Clay comes home from a delivery of her cards to the NC Botanical Garden Gift Shop and exclaims
that we're looking very Lord of the Rings here. The Studio Sentinels.
Now that it will be less and less easy to move these shapes in and out of the inside studio,
any given day's fabrication tasks will be more weather dependent. There are still plenty of detail
elements to occupy a rainy day.
Such as making the head pieces for the three large bird forms.
However the weather by and large has been very mild, and allowed for plenty of progress on
the larger elements. Here a first test fit of the body to leg shape helped me strategize both a
final element of the internal sub-structuring in the legs, and a redesign of the work
stands which will support the birds while I work on them.
Obviously there has been a constant flow of activity since the last update.
I skipped over the entire process of making the body forms, but that's just a variation on
making the legs. Making everything in triplicate is simply a timed exercise in meditative
attention to detail. I like to listen to books on tape while I work. One of my standard lines to someone
who asks how long a piece takes to make is to say, "If I spend several months making one sculpture
that's my version of writing War and Peace." And that is exactly what I've been listening to as I
work. Rest in peace prince Andre.
Closing the forms will be a bit of a noodling process, and I left off last evening pretty close to having
that first one refined. It's been a satisfying couple of weeks with the forms in the studio taking on such
a dramatic presence. I hope to have the head elements on and beginning bearing and axle machining
for the kinetic toppers by next installment.
Til then...
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