired up about that challenge.