I’ve always found that writing-like creating something with my hands-helps to exercise the demons…
I’ve been working on this particular piece of writing off & on the last month or so. It’s funny, one never knows when their work is truly finished….
We express ourselves in different ways. One’s wild garden tending is another’s storytelling of memories, across the bridge someone walks along the river in deep introspection, another dreams as she looks at the sky, he hopes as he sprints down the road, they smile at passersby…this is art…the living choices we paint our lives with…the colors spilling over onto another’s path…some mixes go muddy…others create spectral arcs that seemingly touch the sky…if you think you can’t create art…you’re not looking deeply enough…we are all artists…each one of us the embodiment of art itself…
My character, Hank Olin, began as a drawing many years ago. He was then slid into a plastic sleeve and clipped into a binder to join other characters who’d grown silent between black vinyl covers. One day he escaped to become an acrylic painting. His accomplice told him metallic paint would wake his spacesuit up too so he could fly. Hank Olin was happy – he no longer had to live in the binder. He was free.
Being the benevolent ele-space-ien he was, he asked for the immediate release of all those trapped between the heavy covers of that wicked black vinyl binder.
His request was soon granted by an accomplice on the outside, who looked at the sky that very day, appreciating their singular freedom to gaze upon such beauty in a world of madness. Hank Olin was lifted from his two-dimensional prison. Today Hank is free to stargaze, to whisper musings in the ear of anyone nearby, he’s dreamed below the afternoon sky and sparkled, he travels to regions real and imagined, he lives his best life while watching his friends grow into the free characters they were meant to be.
This is Barney. He was created with 25 lbs of air dry clay. This is my third creature sculpt – and to-date I’ve learned 1,000 ways how not to sculpt. Working toward 1,000 more…
How I wish I could waken him and send him to D.C. – Barney enjoys eating orange men whose chests beat with dark hearts…
II did this sculpture at 17 years of age. It was the only one, of four sculptures, to return home without crumbling. Sadly, she did eventually break apart. I never gave her the fighting chance she’d deserved.
I wasn’t interested in school. It was difficult for me to take direction from anyone. I was one of those perpetual daydreamers. Perhaps, if I’d listened to my art teacher, my sculptures would’ve survived.
The image shown here I call Grieving Woman in Clay. She was about two feet long. To this day, her image remains in my studio. The loss of her long ago, is what prompted my return to clay 44 years later…
I hope you’re all managing with this weather.
am:)
I don’t agree with Golding
I believe there is tremendous capacity for Good
innate human Kindness
though Survival is instinctual
education is the bedrock of Peace
Savagery is learned too
but it is the antithesis of wisdom
in William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, the wild boar’s head symbolizes the devil…
The big son is currently reading this novel in school though he’s read it many times before.
This head was made for a class project.
It’s constructed with a large styrofoam ball, a plastic cup, a partial cat mask, sponge pieces for filler, oodles of duct tape to hold all this crap together then covered in clay and painted…it was quite fun to art direct 😉
anntogether 