Category Archives: The Creative Self

Challenging designs

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Some years back when this blog started, it wasn’t about rolling ball sculpture. It wasn’t even focused chiefly on art! It *was* focused on creativity, and that aspect of it will always be alive and well. Today’s entry is a great example.

This week I had my monthly metalsmith meetup group. It’s a great opportunity to get together with some other artists and swap ideas. Our focus this month was on Design – big “D.” How did we approach design and what sorts of ideas and considerations were part of our design process?

It very often (Maybe all the time?) looks like I just grab some wire, and with total abandon and complete lack of planning, just start a-bendin’ and a-weldin’ and somehow magic happens. In some instances, yeah, I just kind of throw caution to the wind, but lots of times I really am following some sort of plan and working within parameters.

I have one piece in particular which always comes to mind when I think about planning and design, and I brought said piece to the meetup with me. Here is its most basic component:

Maybe not much with just one piece...

Maybe not much with just one piece…

I went through a series of months where I was on a self-wrought mission to create one new piece of sculpture a week. Given that I work a day job, that’s a huge challenge, and I had to figure out a way to do things more quickly. I had to come up with new construction techniques and ideas and…designs.

The track section above came to my mind when I tried to think of the simplest, quickest and most efficient way to create track. Actually, I could simplify it a bit more, but I think it would have lost some coolness, so I made this piece! After I made this piece I made:

Many pieces...

Many pieces…

So now I had lots of pieces of track. It was so simple it just felt brilliant! It was like a jigsaw puzzle you could put together any way you wanted, and you got a cool image when you were done! (Do they make those puzzles? The should!) I started fitting them this way and that, having fun and getting to literally see what the track was going to do as a completed piece (a fair bit, anyway), before any welding took place. Pretty cool!

Once I’d mocked it up in my head I got down to the hard part and made it reality. Behold, Dropping In:

Add some creativity, a lot of hard work, and voila!

Add some creativity, a lot of hard work, and voila!

Um, I *might* have lost some simplicity and speed somewhere, because you’ll notice the incredibly cool(!) uprights that I fashioned. Those took a long time to make, involving the measuring, cutting and fitting of lots of little pieces along with a complex welding process to get the three-sided tower completed.

It was a great overall success, however. I made a stunning piece that uses NO curved track AT ALL! It’s the only piece of created to date of that kind. It uses very carefully leveled track so that the marble does not roll too fast, which was not an easy task to accomplish. The results are very pleasing, however, and well worth the effort.

As of the writing of this post, Dropping In is still available. If you’d like to learn more about it and see video of it in action, click here. If you have any questions about it, or would like me to create something along these lines but customized for your particular wants and needs, send me a message here.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to drop back in for more art updates. I appreciate your enthusiasm for my work!

Greatest Place on Earth: National Ornamental Metal Museum

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I just found out about this place today. Greatest thing ever, right? Possibly, very possibly. It’s the only museum of its kind in the entire country. They seem to really focus on forging and casting, which is a bit of a bummer for a guy like myself, but it’s still incredibly cool!

I will spare you the words. You can check out this very nifty video:

In case you’re wondering, it is a seven hour and fifty-two minute drive from the door of my house to this magnificent repository of ferrous fantasticness (okay, they do non-ferrous stuff too, but I’m taking poetic license) in Memphis, Tennessee. Aaaanyway, I found out about this place today while hunting around for all kinds of things about metal working and metal fabrication, and I was really just thrown. You should check out the part at the beginning where they show off the gates to the museum grounds – so many cool little highlights!

It just looks so cool. The woman featured in the video is a student there, I guess an intern at the time it was filmed, and she’s just so jazzed about the whole thing. It’s infectious! I want to go! How do I enter? Where do I sign up? Do I have to sell my home? No problem! Sell my car once I get there? Okay! Live on macaroni and cheese for an entire year? Sounds great!

Seriously, dudes, there’s something wrong with me. I’ve been looking up metalsmithing, metal working, metal crafting, machining, and I’m dreaming of this awesome shop with, like, four bench grinders and a mill and a lathe and MIG, TIG, stick, and gas welders, and presses and punches and drills and….

*sigh* This is so weird, so very weird.

Here, here’s another video about what they call “Repair Days” where the museum calls in craftsmen and women from all over the world, and you just show up with your broken awesome stuff, and they fix it for you – fixed by some of the greatest artists in the world! This is so cool!

I wanna go. I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go. NOW!

Here’s a short piece highlighting Mary Catherine (whose name I may be misspelling, because the folks who added the videos keep changing it up):

I’m envious of how happy and excited she is here. I want to feel that way about something like that! I’d absolutely LOVE to be immersed in the learning process like that. How…how do you make that happen? I haven’t seen anything like that for the kind of stuff I like to do, at least not yet. I guess I’m looking for it. It’s an odd branch of study, but I suppose if you look for anything long enough, you’ll find it.

I also feel a little envious. She says she studied glass blowing in Europe, and now she’s here studying metal working. I wish I’d embraced those sorts of possibilities when I was younger. I can’t help but feel a little regret for not having spent my life doing things just a bit differently. On the other hand, I had no clue I was into this stuff back then, and back then I probably would have devalued my general feelings on the subject anyway. I have been repeatedly told that “things happen when they are supposed to happen,” so, even though this seems like a late start for me, apparently I’m supposed to have become interested in metal art many years after I received my diploma. I can’t help that. Maybe all this time doing other things has just prepared me to really focus myself wholly and completely on what I want to do right now. I can tell you that if I went back to school now I certainly wouldn’t be skipping classes. I’d be showing up all bright and energetic and annoying the crap out of kids who were hungover or just not really all that into it.

We’ll see where this takes me. I have no clue, I’m just reporting it as it happens.

Oh, and if you know of anyone with shop space on the north side of Indianapolis, I need some.

Welding, more welding, and some freaking out

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weldswithfill

This is what I did last night. I spent, I don’t know, about an hour working on this stuff. It’s improving little by little. Last night was pretty good. I actually made a weld on the sculpture last night, which I only screwed up a little. Better than that, I understand how I screwed it up. This is progress from a week or two ago when I was A) screwing up, and B) not knowing how I was screwing up. Now if I can just get “A” taken care of, we’ll be rockin’ like Dokken.

I know this stuff, these endless pics of pieces of metal with blobby, rusty lines on them are repetitious and maybe boring or annoying, but it’s kind of what I’m dealing with right now. This process is really important, the progress, the improvement. It’s even more slow and tedious for me to do it than it is for you to look at one picture of it per day, but this is the part where I am right now. This is the part where, if my life were a movie, there’d be this montage of me just sitting down at the workbench. I’d put on the welding shield, and then you’d see some flashes of light from the arc, and there’d be lots of images of burnt pieces of metal being tossed on the floor. They’d use some sort of rockin’, yet inspirational background music, like Doyle Bramhall’s “Big” or something, and periodically you’d see me lift the shield and make a face as if to say, “Damn! Failed again!” and then I’d get another look that would be all determined, and I’d wipe some sweat off my brow and go back to work. Then there’d be more pictures of steel bits being thrown on the ground, but they’d start to look better, and then I’d not look so frustrated, just maybe kind of tired but pleased, and we’d be all, “Look! He’s improving! He’s toughing it out! Killer, dude!” and then there’d be some shots of me working on real pieces of sculpture, and then a date would flash at the bottom of the screen showing the passage of eleven months and sixteen days and nine hours and thirty-six minutes would pass in about 2.5 minutes, and then they’d show me standing before a finished and unbelievably awesome sculpture, wiping my brow and going, “Whew! Golly! THAT sure took a lot of work, but, boy, did my patience and persistence pay off!” and then I’d grin and give a thumbs up or something. (I’ve been looking at too many vintage ads online. My brain sounds like a 50s ad for Lucky Strikes or something – “It’s Toasted!”)

Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of a montage here, or at least not so much of one. I guess I haven’t shown you every piece of burnt metal that I really did throw on the floor, so you’ve been spared that, and there really are a ton of them on the floor. Some of them I’ve picked back up again and welded more crap onto to save money – like this piece here! It has a weld on the other side, and I just flipped it over and used it for this test.

Anyway, the first weld is sort of decent, and the second one isn’t too bad. After that they start to get kind of squashed-looking, and some holes show up and some rusty coloring. I guess it’s better than some of the stuff I was doing two weeks ago. I actually like the top weld, even though I’d get thrown out of welding class for it, but it’s good for me.

On a slightly different/sort of the same note, I am really, really, REALLY trying to make progress on this stuff, and it is damn near impossible some weeks. This past weekend I got in one hour of practice on Friday night, and that was it! One. Hour. Over the course of the entire week that adds up to one hour and ten minutes. In seven days I got to work on welding for one hour and seven minutes. It is really difficult not to obsess about how long it will take me to improve if I only get an hour and ten minutes each week. It’s hard, it’s frustrating, but what else can I do? It’s really difficult many nights to find free time for it, and that’s even while I’m currently ignoring most of the rest of the daily crap that normal people don’t ignore – stuff like folding my laundry or sorting my mail (my couch has become a mail repository for months worth of unattended mail – good thing the bills are all on auto-pay). Lots of nights I just microwave anything that’s frozen, because sometimes saving that extra twenty minutes of preparing food is the only way I can make time. (I have become a conniseur of the frozen burrito.)

I’ve employed every other time-saving method I can think of. The only thing left to do is to quit my job, and I’m not that crazy. Motivated, yes, but not crazy. I’m feeling boxed in. Stuck. This is all I want to do, and yet I have so little time to do it. There are times when I decline invitations with friends just so I can do this stuff, as it’s the only free time I have available.

The other night, Friday night, the night when I can clearly hear many people in my neighborhood partying, I was welding and looking up basic geometry on the web. Why? Because geometry is the basis for machine work, and I’m interested in doing machine work, having a mill and building nifty parts for my sculptures, fabulously ridiculously unnecessarily complicated parts for my sculptures. I had a night off from the band, and I was looking up geometry. Clearly I’m either really taken with this stuff, or I’ve sincerely lost my mind. Given that my friends and family have not started avoiding me or continually asking me if I’m sure I’m feeling well, I have to consider the sincere possibility that I have not lost my mind, but am just really enthusiastic about building metal kinetic sculpture.

Still, what’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I exchanging all this free time and money and energy on this stuff? Well, simply because I like it, because it’s cool, fun, nifty, awesome – all that good stuff!

And that – that feeling of “YES! AWESOME!” is scary. I mean, do you ever have a “yes” moment? One of those times where you discover something or get into something and the only word in your head is “yes?” Those yes moments, those are when you know you’re doing something that is *exactly* what you should be doing in your life. I had moments like that when I first started playing music. It was all “Yes, let’s do that! Yes, let’s find out more about this! Yes, let’s practice more! Yes, let’s buy some records, lots of records and tapes! Yes, let’s get in this band and see what happens! Yes, let’s play that basement party! Yes, let’s record with those guys! Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!”

Here I am again, and this feels like one big “yes” moment. Nothing in my brain is telling me that anything about this is wrong for me to be doing. Aside from letting my spending get out of control, there’s nothing I could do wrong with this. It feels like a very natural thing to do.

But what the hell do you do with it? I mean, what are the practical purposes? If I want to devote so much time to it, how, uh – am I supposed to think I’m going to make a living with this or something? Really???? Have I lost my mind? I’m not at the point where I’ve just decided to throw all caution to the wind, go in to work, announce I’m quitting immediately, and saying, “I’m going to make a living as an artist!!!” Not that crazy, because I like to eat and have a house and all that, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve set many other things aside in life in order to pursue this. I mean, who was here when I announced that I had decided to sell my extremely cool and vintage guitar amplifier just so I could buy the welder? We do remember that, don’t we? That amp, I held onto it for YEARS not using it, but not being willing to let go of it, and suddenly it wasn’t even an issue. It was like, “Oh, I need to buy this welder…NOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!!!! SELL THAT FRIGGIN’ AMP AND BUY IT YESYESYESYES!!!!!”

Like that.

I don’t know what you do with these things when they come up in life. Oh, scratch that – I know one thing to do. You follow them. They’re scary, but you follow them. If they’re positive and healthy and they make your life better, then following them is the thing to do. If they make you feel better about yourself and your life, you follow them. I kind of have to follow this. It just feels too good. Yet I don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a frightening thing.

I don’t know, kids. I just don’t know what’s going on here. I’d love to see into the future on this. Until I achieve that ability (and I’ll let you know if I do), I’m just going to keep welding. And probably being kind of scared as well.

Letting go, moving on

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So I went to my steel fabrication sculpture class this past weekend, and it was A-FRIGGIN’-MAZING!!!! OMGZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! (There will be more pictures and explanation later, promise!)

We built stuff! We cut stuff using FIRE!!! There was an oxyacetelyne setup and a plasma cutter and a MIG welder! It was awesome! I will post pics soon as I’m able. I built about half of a rolling ball sculpture in three hours. Yes, shock and surprise there, right? A bunch of people looked at it and were like, “What…is that?” One guy in particular kept looking at it. I’m wondering if he’s not going to start thinking about building one. He had this funny look on his face, like he was really considering something.

This whole welding thing – it was just so great! My one or two meager efforts at stick welding in the garage gave me some familiarity, and the practice of soldering actually prepared me for some of processes used in welding, so I was kind of online already. But the whole thing, just – it was incredible! I have been told, and I believe it’s also in the Artist’s Way, that when you’re really tuned in, when you’re really doing what you’re supposed to be doing, you forget all about everything else around you. Time flies by and you don’t even know it. You become terrifically focused on what you’re doing.

That’s exactly what happened. I was wholly drawn in to it. On Saturday we basically learned how the shop works. On Sunday it was, “Have at it!” day, so Saturday night I went home and took the steel rods I’d bought earlier that morning and I bent them up into spirals so I could spend my time welding on Sunday and not bending stuff. I was working on it without even being there! Then when I got there I got so into my work I didn’t even realize I hadn’t taken a picture until the instructor told is it was time to start cleaning up. I was all the way into it. It was the greatest thing ever!

But what does this have to do with letting go, you ask? Moving on? Well, the experience with welding was so awesome, even the parts where I screwed up, that I’m now clearing out anything around my house that I can find that I don’t need so I can buy a welder! From the outset of this whole rolling ball sculpture exploration I’ve wanted to weld, work with steel. Actually, I still have pieces of scrap metal, old car parts, that I cut up expressly to build a sculpture with. However, I realized not long into the project that I was taking a huge bite, and not sure I could chew it. I scaled back to copper just to get my feet wet. My feet are fairly soaked now, and this welding workshop solidified my suspicions from years past: I WANT TO WELD STEEL! I NEED TO DO THIS!

I know what material I want to use: stainless steel. I know what I want to do with it: build rolling ball sculptures. I need precision and detail. For this I need a TIG welder. Well, I could get by with less, but I’m not going to hamstring my efforts by getting what *kind of* works, not when I could pool resources and get what I *know* is going to do exactly what I need it to do.

At first I was just kind of desperate, like, “Ahh! I must get one! I don’t know how!” Then I went, “Dude, you know how much they cost, and you don’t have that kind of money….damn.” Then I went, “Hey, there have got to be one or two things lying around the house that you don’t want or need anymore. Maybe you can put enough of them together to make ends meet.”

So I started looking, and I was surprised at what I found. I dug through my back hall and found a bunch of music gear that I either never use, or use so seldom that it’s probably best that I just let go of it. It’s all going on Ebay here shortly. I already put a little bass amp on there, a practice amp, and there are a couple more old tube guitar amps that are probably going to go up as well. I may have already sold one of them to a friend, sans Ebay. Cheaper for both of us!

I’m on my way. I’m letting go of all kinds of stuff that I’ve been holding onto. It’s time to turn that over into something that I can use and enjoy today. They say that the things we own can end up owning us, that we can become trapped by things, stuff. I know that in the past I haven’t sold these things because, “Well, I might want to use it someday,” or, “But what if I regret selling it a year or two or ten from now?” Well, what if a year or two or ten from now I go, “Man, I really wish I’d bought that welder ten years ago. Just think where I’d be now if I’d started back then! Why did I wait?”

If I’m not using these things, someone else should be. They were created to be used, not to sit in a dark corner. I’m putting them back out into the world where they can be enjoyed…and then I’m going to purchase something that *I* can fully enjoy today, right now!

Artist Date – Indianapolis Museum of Art

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My friend Jem and I went on a bit of an Artist Date, as prescribed by The Artist’s Way. I was feeling the need for some inspiration, something to cause my brain to make different waves. I took a day off work, and in the morning we went to a coffee shop and worked on our drawings:

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Then in the afternoon we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art:

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Unfortunately, while they did have some cool kinetic sculpture (including work by Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile!!!!), those were in areas where I was not allowed to take pictures. I was able to shoot this wall, which is kind of cool, if not a seminal work by the originator of the mobile:

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Fair enough, the other stuff is in my head anyway, where it will do the most good!

The whole idea behind an Artist Date is to take the art half of yourself (or maybe it’s the art 7/8 or the art 3/4, whatever – you decide the exact equation) out and treat it well, show it a good time. In return, the art portion of you will grow and flourish and start helping you do really awesome stuff. It’s also part of a practice called “refilling the well,” where you replenish some of the energy needed to run the creative engine inside of you.

There were honestly some kind of scary moments in the museum, like when I realized I was writing down tons of names of sculptors, but almost nothing about photographers. What does that mean? Does it mean I’m not going to be doing photography? Does it mean I’m supposed to be a sculptor? Does it mean…well, what DOES it mean? I mean, that lamp, the one with all the brass on it – how do you do that? And those clocks! The clocks with the copper, brass, and steel faces! Those were gorgeous! How…can someone make a living like that? How do you make something so precise and so gorgeous? Many questions, no immediate answers. I guess that’s part of the price of admission with this stuff. (Actually, the IMA is free, which means my confusion and fear cost me nothing. Huzzah!)

Overall, I really enjoyed myself. I got some new ideas for sculpture work, and found out some fun stuff about the Art Nouveau movement. Things could get more interesting. I think we’re entering dangerous inspirational territory here. At any rate, Jem and I have refilled the well, so look for some fantasticness to occur here in the near future!

Affects and Side Affects

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RAM chip, chord book. Totally related, right? Well they are, sort of. Here on the blog where we are all about creativity, it’s no surprise that both of these are linked to my creative growth. Well, that, and I ordered them both off the interwebz, if you need one more obscure way they’re related. I know the mail media link is a thrilling one, but let’s put that aside and look at the whole creative thing, since that’s pretty much why I write on here all the time.

The RAM I hope is going to be a huge help with my photo stuff. You’ve no doubt noticed that the photo posting has slowed until it seems as if it has stopped altogether. It has not, I assure you. I’ve still been taking photos (almost!) every day. I have all of them either on my hard drive or on my camera. However, processing all those photos gets ridiculously time consuming, particularly when I have over a hundred to go through and I want to switch back and forth among five or six of them and pick the best one. Right about the time I start doing that, the virtual memory in my lappy kicks on, and then everything…slows……..to……….a………….crawl. It can take me two hours just to pick through ten photos. Granted, I’m a perfectionist, but the slowosity of my hardware isn’t helping things any.

Enter my brother, who informs me that the whole slowness thing is caused by this virtual memory issue, and that if I got more RAM I could whip through dozens upon dozens of pictures as well as run iTunes, Word, and my web browser all at once and never have a hiccup. This sounds like more than a good deal to me, so I only kind of reluctantly shell out money I don’t really have to get this stuff which should perform what is really an invaluable function: that of making my creative efforts more easily accessible and enjoyable. This is pretty key stuff, as in the past I’ve hamstrung creative efforts by trying to get by with the minimum. Then I’ve been unhappy with the results, and then I’ve called the whole thing a failure. I’m pretty much done with working against myself these days, and I realize that my creative efforst are important enough and valuable enough that I actually DO deserve to spend money on them.

This sort of thing – purchasing the RAM – is the sort of side-effect that working toward a goal has. I didn’t set out to update my computer when I decided to take more pictures, it’s just something that has come with the territory. I didn’t set out to learn more about how my computer operates, but it happened. The same thing was the case with my outboard hard drive – just happened as a matter of course. It’s really interesting to see how all this stuff comes about when I pick up on something and go after it.

The same sort of thing has happened with my drawing stuff. I started with a handfull of pencils that a friend had given me. Now I have a whole box full that I’ve bought for myself. I also have a sketch book and some regular lead pencils for other types of drawing. I’ve been hanging out a lot more with a friend of mine, because she likes drawing. I’ve been noticing visual art more and taking a greater interest since I started drawing. There are some other projects in the works related to this subject, and I hope I’ll have some other developments to report on in the coming months. It looks like I’m going to learn matting and framing in the near future as well – not that I planned on that, it…just happened. I think there’s a trip to the art museum coming up as well related to “refilling the well” as the Artist’s Way puts it, and that will be an outgrowth of all this drawing stuff too.

The guitar chord book – well, that’s kind of obvious, now isn’t it? I…didn’t really plan on buying that, but they guy who is teaching me things, he said that’s the book he first used over forty years ago. I wanted to learn a few things, so I’m going to give this a shot. Working on guitar stuff has led me to listen to music differently and led to new conversations with new people. This interest was also responsible for my nephew getting a ukelele from me for his birthday this year, in a weird sort of related twist. The people who are being affected by my interests are not just me, which is a cool thing to note. (If my nephew ever ends up on Youtube singing Jason Mraz tunes, I’ll be sure to let you know.)

Now, off to work on some photos or guitar or whatever the heck else…

Touchstones

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The Artist’s Way talks about “touchstones.” These are images or objects that kind of draw out our good feelings about creativity, kind of create a comfortable surrounding for it to let itself go, help encourage creative thought and play. I love collections of images as displayed in this magazine article on the drag racing history of ’55-’57 Chevrolets, then there’s some art that my friend and I have done, and a couple of books that I really enjoy. It’s nice to notice these sorts of things when I’m in the middle of this hectic month of novel writing. These things spark the mind, give it energy, and just kind of make a person (well, this person) go, “Man, that’s so cool. I want to make something!” and then you go off and do just that.

Artist vs. Artist vs. Artist

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It was kind of scary, but pretty cool too.

It was kind of scary, but pretty cool too.

My friend Darrel has been a bit of an encouragement with my art for some time. He’s a lot more steeped in creative efforts than I have been, at least as far as his length of involvement. He’s one of those people who identified with his creative side pretty early on, and put himself right in the middle of it and never really thought of it any other way. Me, I was more the type who thought, “It’s fun and all, but I’m not really that good, and that’s not really stuff you do when you have a ‘real’ life.” I changed my mind recently, as you may have guessed from hanging out here, and I’ve started meeting people like Darrel.

For a while he has told me that we should hang out and I can check out some of his work and this massive collection of art magazines that he owns. Today I agreed to go over there, and I brought some of my supplies as he indicated that we might goof around with drawing some stuff. Once I got over there he says, “Oh, and Steve’s coming over also.” Steve is an artist friend of his that I’ve met a couple of times before. Okay, something felt like it was going to happen, but I didn’t know what.

Once Steve gets over there I’m looking at magazines, and those guys start getting out a bunch of paper and talking about something their apparently working on, and then Darrell looks over at me and says, “Okay, so the deal is we’re going to trade off and we’re each going to draw on these and kind of collaborate.”

I laughed a little nervously. “I can’t draw,” I said.
“What do you mean you can’t draw?”
“I haven’t drawn anything since high school.”
“You can do this stuff.”
“Um, okay.”

And so we did. Some hours later I was informed that we were going to color them as well.
“With what?” I asked.
“You brought your stuff! Pencils,” Darrel said.
“Um, okay.”

I went home at about 11pm. I’d been working on art with these guys for about six or seven hours all told. It was pretty wild, spending all that time just drawing and whatnot. At one point one of Darrel’s friends called, and he said, “Oh, we’re just hanging out here, making art.”

Really? That’s what we’re doing? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that *is* what we’re doing. Making art, not just screwing around, we’re making art. Woah. That’s kind of cool.

Darrel had me take one of the drawings home to work on by myself, so we’ll see how that goes. I think those guys are okay with what I was doing, but it was kind of scary trying to fit in and not worry about doing something really stupid. I’m pretty glad they asked me to work with them. This is the first time I’ve collaborated like that. It was nice to be included. Besides, I desperately needed the creative time. I’ve missed doing stuff with my hands. I love creating stuff that way.

That reminds me, Steve, who had seen one of my rolling ball sculptures, asked what I’d been doing with them lately. “I haven’t made any. Nothing. I’ve been too busy.”
“That’s not good at all,” he said.
“Yeah. Yeah, it sucks,” I said.
Damn, I miss that.

Tin Sandwich

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Mouthful o' metal.

Mouthful o' metal.

I did a bunch of finagling on iPhoto with this one. Can’t tell can you? Yeah, I thought it was okay that way for a while, and as soon as I finished I thought otherwise. It should be doing something it’s not doing. I don’t know what it should be doing, though, or how it should be doing it. This photography stuff is really tough. I’m pushing myself in much different areas than I ever have before. I only had one class in it ever, and it met twice a week. My total instruction in lighting – all of the whole of the subject of lighting – was 90 minutes in length. You might see why certain abilities are beyond my grasp. Honestly, looking at stuff I’ve been doing these past couple of weeks, I’m stunned anyone ever paid me to do work for them. I’m also stunned that I was able to produce work for them that really was halfway decent. This isn’t it. Good thing they didn’t need this, whatever it was I was going for.

We’ll see, kids. I’m finding it very hard to keep up with things lately. I have pretty much filled my plate with things. I love them all, but I wonder how wise this all is. At the same time, I want to give none of them up. Didn’t I blog about this a week ago or something? Probably. Perhaps you’ll have to hear me rant about it for some months before I figure something out. It occurs to me that Bruce Springsteen never had this problem. I’ve read about him. He knew, from the moment he picked up a guitar, that that was it. He’d found IT in his life. He said, “The first time in my life I could stand to look at myself in the mirror was the first time I ever looked in it and held a guitar.”

I don’t have that. I seem to have many choices, and unfortunately I have some amount of ability in many areas. I suppose that’s better than when I used to think I was only good at one or maybe two things, but it brings with it a wealth of other issues, issues which I’m struggling with right now. The universe isn’t reaching out with any obvious answers just yet, either. I’m waiting for some outside force to make things a little clearer, for someone to say to me, “We’re going to pay you sixty grand a year to write for us,” or “We want you to do this public installation of this sculpture,” or “Someone broke into your car and stole your camera,” or “We need someone who can build an engine while taking photos, writing, and playing harmonica.” You know, something like that. SOMEthing!

And while I wait, I keep doing.

Oh, tonight’s writing group meeting went well. It was a mad rush getting there, but I made it, and the folks said I did a great job on my writing prompt, the “barn exercise” taken from John Gardner’s much-lauded “The Art of Fiction.” I’ve not read it yet myself, but it’s on the to-do list. The exercise: describe a barn from the point of view of a man who has just found out he lost his son in war. Do not mention the son, death, or war.

It took me about four hours to write one page, but at least an hour of that was devoted to reading about barns so that I could describe on appropriately. I think I used a single word from that hour of research, but somehow the whole thing was a help anyway.

Keep at it, folks. Keep creating. You owe it to yourself.

Dream a Little (Necessary) Dream

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I had a dream last night. No, this isn’t one of those blogs where I tell you I had a dream, but but then I reveal later that it wasn’t a dream in the sleeping-dream sense, that it was more of an awakening of thought while I still had my eyes open. It’s also not the sort of dream like I had this wish for myself for the future, but now it has fallen by the wayside, hence the past-tenseness of it all. Lastly, is not that I’m just pretending it was a sleeping dream, because it was really a real thought I had, but kind of a weird one, and so I’m sort of embarrassed about it, and so I’m just saying that it was a dream. Got it?

If not, well, here’s the basics: I fell asleep, and all these images ran through my head and there was some dialogue and a bit of storyline. Basically I got a short movie that I produced by and for myself for the price of closing my eyes and apparently being a little stressed out.

Two things are immediately significant about this whole affair. One, I don’t usually remember even having dreams. Two, if I do remember them, they’re usually like a photographic flash-type of thing, like this one: I was being chased by zombies. That was one of my more recent dreams – almost the whole thing in its entirety as I can recall it. If you want me to get wordy and descriptive, here’s what I remember: me and some unidentifiable other person (maybe, possibly, some other person) kind of running, and something was coming after us, and I knew it was a zombie, or zombies, but we couldn’t really see them, and I wasn’t going to turn around and look, you know? The end.

So, anyway, that’s what usually happens if I remember a dream I had. Last night? Not like that at all. Oh, and I should also mention, that when I do have dreams, they usually don’t have much bearing on reality – although there was that one time when I dreamt that a woman at the office was coming after me to kill me, which really was kind of close to the mark during that time in my life. Fortunately, she was eventually fired for taking pictures of sensitive documentation at work – but I digress! My dreams are usually vauge and/or pointless, brief, and I almost never remember them. Noted.

Last night, however, as I tried my best to attain some sort of uninterrupted REM the type of which truly restful nights are made of, a vision was visited upon me, and it was…well, it was…oh, it went like this:

In this dream I was trying my damnedest to get a residency in some new artist lofts that had just opened up in town. I desperately wanted to be a part of this. It felt like an immense moment of opportunity had arrived for me. This was the chance I’d been waiting for, the break that would enable me to lose myself in my creative work and really, truly, honestly, seriously make some big things happen.

My chances of getting accepted, however, were not looking good. The people who decide such things (I don’t know who they were, didn’t get that dream-info) were off somewhere considering my current work to see if I were worthy of being placed. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have that much completed work available. I’d known this was coming for quite some time, and I had been trying and trying to get some pieces finished for months now. Events had seemed to conspire against me, however, and one thing or another had cropped up and always prevented me from getting any real work done. The day job, the band, and a million other little things both expected and unexpected had continually thwarted my efforts to accomplish much.

I was at the point in my dream where I was aware of all of this, and I was sitting on the floor in some sort of makeshift studio or workroom, and I was looking at the few meager works that I had managed to complete plus a few projects that I had started – ones that showed real promise and would have secured my acceptance had I only been able to complete them! I sat there in utter frustration, knowing that I was unable to do anything, much as I might want to, that the time had passed, and all I could do was wait and pray I would be accepted, but that it didn’t look very likely. And as I sat there, knowing all of this, looking at my incomplete intentions on benches and the floor, I suddenly completely broke down and started sobbing, exhausted from anger and grief and stress.

Have you ever have one of those times when you’re physically and mentally worn out, like you’ve been working too many 12-hour days in a row, and yet, when you finally have an opportunity to sleep, you can’t? You just lay there and lay there and you’re absolutely dying to fall asleep, but you’re so wound up that your mind keeps going and it won’t shut down and you know that in another hour it won’t be eight hours, but seven, and then after that if you can’t sleep it’ll be six, and if you even get to bed by then it won’t do near as much good and you feel the night slipping away and you just know, you KNOW that tomorrow you’re going to wake up and be just as exhausted as you have been for the past two weeks, but you can’t do anything about it? It was like that. I was spent. Done. I was completely powerless to do anything, and I was feeling the opportunity just slip away.

I remember in the dream that I just kept saying “please” over and over again, while I was sobbing there on the floor, and I was saying that, because I JUST. WANTED. TO. BE. ABLE. TO. MAKE. SOMETHING! Something that mattered, something that made me feel good about what I could do and who I was, and it felt like somebody, like this big Hand of Life Itself was holding me back and preventing me from doing it.

I woke up at about that point, and I had a distinct feeling of relief for just a moment, a “Man, I’m glad I got that out of my system finally” sort of feeling – and then I realized I was just lying there in bed. None of it had happened. I fell back asleep almost immediately, and I don’t remember dreaming anything after that, but it came back to me when I woke up.

I don’t think that this exists as only a small connection to a conversation I had with my brother the other day. We were at the drag strip, and somehow he ended up asking how much sculpture I had done. I said, “Well, I’ve finished two, and I’m working on at third one, but I’m stuck. It’s been sitting there forever, and…I’m just stuck. I haven’t had time for anything lately. Just – no time at all. I haven’t written much of anything, and I haven’t done any sculpture work at all. It’s been two months or something like that.”

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a dream that was more transparent in my life. I think it’s time to stop waiting for some free time to reveal itself to me and time for me to start making some free time for some important work of my own. This reminds me yet again of the Artist’s Way in which it says that essentially creative people become unhappy, grouchy, cranky, and a little insane when we don’t get to create. I hope you allow yourself time for those some pursuits. It’s what keeps the creative self happy and, as a result, the rest of the self is happy as well.

Stay creative. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have schedule I need to rearrange. There’s free time to be cultivated.