Tillander – Another Rolling Ball Sculpture Completed!

stainless steel rolling ball sculpture

It’s amazing, and it’s finished!!!!

I love to be able to announce that I’ve completed another rolling ball sculpture! There are a lot of feelings that come with finishing a new work: gratitude, happiness, pride, relief, maybe a bit of loss, and I don’t know what all else. That gratitude thing, though, that’s a big one. When I was younger I was often so afraid the finished piece would not be “good enough,” not be perfect, that I never finished it. I didn’t even see my problem for what it was. I’d just get to a point where I was anywhere between 50% and maybe even 90% of the way done with something, and I’d put it down and never quite get back to it.

In my high school art class I got lower grades than I should have simply because a lot of my work was not complete when I handed it in. There were even plenty of projects – art and otherwise – that I never started or took part in because I was afraid my end result would not be good enough. I missed out on a lot that way. The fear of what I perceived as failure was powerful in those days. Eventually, however, I got sick and tired of things, and I desired a change badly enough that I started doing things differently.

That was several years ago, and I still have a good perspective on my old way of (not) doing things versus how I choose to live now. I’ve realized that my perceived ruinous flaws were just poor perspective. I still do the best I can at all times, but now I don’t create impossible standards for myself. Allowing myself to be human allows me to get more work done, which, in turn, allows me to improve even more. Every time I finish a piece of art now it becomes another fabulous and concrete way of physically telling myself, “You’re not living that way anymore. You’ve made changes, and look at how awesome this is!”

Tillander is a wonderful piece of art that stands as further proof that there are big benefits in casting aside a belief in perfectionism. I’m so happy to be scheduling delivery of this piece to my clients! They had the idea to put the air plant terrariums in the sculpture. I thought it was an absolutely kickass idea, so much so that I named the sculpture after the scientist who discovered the plant type. The terrarium idea wound up creating a number of challenges during construction, but I dealt with them one by one, perfectionism be damned, and I think the result really is fantastic. The green of the plants reaching out from inside the twisting, shiny metal really has a wonderful effect, and the round glass spheres of the terrariums complement the curving paths of the marbles perfectly.

Below I present a video of the completed piece. If this piece inspires some thoughts for a rolling ball sculpture that you’d like to commission for your home or office, please click here and send me a message. I’d love to hear your ideas!

In which I try, and fail (to quit trying).

This weekend was to be The Big Weekend. The Big Weekend is Video Weekend. Video Weekend means I finally, finally, FINALLY shoot the video of my newest, bestest, awesomest sculpture commission!

No. (You read the blog, headline, righ? No surprises.)

I did a lot of work to make this happen. As I had been overwhelmed with other work last week, I was really looking forward to this weekend and its abundance of free hours on Friday night, Saturday day and Sunday day to make some magic happen.

Friday night was some art marketing work that needed doing. Done. Saturday I made some good progress, though I allowed my sanity to have its own whole day and I freaked out over not having sufficient and proper lighting. Did you know that light bulbs are colored? White lights, they have color. Photographers know this, which means I know this, but I’ve been able to dodge the issue until now using various tricks or simply by ignoring it. Saturday, however, it was suddenly, disgustingly clear to me that when I put the sculpture under a ceiling halogen and side-lit it with incandescent lights I got an unbearable purple-ish hue all over everything.

Purple. Purpllllllle! Sure, maybe y’all wouldn’t notice, but I would, and I think that you would too anyway, because y’all have eyes. Plus (PLUS!!!), I had to take photos, and THOSE would DEFINITELY show purple. All. Day. Long. For the rest of my life. On my web site. To people. To people for whom I want to actually see my stuff looking nice and cool and fascinating as opposed to, “Why does that look weird? Something’s not right about that one…uh, maybe I should go check my email or look for pictures of puppies playing cards or something…”

So, no, this would do. I had to fix it. How, you ask? Recall my comment about the ceiling halogens. Good, right? And I actually HAD more halogens…on the ceiling. I didn’t see that as a problem. Only some chain and a couple hooks stand between a ceiling light becoming a side light.

Witness my awesomeness:

Trust me, it'll look like magic when it's done!

Trust me, it’ll look like magic when it’s done!

That was super nifty, but there were still details, the last of which was realizing that I needed to add the glass planters. I got them all unpacked, then realized they were horridly fingerprinted. One more thing, but I carefully washed them – oh, they had stickers on them. The stickers would not come off. I had to go find some WD40 to remove the goo. Okay, NOW they were cleaned! At that moment I realized I had to split for a band gig. So close, but Sunday would be gold!

Sunday arrived, I was up early, made it to church, then realized I HAD to get groceries lest I starve the rest o’ the week. Went and got groceries. Brought groceries home. Got all of the groceries put away except for two items. Went to put two items on cupboard shelf positioned above where glass planters were sitting on counter. Hit an almost completely empty bottle of Planters Lightly Salted Peanuts, whereupon the deadly nutty missile launched itself off the shelf and straight onto the counter top, hitting one of the planters, knocking it into the sink, and then…

The pain! The pain!

The pain! The pain!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I refuse to admit defeat. I’ll get it done, and while I’m waiting for the new planter to arrive in the mail, I’m going to get other stuff done. (As my dear mum is fond of saying, “Consider your options.) I shan’t give up! Shall not give up!!!!!

Yes, it takes that long!

Sometimes I beat myself up in this whole creation process. The expense of time is something that really gets to me at present, because I don’t have near as much free time to create art as I would like to have. If I work on a project, or even a portion of one, and it takes longer than I think it should, I can be pretty hard on myself about my supposed “poorly managed time.” Most of the time this is totally unreasonable. Actually, maybe it’s always unreasonable.

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Today’s post is a perfect example of that. I conceived the basket assembly shown here as a means to keep the marbles from accidentally being dropped onto the glass plant terrarium that will hang near where the marbles are loaded. It was an excellent and attractive solution to the problem. In my head it was very straightforward. It seemed like such a simple solution couldn’t take much time: basket, wires, welding. Two hours, maybe three? No.

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I wound up spending hours and hours on it, perhaps six. My first reaction was, “What! How could that take so long! It’s just – it’s just a bunch of semicircles in a frame! That shouldn’t have take so long to do! I should have known better! I must not be working fast enough! How could I let all that time slip by?”

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Later I stepped back and did some really quick, really basic math. There are 28 upright pieces forming the sides of the basket. Each of those pieces required on tack weld to hold it in place, so that’s 28 welds right there. Then I had to go back and tack weld them at the other end so that both ends were secure, making 56 welds.

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Once everything was tacked and secured, I went back over all of them on both the inside and the outside of the basket using filler wire to create attractive finish welds that would also be completely solid and sturdy, assuring that no amount of vibration from loading the marbles would ever cause one of the welds to break. That makes four additional welds for each “leg.” Four welds times 28 equals 112 more welds. Add that to the tack welds and we have 168 welds.

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Two main pieces form the upper lip. Adding those pieces to each other made for at least four more welds, probably six. Now we’re up to 174 welds.

One hundred seventy-four welds. How long does it take to make a single weld? Not too long, a few seconds at most. For many of those welds, however, I didn’t just make the weld. Most of the weld joints were not conveniently positioned. I had to move the sculpture, rotate it one way or another, lay it on its back, turn it upside down, I even had to clamp other pieces of metal onto the sculpture so I’d have a place to rest my hands while welding. That all adds to the build time.

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And all of that doesn’t take into account the time I took designing it, bending the wire to the right shape, cutting and fitting all the pieces together. I was really lucky if something fit together on the first try. More often than not I had to grind things to fit just right. More time.

Oh, and cleaning! Let’s not forget the cleaning. That was fun to do after it was all burnt and ugly looking, but it still added time to the build process.

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It ended up taking three or four days of available time to complete. Considering all that, well, I didn’t do too badly. Most of the pieces I create for these sculptures are completely individual, even to me. A big part of why I do what I do is the individuality and uniqueness of each piece. It means that certain things are just going to take a long time. The big benefit to all that effort, however, is that not even I can create two works that will be exactly alike. I hope the results speak for themselves.

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So I’m going to keep practicing not being so hard on myself, save time where and when I can, and keep working to produce truly unique and special pieces of moving art. How’s that sound?