Cleaning cleaning cleaning

Ache all over after big day setting up for Open Studio. Considering i originally thought my full participation was going to be covering the secret sculpture & looking innocent whenever a person wandered in, i have ended up putting out 4 tables of sculptures & moving everything humanly possible into the corner. Thus rendering my space completely unusable in any way. Bit of a shame. I won't even be able to whittle a twig, really. Will have to just sit there drinking... life's very very hard innit.

Some good things today.... Using the excellent bagful of 192 identical perfect foam thin square slabs I've even made some of the tables have a tiered set up & covered with lovely white cloth they look rather noice. $2 a metre white cotton drill from fabric remnants next door & $15 worth of foam from reverse garbage, 2 Juz shelves, a shopping trolley, & 3 free tables. And i can dismantle it all in 5 minutes. Rockin'.

Yes we have fairy bread (or we will have, i'll make it fresh tomorrow, cos fleshy soft white bread needs that just puffed freshness), beer, gummi & choc eyeballs for Halloween, & cider. Mmmmm cider.

Then sundy the big truck. I love driving new things, this will be fun.

Big mess

Today i made an attempt to shovel the shit together in the studio into clumps rather than just a mid tone fuzz across the area. I succeeded to some extent but there is a lot of stuff there. You just don't realise. Anyway i took some away & some bags of rubbish.

Sunday i have booked a 2 ton truck to rent & its got a lifting tailgate & bugger me it is only 100 bucks for the day. I didn't even bother to shop around i just booked the thing. I could save quite a bit by renting this truck to take the finished work to the foundry too.. i never realised how simple it can be. But lets wait & see how that goes. I need this big device to move the big man. Its should be easy, i hope. I may need to call in favours of people whom i have moved in the past to help me on sunday. it would sure rock to get most of the stuff moved in the truck. I can move everything else in my old car, except the big man, but its less trips in a truck eh :)

Sundays great it will be no traffic & no parking issues & no people around. Perfect. If possible i am actually looking forward to it.

Stonkered

Unable to get any work done on the big man now. I guess i'm terrified of making any dust. Sad eh. Been 2 days of hardly touching it at all. I need so bad to get out of there. Got to get this thing done & its not getting done here. But first of course the Open Studio day. I been spending the time i'm not spending on the big man, on patina'ing some bronzes & polishing some stainless steel sculptures, just little ones, for the day. its should be kinda cool i've actually got a bunch of new work, and cos its not s steenkin gallery i can put whatever the fuck i like out there & nobody can veto. What a liberating concept. I could do fibreglass work if i want or anything the hell i like. Of course i haven't & its too late now. But i'll have some plasters and about half the works won't even be for sale, cos they're maquettes for other work. Ha, you don't get away with NFS's like that in a gallery. LOL even tho u rarely sell more than half a show anyway so its actually kinda irrelevant how much s for sale i reckon.

Hey i could even put up photos. Damn wish i'd thought of that earlier.

Leavin, with my jet plane

Well it looks like i got to leave the studio then. I feel pretty depressed about it. Oh sure i could just never do plaster work ever again, but thats just not on, eh. I love plaster. Its like i'm being shunned cos i love somebody who's not accepted cos they're..... dusty. Its kinda weird i feel like its really personal... like a dirty secret they all know now.. i hid it for ages, but now its out.. i make dust - i am a bad bad person.. i make DIRT, actually, cos dust is often wrongly called dirt.. i deserve to be scorned... filthy sculptor... its not like theres a support group for us. Damn. They say they like me orright, they just don't like my dust. WELL MY DUST IS ME. I *AM* MY DUST. So thus i feel depressed hahaha.

I guess this Open Studio will be my Farewell. Its funny cos i was gonna go a month or 2 ago, but i thought i won't let em down for the Open Studio. Ha. Am i stupid. Anyway pack up over next few days & I'll just piss off as soon as i can so i don't have to pay another month's rent. Mum says i can use the front yard again which is very nice of her cos it will make her lovely garden all white again like before. Its a bummer tho i feel already like a stranger in the studio & the studio is unwelcoming to me. Eh, fuckit. My tools still love me - no matter what.

Anyway i'm leaving. Its a shame but.

In other entertaining news, i got road raged today by some feul. U got to just bloody laff when a 4wd tries to scare you by ducking in front & jamming on his brakes as hard as he can. Cos anything else on the rd can outbrake an overweight 4wd, lets face it, its the dumbest possible attempt to road rage in the history of stupidity. The 4wd nosedived at the ground like it was gonna roll & he practically lost it, ended up diagonal & 4 ft into the intersection. Since i was actually already braking for the orange light it had no effect on me whatsoever, bar one poofteenth more pressure on the pedal. I can guess from this obvious "payback" manouver that i had originally slighted him by actually going 40kmh in the school zone & then stopping for the orange light when there were little kids waiting to cross. He was tailgating me at the time. He tried to scare me by driving beside really close too, which was peculiar cos his car was worth 10 times what mine is. And my eyesight in that eye is so bad i didn't realise for ages he was doing anything. Meh.. idjit like that will come to a bad end.. sooner the better. Just a paranoid idiot with no dick... lots of em about eh.

The funniest thing is people who are really fucked in the head always think your motivations are what theirs are: i.e. that you were going to run an orange light & even that you were going to the left at the turn off, cos he was still "blocking" even as he was going off to the left & i went right. I've met people like that before & they just think you are out to do what they would do. Its weird how they cannot see.

On a good note tho, and u always like to end on a good note, have discovered a wonder. First saw this thing at a mates place it was his kids toy. A stormtrooper from star wars, which u may think 'WTF don't be such a geek'. But they've made this little fellow so well he is multi jointed & adjustable into the most lovely attitudes, & i think there is even a bunch of ppl on Flickr doing sets of stormtrooper photos cos these things are so expressive. I reckon they are incredibly sculptural & you can really put life in em very easily. People should be using these to model from, not those pox ridden jointed wooden figures people seem to think mean Artist, even tho anatomically, structurally, functionally, mechanically & emotionally they are absolute utter arse. Anyway i ordered one o these stormtroopers off ebay (too late to buy them thru real shops anymore) and he arrived all mint cond on card (MOC) for collector & i ripped it open. Sadly his hat falls off a bit easily, & he has a real head underneath - not as expressive as a helmet for some reason & the eyes are painted on all rolled up in his head like he just got conked. But anyway he is still awesome as all hell. I remember i had some kind of stormtrooper or vader figure when i was a kid & it was pretty crap, the arms & legs were dead straight & it had no life at all, it only had like one pose. But these are truly amazing little fellers & i'm going to have to get a few more. It came with a plastic silver coin so if you're out there lookin on ebay for one be sure to get the right kind. If you get a classic old one you'll maybe get one like i had when i was a kid, like an ice maiden of stormtroopers.

Buggery

Today been Sunday, its been a bit of an up & down day. I started well, i decided to use this mofo grinding wheel i got some time ago. Its so rough it looks like a glued together gravel road on a disk. Its got bastard big chunks of sharp jagged rocks embedded in it. I've never used it yet cos it doesn't *quite* fit under the blade guard. But, caught short today without a new flap wheel for the grinder & the worn one taking hrs to do much at all, i decided to give it a run. I decided i'd see if it could cut itself a groove in the blade guard or if it'd seize in there. It was very close, it only caught in one area, it might be ok... and it was. Its just threw a few little sparks as it bedded in & off we went, wow what a blade. It was cutting in 3 seconds what would take 15 miutes with the old flapwheel. Mad. It was so good it gave me heart palpitations. This thing would gouge so much flesh outta u if u gave it the chance it was like working with a light sabre. But yeah gave it plenty of respect & it was good :) I was real pleased.

Then one of the gals turned up who shares the studio. She was appalled by the dust on everything in her area. She had hrs of dusting to do & she had a lot of things to dust. I had pushed the big man outside & turned the industrial fan fully on pointing to the outside to blow dust outwards, but there are some weird air currents in the place i guess she copped it. I'd been checking the printmakers' desks for dustage & they were orright, but i hadn't gone round the corner there....

Bugger. This is very bad news. It would not surprise me if the rest of the ppl there were similarly unhappy about my dust, even tho they didn't cop quite as much. How come this hain't been a problem yet u may ask, since i had originally thought it would be a dealbreaker when i first moved in, & nobody cared so far? Well its cos i always used clay so far. Hardly any dust associated with clay. But now i'm back to plaster its gonna be a bit of an issue. I'll probably have to move out. I don't want to stop using plaster, u see, i like it a lot. Its a sculpting staple anyway. You gonna use it sometime. I wonder if i actually 'flicked' some over the top of the partition by accident... damn i can't avoid it then can i.

I feel very worrying about this. But yet, if it means i have to leave its kinda OK cos i'm about to have some time out re the sculpture anyway & was wonderin if i should move out & save myself the 440 a month. But its also my oasis. I'd be in big big trouble if i was home all the time. Perhaps Fate is gonna push me out. This train of thought shows i prolly have no deep attachment to anything, cos i like the studio & i'm gonna be sad to leave, but i'll still just walk way. I wonder if my love life works similar. Suspect it does. Fatalism. Anyway back to the matter at hand:

First, i'll try to make some curtains for the back entrance & work outside using curtains. Its pretty well f'ed idea though & probably won't work. That dust has proved pretty persistent eh. I do need to complete this sculpture though, there's no muckin round there. I guess i will be unpopular for a bit. Then i'll just PO.

Making me real down this evening too for some reason i'm in the shit at home as well. i must fully have aspbergers or summink cos for the life of me i cannot understand why i get the nagging at the END of the evening when its too late for me to do anything. Like its not logical is it. Anyway i can see i need to have a place to go. It would not do to not have some form of studio.

Guiltlessness

This new work regime of leave before u finish is going well. It is not only facilitating work but disabling guilt, which is the enemy of good & proper thought.

New muffler on the car - again - just the end bit, the bit that was hangin off. It now has more power & goes well. I always forget that when it starts to lose power there is probably a hole n the muffler someplace. It still makes the hair on end noise though. That is front end something i think.

Another Satdy in Paradise. I visited the house i like in Arncliffe. Its a shop with a 2 bed house, reno'd by egyptians. Its coming for auction in a week. It would be affordable if not for the fact that pre-auction estimates are >100K under what the selling prices end up. I hate auctions, house ones anyway. I used to do a lot of auctions, old pawnbrokers ones & wrecked motorbike ones, and there is only 1 way u can get ahead in them, and that is by knowing your product. If u know for e.g. that those pocket pc's ALWAYS don't work by the time they come up 4 auction, cos their CR2032 battery cannot last more than a month as backup without the main battery being charged, which they never are when waiting to be auctioned... well then u know you have a pretty much 100% chance the thing is perfectly functional, & nobody else will bid cos they don't know that. Thus the perfect bargain.
However with houses, i have no flamin idea, except i think i'm correct about how they're overpriced. Other ppl seem to be boundlessly Optimistic tho, or thats what u got to imagine when a place goes 100k over estimate. For some reason ppl think the dreadful structural destruction bit o everything decor of this place will be nothing to renovate into a stunning contemporary oasis, & a new kitchen is probably gonna be, like, free or summink. You cannot win in this game, eh. i don't wanna play, cos my opponents r crazy.

Maybe i just put my house deposit into BHP shares instead. Or a trip to Paris :)

Halloween

Hey its Halloween & Aldi are right into it. I got a load of gummi eyeballs, body parts, 5 inch long black & yellow centipedes that are more real than reality could ever be, & some choc eyeballs too. The body parts are cool there are bloody ended fingers, noses, even more eyeballs, & a full set of teeth inc vampire fangs with blood drips on them. My word - gummi technology is awesome. Also got some rats. All this is not great for one on a diet but since i don't like gummi that much i should be able to ration it out by posting some of it off to various family OS. Just family who can cope with it though.

Am taking it easy on the new big sculpture. I'm deciding to be less judgemental right now & do the cut & shut renovations later if a leg is too long or something. It will come together i have decided & i deliberately left it today while i was in mid work so tomorrow i will get a fabulous start. it is a great thing to leave on a high when u are feeling in control & in mid swing. I guess something could come along to spoil it before tomorrow but fingers crossed.

Speaking of things that spoil it tho the muffler just fell orf the old car today. Just the end bit. Just enough i got to go throw more money down the toilet... Hopefully not enough to make tomorrow in the studio suck, but i guess i better fix it before the weekend. Weekends are very busy in my family for some reason.

We're having this Open Studio thing in about a week. I won't be able to show my new work of course & i'll have to wrap it in black plastic & it will look bloody silly. People will ask about it & it will take up space, it will put a stick in the spokes of my day, but what can u do, it was never gonna be good timing whenever it was gonna be. I will be takin in some bronzes & piling them over some tables with sheets on em, so they should look pretty cool. My workspace is a brothel of a mess but that may not actually improve by then. Well hell its a work space innit. I will also have a bowl of eyeballs for guests to pick thru cos it will be Halloween!

The sculpture is slowly growing arms & a head. It has an oblong bit of foam for its head. Somehow it has character, i think... but perhaps i watch too many robot movies.

Stinker of a Day

Today was ruddy hot. Drove to studio after watching Surrogates on the PC... good flick, if a bit simple.. annoying that the scientist from I, Robot is in it as a scientist who makes robots & doesn't trust them. Again. He must be very typecast, its just lucky for him that SF & robots is so big now in cinema i guess, he can just play the same guy over n over, i mean soon as u see him u immediately know he is a scientist who makes robots and doesn't trust them. And yeah u know Bruce Willis is gonna be misunderstood & unfairly stood down as cop & have to work alone etc etc. But hey its got robots & that, so cool, its worth seeing.

I poked (patted) at Mr sculpture in ineffectual fashion then got train to Bondi to see tax dude. It seem he have a massive effort when he do my tax... i cannot imagine why unless its cos i'm utterly crap at getting my shit together. Oh yeah, that could be it. Enjoyed the train ride & the tax dude laff at my jokes & apart from that the news is not fantastic: shell out 20K for BAS. Its a bit rich of the govt to expect this & while u may indeed get a load of $$ thru yr bank account, it seem much more go out than come in when u are doing the govt's tax collecting & paying tax "ahead" which seems strange & unsettling. And esp if u are paying a tax dude vast amounts to do it cos its so arse-bitingly complicated & if you think 2 seconds, u will remember it was never as bad as this, tax i mean. Poor tax chap he goes white sometimes & all quiet cos he has to calculate something so horrible it even make a seasoned tax accountant blanch.

So then i sweat my way back to studio, tho i do enjoy my train ride. I imagine real commuter ppl laff when i say that. how silly they think, but they never grew up in a suburb where there's no trains at all & u never think about them. Its a jolly adventure for me & i do enjoy seeing the backs of all the industrial areas that u cannot see otherwise. For e.g. I never knew there was a huge yawning brickpit in the back of that particular bit of marrikville its no wonder u can't walk thru to the Metro that way.

Then everybody all feelin washed out from the heat of the day. And giant traffic jams which i was lucky to rat run away from. Standing in traffic unmoving as lights change & change & change again is a very bad look when its as hot as that. I was cool tho i had some twisties (to replace salt) and a bottle of water. i just sweated there but it was at least 1 degree cooler by this time 6pm so i was happy enough esp when i found my escape.

Foam

Well its bin a while haven't had much to whinge about so i haven't blogged. My foot suddenly got better on the day i went to get a blood test over it, but yeah hey i did have gout & how funny is that. Anyway the Dr said stop eating so much oranges. Damn i thought i had a really good healthy food there but hell.

I picked up a book by Haruki Murikami which is about running. He wrote a memoir about his marathon running. But really its also about the work-health balance you need to work at if u are a writer who sits at a desk all day. I guess everybody in IT can relate. Anyway one thing he said about doing a creative thing is u should stop when you feel you could still go on. That makes the next day's start very easy indeed. I been using that bit of advice & its great. I'm taking this new life sized man quite easy. I have a few things that been causing distraction but i'm just being relaxed about it. And it seems to be working!

Some new technical breakthru's are helping with enabling a feeling of progress. Firstly i have a murder of Plaster Bandages, Foam & wooden Skewers. I'm building this dude up using foam blocks skewered together & sometimes glued with liquid nails, and then i might wrap the foam limb or whatever in plaster bandages. I'm hoping this will be strong as 1 leg has no armature in it. So actually i may find my tub of resin & Fibreglass that leg to a bit of metal rod before get too far into it cos it sucks when a leg falls off. The skewers are a lifesaver - even when u wrap the plaster bandages u can poke in a skewer to hold one end. Awesomely handy. Anything that saves you from coming back from lunch to find your bandages have all drooped off & set spazmo is worth HEAPS.

My car is making a noise that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It does this every time i drive, the noise & the hairs. The noise is speed related, and getting worse. Its got so i know which hairs (either side of back of neck up to & around the ears) & the fact more on the left side of my head stand up. i'm wondering if its cos i hear more with that ear cos the open space of the car interior is on that side & maybe theres an echo. But regardless i really need to trade the heap in on something & for a while there i was convinced i could get a twin cab ute & how this would be awesome. Since I could then carry my life sized man to the foundry thus saving up to 2K for e.g. when they come to my studio to mould. i was fully into buying a Hilux & even went to see some. Then as i drove there i saw a place.. rent a ute. Der. I could spend 50 bucks renting a stupid ute i don't have to own one. And in fact a trailer would do if i had a tow ball. So now i'm back at square one I don't have the faintest clue what kind of car i need. I guess its got to be big & able to carry stuff in it. And maybe a tow ball. Thats about it... And it should be a toyota cos i heard they are very reliable.

Arrrrrrr

I feel like Pegleg Pete, tho i have to have a bit o hope cos my foot ain't totally killing like the last 2 nights. reckon i got 10% sleep last night. In between it hurting like hell in certain possies u turn over & even the good possie is not comfy so u turn again & it gets really sore & u wake fully up & then u turn again etc. U know the drill. Anyway the verdict is it might be gout would u believe. Ash sez if it feels like yr foot is full of razor blades twisting then its gout.

And my back went today too, prolly cos i been hopping about for too long. Tis like a finely tuned machine, my bod. Laugh not! Tis fer sure like a fine tuned machine, cos when 1 string detune, go plunk instead of plink, it all falls to shit. Like a house of cards or a teetering pile of garbage. Or for something more tunedly: like when a rubber band breaks on an italian motocycle. You don't wanna be cleaning that up.

Anyway ... tomorrow i takes a boxful of maquettes to a meeting & from there i certainly hope can start work immediately otherwise i'll *really* never get another weekend.

Sis done me a 36 card spread tarot today. In the future i will meet an asshole & i should walk away. Heh. There were good things too. Its hard to report on a tarot reading cos its all so subjective. You can interpret it diff ways & in short this is why ppl call it a load of old cobblers i guess. But such things are just frameworks for allowing intuition eh. Most ppl know in their hearts what they need to do.

House poking

Went out house poking today. thats when u go out & poke about hopelessly at overpriced shitheaps & justify your inability to enter the real estate market by slaggin people's dreadful taste in home reno's. Its either an appalling egyptesque grotesquerie or an unreno'd dung heap complete with tenants dishes filling the kitchen sink. Re the egyptesque place, well i been to egypt i know how they fix up houses there.. this was so egyptian it cried out. Exposed wiring everywhere & tiled within an inch of its life. The lower level had 9 ceiling roses in total. 6 in the shop front were all the same kind which is fair enough but the 3 in the living quarters were each different & the paint they used to accent all the mouldings & window sills etc was a kind of puke formless army green, which my sis said is similar to what is trendy at the moment.... similar. The bathroom tap knobs were awesome i think u could read yr future in each one like crystal balls. Beaut things. The most beaut rainbow mother of pearl crystal one was hanging out 3 inches, but after i cut myself on the fireplace i turned that on to washed the cut so it still works. They had removed some structural thingys from the rooms & replaced them with glossy thin round pillars that went to Square blocks & thence up to a filletted curvy V shape & it was pretty bad with the puke green ceiling roses above that. In some ways perhaps painful to look at is a description. Still we liked it a lot, generally. Just need a load a small changes... and a builders inspection cos i know how egyptians build & if they removed structural things its a bit worrying. I'm not being rude - any egyptian will agree.

Then we saw a fixer-upper in marrickville. Well actually it was a knocker-downer or better yet nuke-it-from-space-to-be-sure-r & it even had Enter At Own Risk in big red letters on the front door. Our the back were a couple of happy ladies who had obviously decided to rescue it but as i said to my sis, grandpop would knock it down rather than fix it. Its the kind of house grandpop would have built, but i reckon he would take a 1.5 second look & say this place is done for.

Speakin of cuts we just received a gross-out email with 2 pics of my cousin's foot, this arvo it happened, he chucked his fishing knife at the ground but neglected to move his foot first. Load of blood very impressive. The 2nd photo shows just the cut with the blood washed off & its not too bad tho must be deep. If i were a person who beleived in anything i would find it most funny that the exact spot where his foot got hit by knife is exactly where my foot hurts. It radiates outward from that exact point. Coincidence. Funny though. Hmm. So, like, universe... very funny.... Can my foot get BETTER now then???

I SMSd him he was nodding off in the hospital waiting his turn. He filmed them sewing it up, on his phone. He has a great pain threshold. Lucky.

Corroding foot

Sigh a mere 25 minutes after stupidly allowing add-ons update in firefox i can now start typing. I have few mins left before i'm out of power... gakkk.... no just kidding. the laptop might go though. Hm i dunno firefox used to take 3 seconds to do that kind of thing, now its endless waiting & semi-crashing until u fnally start IE instead & then u can swear at how interminably slow that runs & by the time u got gmail up u can try firefox again & maybe..

Buggering bloody computers anyway. I got a weird foot at the moment thats causing me a bit of grumpy. Its kind of numb on top & a bit pins & needles & if i push on it it feels like its being ripped apart. Nothing visible at all. Not the usual sore foot eh. I took some magnesium this evening in case its related to cramps but otherwise who nose. I had to sit own this arvo tho when i got it caught under a thing, & twisted it. Gosh did that hurt. I don't think it would have hurt usually, so its just a bit delicate or summink. Hope it starts to improve soon or i'm gonna need to be careful with it & thats a PITA... Got a meet early next week to approve a maquette for the next life sized dude & from that moment it'll be full steam ahead & no time for any frailties thank Q.

Been contemplating what is the role of a sculptor. Skip to the end now if that bore u to tears...
Know some sculptors who just do pretty ordinary work, and sell loads of it. The point is, should a person strive to create amazing things that are an exploration of incredible universes & formalist practice & perhaps create their own sculptural language, or is the fact you sell em means its not broke & why fix? You ask yrself why wd u devote yr life to an art form & never want to push it to hell & back? Well the answer may be many things but it just being a job could be one of them. Its not the kind of job anyone wd choose to make a living tho, so u suspect a person start it all starry eyed & idealistic.. but then when the work starts & keeps selling, do they reckon they made it now & thats enough pushing it. I dunno. Maybe they worry if its a bt different it might stop selling.. dunno.. i mean u could always make both kinds of work couldn't ya?

But like ppl buy the stuff... so is it broke? Maybe its not. But if several actual sculptors think its shite, then it is shite, this is true. Guess ppl buy it cos there is nothing as shiny next to it that actually is a good sculpture. And shiny matters. Surfaces & colour matter, & Bling. Sadly, they have to put the bastard in the house somewhere & live with it & they care about them things.

And is the sculptor's role to make what other people want into a 3d object, like make manifest their vision or their hopes & expectations? For example if u make an urn for the ashes of a stillborn baby for a friend, or get commissioned to make a portrait of some historical dude. Or is it to be the maker of objects & then afterwards people come to you & buy one cos they like your vision? Like Henry Moore. Henry Moore is a odd one cos he just made Henry Moores & people got him to make a Henry Moore as a commission. In the annals of commissioned sculpture history did anybody ever get asked to just go make somethin, whatever took his fancy, the way he was? [Please imagine this rhetorical question from the POV of a person (myself) who hasn't got much a grasp of actual art history but yet I think i'm correct here - cos hell they were all Henry Moores, eh. Nobody said, i'd like a blobuform mother & child here pls, Henners, and i'd like em to float a bit & have no relation to figurative sculpture as its been done in the past 4000 yrs.]

Anyway... been busy makin another maquette today. Its not going so great cos every pose besides the original one looks unco. But i'm fighting hard against that & getting the anatomy up on it... adds to the flavour.... if u got the gesture & the anatomy u should have a contender or at least something not embarrassin. Me, i still like the first one though. What can u do.
Ah, better do my tax before i get the nod on the big feller, cos there won't be no time from that moment til Xmas for any muckin about.

2 Bat stories

Scary story...
The other night i heard a yowling n screeching out the back. It was fully dark. I thought whatever that is its probably whats been mucking up the back yard eh, some bloody cat, & it needs to be shoo'd off. I went out to give it a yellin & i realise its something much creepier out there. There's gurgling screechy noises u never heard in any horror film & i suddenly understood why in them horror films people Go Outside To See What Is Makin That Noise & we in the safety of our warm house or movie theatre are going "oh no!!!!!!!!!!!! u idiot!!!!!!!!!!! why on earth would u go outside!!!!!!!!!!!" Well now i know why ya would, cos u just do. As this thought whoosh thru my head I realise its flying things battering & gurgling like mutated cats choking & i see other neighbour out looking & saying WTF is that & i realise its a flock of bats dive bombing the back yard & i realise that i am silhouetted against the lit back doorway & in a horror film i'd be dead meat & i also realise bats are mad & nothing i do will get me more than a flappin bat down my neck so i repair inside & imagine my fast escape from horror movie & how if it real was a movie i'd be splattered all over the wire door in grotesque fashion & how funny is that.

Other Batt story:
This morn out in the raging gale force winds doing some gardening with mum (when she gets a notion u better mind what she sez) i see my plaster batt which i described in previous post, that lives in the carport, has blown over (its been a night of very blowy proportions) & smashed into bits. Its kinda sad.... perhaps it knew its time had come.

A Dog a Day

Today went to morn tea at a sculptor's place. I brought timtams & absorbed information. I learned that you can use a rice cooker to melt your wax & pour it into one of those silicon cake tins to make wax sheets. I'd bought one of those cake tins just this week, hoping it would work to make wax sheets in & here we are - it apparently works an absolute treat. I'm so over dealing with a heavy plaster batt... you have to soak it, keep it cool, do it outdoors squatting in the yard, make new one when it wears out, store the bastard, find that rain got to it & wore ruddy bastard grooves across it, etc. With a silicon mould you can leave out the running water mess & even work inside the studio when u make wax. Brilliant. And the rice cooker trick melts the wax without drama, no setting it on fire or blowing it up all over the ceiling, & then keeps it at a low temp afterwards as long as u want. Bloody brilliant. Damn! And everybody's got a rice cooker they never use, even us.

She does beautiful work & the photos i'd seen did not do em justice at all. Really uses bronze like it should be used. You just wanna hold them. They're all abstract. Just beaut.

She told me about Depot Beach where you can snorkel and find rocks like the little ones u find at Mystery Bay, with lines thru em, except they are the size of your hand. I must go snorkel there sometime.

Thence to studio. I poured the daschund mould, i had took it off the clay the other day & cleaned it up & soaped it. Today dampened it good, resoaped it & poured lovely fresh white plaster in & then a backing of fibreglass with a pair of honkin big wire hangers imbedded. Suspect the doggie looks a lot more like a jack russell than a daschund but u get that. I had destroyed the clay relief getting the mould off it so i used a knife & a bloody big wooden mallet to persuade the clay back into a nice flat slab for the next relief. Another mate come over later & moaned long n bitterly about people who are hard to work with & drank some beer. Sadly i can't help much but can supply beer.

He told me about Washerwoman's Beach which is where tiles wash up from a shipwreck & the tiles had been aimed for St Mary's Cathederal. So if u snorkel there u can find some nice buggered up careworn tiles swishing back n forth in the surf. I will have to go have a snorkel there when its not bloody freezing cold, gale force winds & hail, like lately.

While he was there i started on a jokey quick dog on the slab & it started to work out. Hey i could do a dog a day at this rate. Anyway i soaked it in water a bit too much & it got hard to work with, more got stuck on my fingers & tools than i left on the slab, so i called it a day. Tomorrow it'll be just right.

Flies Dead After Pesticide Bomber Uncorks Carnage Cocktail

Been lookin at a house for sale... looks good, i think they are underquoting by about 100K on estimated price at the auction, i doubt i'm in the running. Otherwise its pretty good & i'm daydreamin here how would everything work etc etc. The Grt Aus Drm.

Looked at the contract it says the vendor will not be responsible for any environmental contamination under the site. I haven't noticed such a statement in any previous real estate contracts, tho they are a bit dry reading so i may skip bits sometimes. It make u achieve a state of unease, tho, really.

Rainy day in the studio

Sittin in the shop window of the studio. its teemin down outside & i've turned the big armchair round so i can watch the traffic flushing down the rd outside. its a busy rd even on a public holiday in the rain. Its been a lovely quiet day here apart from the bloody airplanes. But they are nothing compared to the noisy bastards next door & yay they got the day off.

i been here all day. i did another footy player same as before but this time reversed. i tried to do him different posed, but he keeps going back to the same one & maybe this is how he is just gonna be. anyway he looks ok, mirror image of the first. Then i went to work on the sausage dog. he is easily damaged but i feel like i can break him & bring him back. Meh - u can still ruin it though and in that overconfident moment i always used to crash the motorbike. So, to not tempt fate i've coated him in a plaster waste mould & tomorrow i can make another, & see what i get again. I guess you could just keep modifying one relief over n over this way. Cool.

There was some relief that Matisse kept doing over n over, the back of a woman. He was a very serious dude, i don't think he would do sausage dogs. But its a natural way to work i reckon i've stumbled upon eh. Could get out a number of modified reliefs in a row & see a real progression quickly. Think i'll have to do that.

Been a good day been all alone. watched every episode of New Amsterdam all 8 of em. I dunno where series 2 would have gone, they canned it apparently after 1 series, but this was good. Sometimes they ruin it by doing it again for series 2 etc. I think maybe they work backwards in tv. They lay it all out a.s.a.p. cos they know they might get canned any moment. Not like doing endless reliefs where u hope u improve each time. And g-d knows where Lost fits in & how it dragged on, but it sure broke our trust in TV... i never watch anything anymore without reading the reviews, in case i get "big fat nothing back" for watching it. But for this show, in a way one season might be enough. And it leaves a bunch of cool existential questions very pertinent to today's ppl. Such as finding ones true love vs having 609 GFs which is something lot of today's blokes aspire to - well they aspire to both & this is the hard choice. Which one of the 609+ do u stop at? And does 609 GFs make u feel immortal? Heh. A jolly good show.

Major skill: know crap when u see it,
i guess thats step 1.
If u see when yr own work is crap n when OP's work is crap then u got a great chance of not making crap yourself. Yes i've got a certain repeating sculptor in mind but i won't diss anybody by droppin a name... some ppl fall in love with the technical side of it all & forget the point.. actually with that comment a bunch more sculptors popped into my head. Breathe it out...

Eh, i feel like an old codger .. i guess a rainy afternoon can do that to ya. That and a full day of wrestling with death, immortality, murder, love, time travel, old age, supernature, loss, deception & redemption a.k.a. that tv show. Gosh heavy themes. That TV show makes me see my petty little reality issues are nothin compared to the big issues of all them age old concepts that run round on the weeny screen. Feelin good though, if a little unresolved sculpturally speaking.

Also watched an episode of Nurse Jackie on the laptop, which i since heard is on normal telly. An imperfect nurse who does her best while being a wee bit fast n loose, i loved it when she flushed that guys ear down the toilet.. he didn't deserve to get it back, in fact he deserved to have his scrotum sewed on where his ear used to be. i guess u could only go that far as Surgeon Jackie.

Some work

Sundy broke in gloomy rainy darkness so i slept in & then daylight savings meant along with my laziness i never got to the studio till 11 or 12. But i worked hard & done good. I did a maquette for the next big feller, this went well cos i thought about it heaps before i started & decided there was only 1 pose that suited the dude (according to the small amt of photos available, anyway).

So i was pretty rapt over that & cos i'd brought some daschund photos off the net printed up i drew a picture & then set to making my relief which was gonna be a sausage dog. I love them things & if they weren't so mutated to be totally unhealthy i'd love to have one. But anyways I surprised myself- the relief things come good & he's lookin out of the flat plane & checkin u out.

We're gonna have some kinda Open Studio later & it would be cool to have some sculptures there that ppl can relate to. Or else i'll hae nothing, cos everythig will be in process. But dogs are good, i like em, they are a good challenge & its way cool cos its easy to tell when u got em right. Awesome.

For a Sundy the studio got quite busy then, ppl coming and goin & i had to stop watching my laptop tv.. i was up to episode 3 of New Amsterdam which is a tv show from america thats got... supernature, immortality, romance, forensics, cop/detective, inter racial relationships, um um whatever i think they put everything in it. Anyway its quite good I was sucked right in. Sadly there's only 8 episodes been made but i got 5 to go so... will enjoy while it lasts.

Anyway not really watching it, it just runs in the background while i work, i dunno if it helps or hinders but today i did well sculpturally speaking, so who nose. Could be having yesterday off helped too.

Left the studio before i really could have, i realised where i was once the tv was off & then got itchy feet. Shocked to see it was after 5pm on the car clock but then daylight saving... it had been 4 at this time the day before. Felt weird. Daylight saving really does muck u about.

Pimsleur Hungarian... its all Hello are you American? Do you speak English? And Would you like to eat with me? Boooooorrrrriiiiiinnnnnnggggggg. And they still sound like they're telling each other to Go Get F'ed! Emphatic, as the Pimsleur guy sez.

Bookz

Never one to hold back long from buying books... well u know its rained horribly all day so i got a bit insular & bought a Dr Who audio book on ebay & a very old book on Henry Moore (a book of pix of him working) for 3 pounds from UK. Then I decided i would yes actually buy those Faurat (Feurat?) books on doing portrait sculpture. His work scares the sh*t outta me & i never want to do work like that (ref: wikipedia: uncanny valley) but he has certainly studied heads & i could use more info. So i ordered both of those from USA & then i said to myself well WTF & sorted out the Amazon order i'd had gathering dust in the Cart there. I got like 70 books in the save for later cart that can wait but what i really wanted was the Carving in Stone book that gives u the full guff on using pantographs or pointing machines. We shall see if it does eh.... some review whinges about how its all page after page of technical stuff on enlarging... whoo-hoo! Just what i wanna read.

A course none of the technical books will get here within a month... so its all business as usual. Dr who should get here soon tho :) I like audio books in the studio.. Dr who is pretty senseless but thats good for working, u don't want anything to really distract you.

Never got to the studio... mserable sort of day & i thought i'd be cold there. But tomorrow i'll rug up & do a full day. Sundays are the best days there its quiet & its like i'm the only person for miles. Trying to work out if i'm a country person or a city person. Sometimes i could really be a country person. Alone & maybe with a dog. Nice.

Yesterday went to see an Airplane Museum down south. Was great, planes are the most awesome mechanical devices ever made i reckon. They were pulling a Constellation apart for repairs & there were all sorts of beaut craft about in various states. There were the really skinny helicopters from Vietnam & Iraq, mad things. One had a wire cutter attachment on the front. How would you ever manouver a helicopter to cut a wire! Yet of course it'd be mighty handy to have a wire cutter on the nose like that..... can see that... when u need to cut a wire, u bloody need to don't you. Inside on the observers dashboard was a button called 'wire cut'.

Nuff Whingeing

Nuff moaning. We're getting healthier in the lungs & looking about with actual interest. Obsessed with reading that book on sculpting by Jagger. Today went into studio & after studying the book i made a square clay slab on a plank which is going to be a relief sculpture. Yeah don't sound much, but, it took 2 froggin hrs. Sadly bereft of actual inspiration but once i've drawn a decent drawing that looks like it'd make a decent relief then i'll be away. I drew some sausage dogs & they cool. Need some photos of them tho so i get the details. We're having some kinda "open studio" deal one day soon. It would be good to have some nice stuff around. I'd like to test a different foundry & maybe get some stuff sandcast. Good opportunity to do that with a relief thats got no undercuts or nothing.

Cannot look at any of the work i did last week or want to use those subjects. Think i did a crap job of it all. I'll be better at it next time from the practice, but u know, feel like sh*t now. Tis normal after a job interview though :) Really hope i don't get it. Feels like disaster. Well must wait n see.

Listening to Pimsleurs Hungarian lessons. Damn the hungarians all sound like they want to cut yer throat. Realise this is how hungarians speak normally. They explain where the emphasis is. Always on the first syllable. Is this why it sounds so smack u in the face?