6 months of bludging

Work breakfast.. a.k.a. mental indegestion

2011-03-29T22:05:00.002+11:00

Yep well i couldn't stay away, at least not while people are so crazy as they is. Have to share my stories.
Today was one o them work breakfasts u know. Where they lure u in w good free tucker when u sposed to be working & too late u realise u are hooked on a line & they're getting the gaff... Theres an hour worth of speeches to come.
Ok but today was luvverly all pretty in the refectory which has some huge apocalyptic mural across the wall that I love to stare at cos i have absolutely no idea what its about.. But i love it for that very thing i guess. Like why is that naked guy putting a hat on the scarecrow with the head made of a fruit? Why is that other man leaned like that? What is that, an astronaut? A fitting place for a meeting arranged by bosses who are just as mysterious in their mental functioning.
One of their recent tortures has been to inflict upon the serfs to make a presentation to them about what their teams do but without using technology like powerpoint. Pergatory for an IT pro. Like sending out spartacus to fight with a banana. This kind o thing was right up my alley, but, and i even volunteered to do it for my team wd u believe.. but got knocked back by my teem leed, silly man.
Anyway we got a repeat of 2 of the bosses faves.
One was so forgettable that i dunno who it was. The other was so fucking awful that i blocked most of it out, and when i dared to look up from refolding my napkin over n over i could see everyone in the surroundin tables cringing with embarrassment and clutching their heads grimly. but what i remember was it was audio visual team, 3 of, wearing chefs hats on stage, talking utter shit - they are iron chef, they said, as they explained to a room full of IT professionals how important AV are cos they cant always use out of the box solutions for their work and sometimes they have to solve problems! (You mean like every single person in this room does constantly in their jobs cos they work in IT?)
They didn't use big words like those ones, they used the most patronising possible little words way of explaining to 100 granmas how to suck eggs, using kitchen paraphenalia to demnstrate how a pointy stick thing doesnt fit in a rectangular baking tray but it does fit in a round one, thus displaying complete lack of mental capacity or ability to either cook or make up metaphors that make any sense at all.
Sadly they understand so little about IT that they congratulate themselves for solving problems and smugly believe this shows their superiority over the drones. They show us a VGA cable and a cat5 cable and look at the difference!
It was so cringeworthy that nobody could even speak afterwards. Everybody despaired inside. But also, it was like we had a choir of downs syndrome ppl on stage and it'd be mean to criticise.

Our management believe they're great, cos they keep saying they are.
What planet is our management from, again?

Some time later

2010-12-19T17:31:00.001+11:00

This eyeball is settled out... awaiting glasses but i kind of got the idea now of what i have. one shortsighted eye (the new un) and one long sighted. This makes me feel like i'm on drugs at all times. hoping glasses will help at least when i walking down the street. Healthwise i been really knocked about by either the insult of the operation or just the fact i stopped struggling for a few weeks after having no break at all for 3 years. Have now had 7 weeks, i think, in stasis. Thus the lack of intrest in writing blog when nothing is happening either in reality or in my imagination. But have come to see i will not get better by accident i have to strike a blow. Its now xmas hols from work, we get 2 weeks. I intend to be vastly improved in 2 weeks time. Comon glasses!

BTW my nephew living with us is now 6 weeks old. He is the same age as my new eyeball, give or take a week. I hope to use him as my model sometime. He is as yet not too entertaining, though i get the rare huge grin just for me that makes my day.

Sculpturally speeking i been informed i got a tender i went for, tho no paperwork yet so i won't go into details. its 3 busts of old poets. Reckon i was the absolute cheapest tender... couldn't see i needed to get paid more than that so thats what i put. starting to think i maybe should have allowed more for foundry in case i decided to get extravagant, but i will just have to work in the confines of the usual bust idea then instead. Should be fun, and a good learnin opp. Doing people's heads is difficult but without the bodies it should be quite a fast thing i hope.

anyway my newest project before starting the real project, is to make real bust armatures, something i've dodged for all these years by making every head off some aluminium bent creation i found in a rubbish bin at art school 20+ years ago. its not ideal, its crooked, and it has bits that always stick out the neck. but it was free, light, tough, and never rust. i'm gonna make some real ones now though as per Lanteri's book. I bought some armature wire at vast expense from the sculpt shop and i found some excellent big bits of ply in a bin at the studio. all i need now is some 5cm x 5cm length of wood for the neck bit and i got all my ingredients. How exciting.

Today braved the pre-xmas at ikea. silly thing to do, but we made it. with my 6 week old nephew, even. mention this cos i got an apron there for sculpting that's exactly like the one Henry Moore was wearing on the cover of a book i've got about him. That for extra inspiration :)

Post op

2010-10-30T11:52:00.002+11:00

It's been a week and 2 days since they sliced my eyeball and slid in a new lens. I wasn't too crash hot happy about it for the past week but it's finally starting to settle a bit. I think. Firstly it was like xtra vivid, like big bright lollyworld, with a purple cast to everything. Like blacks were blue sometimes and I could see a vast difference between the new eye n the old one. It was sharp in the middle sorta, tho too bright to look for long, and blurry round the edges like a vignette which meant I still couldn't cross roads too safe lol. Also it felt rough cos i had a black eye and it wasnt too comfy there. The black eye was from the needle they stuck under the eye to knock out the nerves in back of the eyeball. That sorta worked but then it started to wear off before the end of the op and it hurt a bit when they slid in the lens and twisted it about, but by then it's like yeah , whatever , you're still cutting into my eyeball , sure thing. Old hat it was. I guess I was sedated.

Once the new eye started to be ok to look thru, my brain rapidly decided to jump ship on the old eye and ran over to the left eye n settle there cos it's now sharper than my 'good' old eye. That's loyalty for ya innit. But then that meant my right eye was not bothering to focus anymore which sucked cos I ended up closing that one instead of closing the operated one and that confused the beejezuz out of me and everybody who usually talks to me. I'm hoping my brain will sort it's shit out soon and I'll get to use both eyes. Today they're not too bad actually I have hope. Still got 2 weeks off work to go so in 2 weeks I hope things have got sorted.

Been sleeping heaps for the past week mainly cos my eyes hurt I spose but also just getting over work. Miss my studio. Apparently I'm ok to drive now but don't feel quite like doing it yet. Maybe tomorrow I'll go over to the studio.

Poor doggie

2010-10-20T22:20:00.000+11:00

Tomorrow going to get my eyeball sliced open. Just a cataract operation, but still, it's freaky. I feel real sad, like cos I can't explain it to my eye.. feel like I'm taking my dog to be put down. Just sad really. Cos th bit I used too look thru is gonna get chucked in a bin eh.

Anyway enuff o that. Tonight I rode my big 7-fiddy over to store it in my studio. After much swearing I got it started and had a lovely ride over there in the evening light. Surprising I could see pretty good, tho when mum drove me home in darkness after I couldn't see nuthin. Meh. Anyway got to the studio n a marvel of timing I arrived during a massive movement of very very large sculpture. There was a car sculpture, a 9 ft high block of concrete, and a few extremely large maybe 8 ft high n 6 wide steel fabrications, all totally blocking my passage into my studio. U never known timing like that. Spectacular. Farkinell. Anyway things looking bad but I ended up getting passage thru someone elses studio so it worked out. Amazing tho, itwas the one evening that things were utterly impassable n of course that's when I choose to turn up.. It's a family trait, donchaknow.

So.... I pushed it up a ramp, backed it in 3 times til I got it in the studio, lowered a rolladoor, locked it with a string of electrical cable, n locked 2 unfamiliar gates in complete darkness...all while holding my phone to one ear. Now that's a motorcyclist! Heh. I Have got skillz.

Apres show der monkey

2010-10-11T18:49:00.000+11:00

2 more sold since the show closed, i've made my target exactly. Which is quite inscrutable, and unexplainable, but very welcome. Hopefully more will go over time. But happy with that. The economic climate is crap for selling art, apparently.

Not missing the hard yakka in studio. Am missing having a reason to live though. Have transformed the stinging goal of making art into a pining lust for a fellow office worker in my building. That will have to do til i need to transmute it back into art fuel. Its gotta go somewhere, don't it. And a change of scenery is good.

Went & cleaned up the studio. 2 hours of sweeping & moving bits around. Now the large studio is a vast expanse of uselessness, seems like. But will have a friend come use it now for a few weeks, so its good its big, cos if i wanna do something too its best have enough room eh.

My bro in law put up the fluoro's properly, so now they don't hang 2 ft below the ceiling. I couldn't get em up any higher using a shopping trolley & milk crates, tho i finally clicked how it could be done the other day, and he did it that way & it was mucho easy. (Hooks! Not tying with string.) Much better in there now with the lights higher & the room looks much more inviting.

Think i'll be moving my stuff out of storage now & into there. That'll save some bucks. And i'll have a sofa to sit on...

shows over

2010-10-05T21:15:00.000+11:00

Shows over, picked up my sculptures this evening. They have kept about 3/4 of them tho, to put in a cabinet cos they reckon they might be able to sell a few over time. In fact they sold one tonight after i left, would u believe. Thats cool huh.

But... The Coolest thing happened today, the gallery people told me, that Google Earth "did" the gallery, and went right thru the show. Being the geek i half am, that is totally awesome. So in 3 or 4 months my show will be viewable in Google Freakin Earth. Bugger me, is that not flippin amazin.

post show

2010-09-25T07:32:00.000+10:00

Hey well the show opened, and it was lovely to get some many people coming. Had a great night. Sales weren't massive, sold 5. If i sell another 2 i'll cover expenses. So, well, nu, but thats OK. Nobody makes art to make money. I really like not making a loss though, thats just arse. Its a dignity thing, once you been sculpting 20 years. But i'm sure a few more will go from the gallery over the next 6 months & thats how long they can hang on to em for.

Its a week after the opening & i feel much better. I've had some sitting about time, not too much, but feels really good. Only working one full time job is quite OK. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do one full time job that you really *wanted* to do. Heh. How damn relaxing would that be!

Getting there

2010-09-12T20:10:00.001+10:00

Been a hard little track (just about the finish of me) but I might be nearly arrived at the destination i.e. Having the work ready 4 my show.
One positive thing happened today.. I discovered is that I have a huge bruisy lump on my foot, which is way cool cos I thought it was gout again.
Have buggered my right hand from overuse so I'm calling it mostly done.
There's 2 more castings i could easily finish if i had 2 functioning hands but, what the hell. Reckon I got a bunch of stuff, should be ok. Just a bit more colour touch ups on a couple, n we're done.
As usual have lowered my expectations to suit the product I'm able to produce.. Well u got to.. But even then was pleasantly surprised with some of em.

One week

2010-09-06T22:10:00.000+10:00

One week to set up of show. Think I am in the shit really, cos I'm also sick. Think I'm just exhausted, getting a wisdom tooth pulled last week has set me back a ways I think. The bronzes are coming along ok but the stainless are a pain in the ass. Might need an extra day orf work.

Can't wait till it's all over. Damn I could use a year off..

survived another one

2010-08-22T09:07:00.000+10:00

Survived another unveiling. there's only 1 left where i have to speechify & that one won't be very well attended cos its a mid week thingy, so it'll be easier, tho of course i'm already starting to dread that one now dammit. it does drain the pleasure away totally when u have to give a speech & sadly thats just the way it is.

anyway it was good, i made everybody laugh with my speech and it was nice & short again. Eh, and they liked the sculpture. I can see all the faults but i done my absolute best, couldn't do any better, thats all you can try to do.

thanks to my sis for dressing me i looked better than usual. better than i deserved probably lol.

New project

2010-08-15T08:43:00.001+10:00

Been approached about doing some very large work.. It's still in proposal stage but very exciting. It's big enough I'd need to employ people to help and probably need an even bigger studio. Cool!

Though these things have a history of not working out, generally, these ppl seem very professional.. Maybe they can push it thru.

Diminishing returns

2010-08-14T21:46:00.003+10:00

Seems like I've run out of puff far as making new work goes. I spend many hrs in studio and end up with some dead bodies in wax. Its very much a diminishing returns style of working.. Have 1 day left to work, and may not bother. I've been fettling some unfinished ones too so I'm getting a bit done, but as far making new work I seem to need a bit of a rest really. Still I'm pretty happy generally, I think I got some 26 or so for the show, if they all cast well, anyway. That's pretty good. That number includes a few old ones that could use some exposure. I think I have created about 20 in the past little while. It's kinda cool. And about another like 50 or so wax fails. But sometimes they can get recycled, later.

Have some ideas tho.. Especially some suggestions from people. Just seem to be a bit tired to make things. Is ok.. U can't got at that speed for too long i guess.

Need a wisdom tooth pulled. And hey it's just starting to hurt tonight. Be a bit unlucky if it caused me conniptions at the next weeks unveiling eh. The timing is umpeccable.

End of a vein

2010-08-09T21:08:00.000+10:00

Got to accept i've reached the end of he old creative vein re managers. Bugger really, cos i'm sure there's just so much more to say. But hey, maybe later it'll come back. But not this week, so i have to move on cos only have a week. Um.. OK...

David Attenborough.

2010-08-08T22:21:00.001+10:00

Lost my manager thread..I need to hang more with the suits, like anthropologically..

The boring crested grebe wears it's plumage with pride. It's gibbering cries make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, but only the beta males understand what its calls mean, or at least they pretend to.

(Cut to long slow sweeping shot of bony carcasses half dug into mudflats)

Out here it's survival of the fittest. However, the fittest of this genus is not necessarily strong, nor clever.. It's a different meaning of the word "fittest" and not as we know it Jim.

Bit of success

2010-08-08T09:43:00.001+10:00

I had 2 choices, either chop up the life sized man in situ (time = 1 full day including clean up.. if i'm lucky) or moving it somehow to the new studio (time= short but painful).

But i put my mind to it & with the help of the shonky studio trolley (a trolley so shonky that nobody admits it exists, even) and 2 pieces of wood on it for height leverage, and the spectacularly timely intervention of the man upstairs who is a bit like the lone ranger, in that he appears, moves like 20 bags of clay for ya & then disappears.... this time he appeared just as i got it stuck in the first doorway, dislodged it for me, then disappeared... the life sized man did get moved to the new studio.

There is nothing you need more in a sculpture studio than an assortment of wood blocks and planks. You can't rely on the man upstairs, but your blocks of wood will save your ass.

Progress

2010-08-06T22:05:00.000+10:00

Ok it's bin a while.
Times passed and oceans have eroded the coastline etc. The other day I delivered a handful o waxes to the stainless steel casters and a huge mound to the bronze foundry. 6 and 14, tho with repeats and one that won't be in the show it totals at 16. Already have 2 finished bronzes and 2 unfinished bronzes that qualify. So a grand total 20 so far. I feel like a good number for the show is like maybe 30, and so that's my goal.

Bin sick a week and didn't do anything for almost that whole time. Bit of a setback, tho the foundry's gifted me an extra week, so it's even.. Hm I have a week to make 10 sculptures. Well why not. Or else find some old ones round the house, but that's a last resort. Mum sez it may take me longer to find 10 sculptures than make them. I guess she means I'd be picky, tho she may also mean I'm incredibly untidy, but since I'm both..

Moved studio, almost finished, bloody hell what a load of stuff, I really didn't think there was much in there... But there was.

The only thing that didn't move is the life sized man. I thought he'd be easy, just roll him out, but he is too tall to fit thru the door! And requires some thought.

Shark car

2010-07-25T20:18:00.004+10:00

Have a new car, an old magna. I'm going to put a shark fin on the roof. or some teeth on the front. Something anyway. My last car was boring boring boring boring boring. I wanted to be anonymous. But meh, who cares. If they want to book me they'll do it with an automatik camera & being boring won't help me there LOL. Maybe i'll put an arse on the back, for the cameras.

Have the first set of finished detailed waxes ready to take to the foundry. I wanna use 2 foundries, cos i want to do some stainless steel as well as bronze. Not ready yet with the stainless waxes, i been making a mould off one sculpture & i'll pop a set of those out to cast in stainless.

Anyway i'll book a day off work when i get 2 foundries worth o' stuff & deliver them out there. Now thats a PLAN.

Todays sculptures:
One footballer reinvigorated from an old sculpture found in a box
Detailed lots of em
Drawing of a monkey

Managers managers

2010-07-23T23:59:00.002+10:00

Been making tons of managers. its been going well. i aim to do a sculpture every day, and more or less its been working like that. I never quite finish em so each will require a fettle later, but usually by then cos they been maturing a while, i'll decide to either not do much to em or trash em altogether. thats ok, its a 2nd level cull process.

tonight i made one businessman bending over giving a brown eye and called it "business presentation". That could be taking it all a bit far, perhaps. Its a bit too honest. We certainly can't have stuff thats too honest in a show about managers. I'd get sacked, for a start. The wider range of metaphorical escapades could be mistaken for social commentary about the whole world of business/family/humanity/the universality of lost dreams & hopes/pitiful human condition in the 1st world/pursuit of happiness lifelong detour, etc, .....but sledgehammer stuff like that is not very... um... sofistikated.

Still, it was interesting making the dude cos he's pretty twisted up & has his head upside down & that. I'm behind one sculpture in the grand plan but i guess it was a good exercise.

Anyway it could be that the manager theme is already getting towards exhausting itself. Once it bitters up like that u may as well get fresh onto a new theme. Its all fine cos a sprinkle of small themes in this show will be orright.

Todays sculpture:
Business Presentation

Working for show

2010-07-13T21:19:00.004+10:00

Since finishing that big bloke, I been feeling quite happy with myself and that. Nothing like finishing 3 years of slog. Now I'm working on work for my show in 2 months. It's kind of close really. But the past few days I've got back into the swing and some nice ideas are coming out. Decided to run with whatever came, and started with the concept of angels, cos having done one angel it was well received and I thought well there u are I can use that as a theme, angels, and devils too maybe. Cos thats as good a theme as any and being a bit mythological u can take it places. But it seems like the old subconscious is changing the devils into managers, blokes in suits. It's "make what u know", thats the old saying. at work there's lots of managers and blokes in suits, and they kinda run the gamut of evil right the way to nice. So u can have blokes in suits with all layers of moral ambiguity and like in real life u can sometimes not know where u stand with em at all, or what theyre thinking, and they can have weird motivations that make no sense. And some of em, well they don't know where they stand either. Lol. And then u got some who even worry about it, I was talking to one yesterday who I get the feeling is a bit sad and feeling maybe a bit shunned. I never talk to him usually but not cos I don't want to, more cos he always looks very serious and very busy. We used to talk before. But hell u know, he's a manager.. it's beyond my ken what managers do, and I don't think it's my place to try to pull one outta his shell. I don't know. So anyway there's a very fertile theme there eh.
It's got no relation to anything I done before, really, feels kinda fresh. Hopefully it'll stay inspiring. Think it's mostly coming from real people and real impressions from work, so that's a good way to keep it feeling fresh.

New week

2010-07-07T06:47:00.002+10:00

Well it's Wednesday and the foundry guys have taken their impression and left. Last night I went to the studio and lo n behold the place was empty of big mess. I realized my studio is big when there's nothing in it. Perhaps I don't need to move. However that is an illusion as studios don't work with nothing in them, do they. The more in them the better, and all of it moving.

Feel much happier since last night. Maybe my depression last week was cos someone was using my studio n encroaching on my personal space... It's silly enough to be true. Not that I mind the foundry guys they are lovely people. But yeah I do have a thing with my personal studio space I think... Does it matter, nah probly not. I'll make a note tho :)

Another cool thing.. Have more time than I thought to get stuff cast. So that too make me happier. I thought it needed 8 weeks in the foundry but if they get it in wax ready to go it's 4. Or 2 if you catch the right part of the casting cycle. Awesome. Already did some angel like sculptures last night. It's a start anyway. Angels seem to be some kind of trend at the moment but I'm gonna do it anyway, cos wings are cool. There will always be the problem that anatomically speaking wings AND arms on one creature is just total BS, but there's the challenge, to make it seem like it works.

Have been offered a half time position at work and I think I have to jump at it. My health sucks sitting in front of pc all day and if nothing else thats plenty good reason to do it. Anyway that's still a secret because the big boss is away on hols so nothings gonna happen for a week as far as informing anybody goes. 6 month secondment first so see how I cope with much less income... And a more expensive studio lol. Timing.

Bit of a shame tho as I'm getting rather good at my job now. I can just stroll out and create a new computer lab solo now and not even bother anybody except with maybe double checking I've created every idiotic group and group policy in active directory as the overriding trait with MS AD n SCCM n every other stupid MS server product is that there's 1000 seemingly unconnected irrelevancies u need to adjust to get anything to work. And make sure the policies are reversed , but reversed correctly, not that u can actually tell by looking, mind you, but reversed so they work in the right order. FFS it's like they did that shit deliberately. I won't miss that, actually.

Ta goodness

2010-07-03T23:30:00.001+10:00

Yep thx goodness for the weekend. Before I kill or further insult my workmates. I appalled the room by calling a third party a gargoyle yesterday. Crikey - I like gargoyles. But yes I was being a little disparaging at the time, perhaps.

Went to a garage sale briefly n got an array of boxes of pencils, old drafting materials n stuff. Doing lot of drawing lately, using some china graph pencils cos thsts all there was in the pencil dept of the newsagent at work. I got a nice blue one and I like using them. Got two boxes of em at the garage sale. Mostly brown and green. Also some Luna pencils n some Ruwe pencils. Dunno what they're good for, yet.

Then my cap off the week flat tyre on the bike, got that sorted n tried to do some sculpture in the studio. Not going very well but hope I'm just still warming up. Having a deadline for which u need to pump out creativity is about the most crap thing imaginable.. but u get that.

Have decided to move to the newly empty studio next door. From the inside it looks twice as big, tho it's in reality 1.5 times. It's a much nicer one it's not long n skinny like my place, more square n comfy feeling.

That'll be good. A course I've just finished all the big work I got in foreseeable future, but if get any more, ill be ready.

More boring stuff

2010-07-01T22:35:00.000+10:00

Still have the shits, unfortunately. Starting to hate my workmates, cos I haven't had enough to do n everything is on my nerves. Nobody laffs at my jokes till the 11am starter arrives. Since I start at 7.30 I feel lost for most of the day. What am I without anyone to laff? Who would think that was even important anyway. I must be a bit out of sorts..

One of my mates may not be leaving work. He can't decide. So I feel slightly better. But one needs to be independent, so even the fact that this makes me feel better, gives me the shits. I got the gout comin on too, I ate some mandarines last week. Its the bit of my left foot where the gear change is for the bike. Being car free for the moment, that'll suck.

Customers r shitting me too... Deleted all my phone messages this morn cos could not stand to listen to well known fuckwit unravel his tiny mindlet .. I refused to flatten out the folds of my brain comprehending his rubbish. I saw his number on the display, and the sound of his voice would have meant I be takin tomorrow off on mental health grounds.

Coming down

2010-07-01T22:10:00.000+10:00

Feel quite down. Not getting on well with people. Work sucks. I guess when you're working hard on a big project you can ignore everything else & then reality comes back & it doesn't exactly slap you it just erodes you over time. Here it is Wednesday & its taken 3 days for me to wear down to this point. 5 days a week at work is too much. Nothing gets better everything just craps out worse n worse till u get to the weekend then it starts over on monday. The customers suck.

But what really brings me down is i guess the following 3 things...

- all my friends are leaving work & i won't have anybody there to talk to by september

- in a couple weeks it'll be a year since dad died

- i just finished the big sculpture & i'm burned out

So yeah i guess i got some stuff to be down about. but got to try to snap out of it. Its so damn cold though. there was ice on my windscreen this morning. Crikey.

Finished him

2010-06-27T20:45:00.001+10:00

Have now officially finished the big man sculpture. OK then. Now i can get sick & fall over.

Updating webshite

2010-06-17T21:31:00.000+10:00

Today using the tedium of a rare lack of work day at work, actually got my website updated. (Updated is a big word, perhaps bigger than needed for adding 2 sentences and 1 photo.) Updating a website sounds like an easy task one wd think well within the capabilities of an IT professional, but I just never can remember my password. The reason being that they don't allow anything memorable for a password, the web hosting mobs security demands in that dept are extreme. So in the end I just never remember what I set last time & each time i get to reset another ludicrously unmemorable password. Which tends to take about 15 minutes of just figuring out a new password let alone all the rest of it all. Today being at work I installed an FTP client and over a longish period toiled away & finally Ash told me that the proxy at work won't let me do FTP anyway.
Eventually I found the web hosting has a file management tool so I did it thru that. Wouldn't want to do much thru that though it's a pain doing 1 file at a time.
So yes it's never easy to update the website. For stupid reasons, usually. But that, and other niggles like how using Highslide JS (that makes yr photos pop out nicely) is fully annoying hacking the code each time just to add a photo, well that's why I thought I might like to run it with a CMS. So i can just click 5 times to add some pictures and crap, eh. Anyway reckon I won't, cos I don't need all that bumpf, but i might use something like ZenPhoto, which does a nice gallery thing. With the opportunity to add like bloggy things there too. That's about all I want. Using a real blog like Ben does, awesome as it is, is not really that good for me, cos I don't have much to say about each sculpture, usually. I like little words to go with my pics. I can't really say much about how they're made, cos mostly they are all made the same way.

Sickie

2010-06-16T22:26:00.000+10:00

Chucked a sickie today. I reckon I was maybe over tired. Sleeping till 2 seemed to help a bit though. I dunno I try to muster all my resources so that I got enough strength for the day job.. I been going to bed by 9pm for ages. But I guess I burned out a bit. I dunno though after yesterday at work, it's like mental torture to go back. I know I should use the slow bits of the day better like update my website or something but its like doing time, u sposed to suffer. the best thing I can do is go make another cup of coffee, and I do that heaps.

Anyway after having the shits with the sculpture yesterday, I did a couple hours this evening on it, I got the angle grinder on it and made big dust storm. Squared off some muscles, cut the bigger looking arm right down, cut some clothing wrinkles in. It's improved.

Not happy

2010-06-15T22:12:00.002+10:00

Not happy today. Ratty day at the office. Wasted most of the day attempting to get something done that in the end was under control - well maybe - but a loose unit who never updates any docos had as usual failed to update any docos. That sort of person makes big fail when forced to use ITSM. Or rather, causes big fail to much fucked off co-workers and it's not the first time I've wasted large amt of effort like this.
Could not wait to leave work, got to studio at 4.02pm.

Unfortunately I think my big weekend took a toll and then the shitty day at work just finished me off. Went home a couple hrs later thinking the sculpture is absolute rubbish and unrecoverable. Woe.

Not happy :(

Have been looking at old photos, and I think it's been over-worked now. It's too smooth and too finished. Each body part has become separated, it's not one sculpture anymore, it's a bunch of body parts tied together. As well the anatomy and wrinkles have become too rounded and pretty when it should be notated, squared and precise but look messy like handwriting. Or something. They like em a bit smooth you know, but this is where I call artistic interpretation and whip it off to the foundry when nobody's looking.

It's gonna be hard to cut it back, I'm gonna need power tools. Much dust.

Too smooth too rough... i need two heads

2010-06-14T20:19:00.000+10:00

OK finally got his face on, about 4 days later than i'd hoped. Considering i only got so few days, thats a bit stressful. It seems to fit though, which is always a worry this point in the game. That its the right size n all. Luckily i seem to have got to a smart ass proficiency stage where things seems to just work ok like that. Big relief, that. Imagine if it was too small or too big. Geez.

The studio is littered with heads now. I think there is like 5 or so. But the one going on is the one moulded off the clay as discussed earlier... the mould weren't too excellent cos the one drop of thixo i put in the rubber to thicken it just made it solidify like f***, much like when i put in 10mls of it. That was a bit disappointing, it was not wanting to go quite into the eye sockets & stuff, but in spite of a few bubbles it come out ok.

With the rest of him, I've somehow smoothed him out all over, which isn't good really, cos now he's too smooth. Before, he was too rough. You cannae win this fight very easily. But i did bring the big gun to the studio today, the electric die grinder. The mofo in the cupboard, that is. When i start that baby up, its all over, red rover. Whatever i want to eliminate is annihilated pretty much as if it never was. Of course u need to direct that kind of power responsibly.

Early queens birthday monday

2010-06-14T07:58:00.000+10:00

Had a rough day yesterday it seems, cos everything hurts today. I think I worked too long, got very tired, and I was hella grumpy on the way home, tho I stopped off at the supermarket which means I was physically still able to function. Mentally not so sure judging by the food I bought, but anyway.

It's come time I think to make a list of all the broken bits of the sculpture and just go thru the list one at a time. Or at least it will be once I get the head on there. That's a big task...

So head first, then I make a list n work thru it every evening after work this week. Next Monday the foundry guys come to mould him in rubber n i guess I get a weekend in there but that is literally the last second... Think I'd rather tick things off each day and goodness me I might even get a moment off on the weekend to try to find a new car. My old car will run out of rego on the 30th n it's not gonna pass again. I think I'd like a van. Dunno, to tell the truth any vehicle will do if I don't have a large commission on the horizon. Any bubble car can carry bags of plaster. Long lengths of steel maybe not but I can ask them to cut em shorter. So ... Any car... Any car that'll carry stuff, and they all carry stuff. This probably requires more than an hour of weekend to choose.

New post..

2010-06-12T21:44:00.000+10:00

Hmm found out iPad can't modify a blog post cos u can't scroll inside a box. That's pretty crap.

Anyway.. What I was gonna pop on the end of that post was that the drawings I been doing actually suck, cos I tend to do em without bothering to hold the sketch pad straight. So they all angled and stretched out when u look at em. You got to look at them from the same angle as I made them, for them to look like a decent drawing. How freaking stupid.... Sometimes it feels like I don't need extra problems, I can make plenty trouble up for myself. :P

Anatomy

2010-06-12T20:56:00.000+10:00

I just been drawing some bodies while watching the footy on telly. Pleasantly surprised to find I can draw *loads* better just cos I been studying anatomical things so hard lately. And I can see very clearly what parts I do know from what parts I don't know. Im drawing all confident some areas and fudging others and its painfully obvious which. You'd think I'd know most of it by now, but shit I've only been studying it not much more than 20 years... Giz a break, eh. Reckon I've learned and cemented a lot in the past few weeks though. You can think you done 20 years by doing the same day over and over again, can't ya. Much like riding a motorbike. You can ride for 20 years the same commute, and then crash when you go thru the Nasho. You hain't done 20 yrs, u done the same yr 20 times.

Anyway I got the back, trunk, arms, some parts of the legs. Got them so i can quickly make a drawing out of the muscles. Don't have the arse sorted yet. Arse is difficult for some reason. I think there's some complicated stuff going on there when the pelvis and the torso and the legs all get twisted about. Hmm it's another challenge innit. Those muscles that come down the sides of the stomach are intriguing. (Is it possible to be geeky about muscles???) They give the profile of the lower torso really. How do they work...

Regards the head thing, the people came to see the progress, and they liked the clay head. It's had the surface ripped off it when the rubber mould come off it, but that somehow did give it a good useful surface texture. They like it better than the detailed one that come out of the mould. I agree though. So just some quick repairs to the clay head and I'm making another mould off it.

I'm 2 days into a 4 day weekend and not much has changed.. Scary. Got to get up and get on. My intention was to finish it this weekend, though I do have next weekend too. The Monday after that, the very next day, the foundry starts moulding. It's gonna happen in my studio cos the armature is groaning and flexing and getting some cracks in the plaster. Bit of a worry but if I can just get it finished without it falling to bits.. Fingers crossed.

Another long day

2010-06-08T20:28:00.000+10:00

Today I made the best wrinkle. Doing wrinkles is a major bit of making a life sized dude, cos in the end you can get a lot of movement n life out of your drapery. In fact yr drapery can hide a few good sins in there n distract from other dodgy bits. Or it can also totally ruin the whole thing, if u muck it up. And it can give it more sense of reality or it can jar your viewer right out of believing anything at all if u do it absolutely rubbish. Anyway this wrinkle just totally makes the left shoulder area n brings the whole back up to a pointy wrinkle n also it points in the direction of the dude's travel kinda sweetly. With a nice little curve in it. Way coolarama. Very pleased with that wrinkle.

I was pleasantly surprised with the whole back actually, when i accidentally walked round the back (i'm a professional sculptor though, really), and saw it's come good, I reckon. With the big footy number on it - love doing the numbers. It's all getting there. The head, maybe not quite there yet, but I did make one in clay n moulded it. I popped out a facsimile today but after a bit of a look I realize the mould were not set right n his nose got shortened n one eye was like sunken, and generally twas buggered. I poured another one n hope that one worked. See tomorrow when I pop it out of the mould.

Times a passin

2010-06-08T07:37:00.000+10:00

Have kinda lost track of things a bit. I know time is passing, cos it is, but it seems to be moving both fast and slow at the same time. Deadline is fast approaching, yet i seem to be spending many hours in the studio. I guess those two are not mutually exclusive. But there seems to be a lot of time packed into this deadline. Not that i feel like i got enough, but rather i'm fitting a lot in, u might say. Still know what day it is though - every day. Which in itself is unusual.

I tackled the head the other day. Sunday. Out of quite a long day I think i was standing there about 6 hours straight just flogging at this clay head. It didn't want to do anything useful for me but i beat it into submission by sheer force of will. If you put in the hours, many of em, it must get there. I had a sore left leg all night so i guess i had a left leaning sorta day. LOL. Otherwise it was unpolitical.

Days pass slower too when u live alone. I like it, but maybe just cos i'm not at home much, and if i was home all evening i might get depressed. But if that were the case then i'd go to the studio & make something, wouldn't i. Like i'm doing now. Or i'd sit about getting depressed. Nah i'd like to think i'd go to the studio. I think everybody should have a studio.

I would like to do more heads. Would like to get a model, but only if i can get one who'd be unoffended by my failure to make it look much like them. Though if they could sit there 6 hrs, maybe it might get there. I'd have to drug them i guess. There's a guy at work with a fantastic head, and he quite likes my sculptures, so maybe he'd be willing, but i should practice first before i ask him, cos i don't wanna waste that great head by maybe doing a substandard job. Gee listen to me. LOL i think i have a problem, Houston, my brain is stranded out there in the art nebula.

Speaking of f***ed up interpersonal relations.. not that we were.. i thought i'd ask this dude at work out for coffee.. i didn't have any ulterior motive particularly except that he does interesting things out of work time so i thought he might be good to get to know a bit better. I love to find people who have a life, u know. Cos u can always learn something from a fanatic ha ha. Anyway i think i scared him off. He's gone all weird. Damn shame, guess i mucked that up. It shouldn't have been that big a deal. I guess i creeped him out. Or something. I dunno. Maybe its the politics. I don't have any, but other people might. Think too much, not good for anybody.

Been downloading old Life episodes, season 2, of which i never caught any episodes. 'They probably never showed it here' would be a cynical thing to say. Weird zen dude with a past solves murders. They got to have an angle these days, simple alcoholic self hatred doesn't cut it for a detective anymore. I watch an episode whenever i need a lunchbreak in the studio. Having OSX on the little Dell min 10v is awesome. Its better than Win Xp in so many ways, but one important one is that the sound can crank to at least double the volume it used to, so i can actually hear the show even in a noisy studio environ :)

Side torso

2010-06-02T22:06:00.000+10:00

OK it looks like each day i'm working on one massive Problem & sorting it. This could be really good. Today i worked on the underneath torso to the side which is difficult to explain but since i can't show it to you either, you just have to believe me that it was really sucky. I cut away a ton & made it concave instead of convex. Awesome, now it looks 10 times better. Or at least, it doesn't stand out as grotesque anymore. Not longer does it have a dogs' balls torso side. So to speak.

Its not the chippin & filin really, its Deciding that u need to reverse an area, thats the hard work part.

I'm stronger now from all this hard work (not deciding, but rather filin) & i can carry a 20kg bag o plaster from the car into the studio without feeling anything, 2 weeks ago it was a back straining experience. Cool huh.

Speakin of studio, the studio is really quite well insulated downstairs (i don't understand why, cos i was expecting to freeze) & its not cold. Its amazing. We also were cool in summer down there. The poor painter types upstairs - heh - they are freezing their butts right off now, and they suffered horribly in the heat in summer. Downstairs, we may feel ignored and shunned, but actually - we rock :) We have climate control u wouldn't believe. And guess what - nobody's telling em upstairs hee hee.

More thigh

2010-06-01T21:54:00.000+10:00

Well i been working ridiculously hard lately. I think if i knew i was gonna redo the *entire* sculpture each time i did one... well i'd have to just do it wouldn't i. But it mightn't come as such a surprise each time...

Being at home alone has been good. I been able to work late as i want in the studio & not think about anything much. I don't eat much but work hard. I guess this is good, i feel good so there u go. Taking my vitamins & eating healthy stuff. The house is a tip, i have stuff everywhere, but i can find everything which is unusual. The constant rain over the past few weeks means i've worked out how & where to hang my various items of clothing so that each has the ideal drying position based on its shape & material. Jeans dry when hung upside down off a clip hanger attached to a belt tied to the top of the stairs. Very funny eh. Its all working well though.

The sculpture's been a bit of a wildly swinging pendulum, some days i dread going in there, cos its so wrong. But then i just force myself to go in there & hammer at it till i can't go on, like 8 or 10 hrs, & every evening when i can lift my head i go there from work. Somehow this effort is getting it there. Thats always the way. Put in the hours & u get there.

Tonight i got one thigh sorted. What a massive relief it is to just get one bit right. I have to admit i thought i had it right before. But you just move one thing, & then, well,. you got to move everything else to fit that, don't ya. Thats why i redo everything every time.

An auction

2010-05-22T20:04:00.000+10:00

I went to an auction today for a house. I didn't hold a whole lot of hope really, but, if everybody else forgot to come to the auction, etc. It was bad news in the paper for property, some real estate noob was saying the inner west had "died in the arse", it was dark & rainy, and i'd done all the prep for it so i was bloody well going to at least be there. I really liked the area this house was in. It had a swamp just out the back gate & you could see airplane tails moving way off in the distance over at the airport. It was way cool.

I had committed myself in my mind to staying in my irritating job for the rest of eternity to pay it off. Thats a huge step. I was ready. But there were 100 people there & it went for about 740K, a number that my wildest nightmares wouldn't provoke, yet here was reality (or what passes for it in sydney real estate). Sigh. The goon had been saying 550-590.... you don't even add 100K to that shite anymore do ya.

But you know, as every loser in creation has ever repeated ad pukeum: it was a good experience, i'm glad i tried, i learned something. Bleah.

Anyway... i bought a rocking chair up the street at a garage sale, so the trip was not entirely wasted.

I'm alone at home now for a month. I started out well, i went shopping & made a lovely big stirfry that will last two days. Healthy. Nutritious. A good start that will probably deteriorate to 2 minute noodles spiced with frozen peas by the end of week 1... but like if u don't START good then you're quitting before u begin.

A visit from the studio cat

2010-05-20T21:50:00.000+10:00

We have a studio cat that lives about the studios. I almost never see her but this evening she came & visited me. She hadn't been in my studio before, so she travelled all around & under everything & negotiated the chicken wire trap & even tried to go under the tarp taped on the floor. She regarded the large man sculpture with great caution & in a very different way to anything else. I think she thought it was a very weird very still person. When she passed by under its gaze she scuttled low on the ground. Didn't stop her though she soon worked out it was not moving. She's still kitten like & played with my tape measure & bounced her paws off the metal rod i was using to make a new arm for the big dude. I cut off his left arm cos it was wrong & it wasn't moving. No matter how much i hurt myself trying to bend that arm, it weren't going anyplace. There's another person coming for a viewing tomorrow, but i'd rather it had no arm than a bad arm, i think thats better really. I adjusted its eyes too. Thats kinda important.

I'm pretty well realising my new surform is a load of shite. What a shame. I took one back already cos a piece broke off it in 3 strokes. Now this second one has only about half as many teeth that are sharp as what its meant to have. Its just about uncontrollable. U dunno what you gonna get when u run that over something. It'll either do nothing, or gouge a stonking great rip in it, and anything in between based on what bit is in contact, its all different all over the place in either the x or y axis if u get my drift.

F*** it - whatever happened to quality control? I got the EXACT same one 2 years ago & its still working, if slightly blunter. I only got this one cos i wanted to have a spare. Was that hubris? Was i asking too much of the universe? I need to find someone who sells the Stanley version & not this shitty brand - which i would mention the name of in order to blacken its rep, but i've forgotten it. They're yellow n black, anyway.

Hmm i just re-read that & it seems a little heated for a simple tool review. But its a really important tool ok!!! And you know i don't have a life. The camera man asked me yesterday how did i do a FT job & the sculpture & i said i just don't have a life. None, nothing at all. So a SURFORM is really important, man, ok! LOL

Tv tv

2010-05-19T19:58:00.002+10:00

Today the dude himself was coming to the studio & he was going to check out the sculpture's progress.

He told me what was wrong with the arms & that. He said he wouldn't really move like that, which is fairinuff, cos he'd know. But then he looked at the little maquette & he said that was fine. So the problem was in how i'd interpreted that & we worked out what that was. One arm was pointing in the wrong direction. Typical i had made such a damn complicated pose that i couldn't understand it myself. But like hey whats the point of doing something easy.

I told him stories of Egyptian travels while we sat around waiting for the tv guys. There is one thing you can get from a nightmare trip like going to egypt, & that is spellbinding stories of horror. Heh.

The tv crew & presenter turned up to do a piece on the making of. I hadn't get enough notice to get my hair cut or even get the studio trackie dacks laundered. So i kept on my street clothes for the tv stuff. It went quite well i talked good & they asked good questions so it was easy. The only problem is that i'm in it, but then so's the subject & he's cool. Luckily the head of the sculpture comes off & on, & that novelty's probably going to be a feature of the film.

They're gonna film at the foundry too & all that later & then show it on the day of the unveiling, on telly. The cameraman knew my sculptures already & he liked em :) How cool is that.

Anyway... i been working very hard on this sculpture lately. Bin a while since i blogged but i been flogging the work pretty hard. Its about half way there. the socks are good. The head looks like the dude on one side & not on the other. But thats pretty good cos usually it doesn't work till about version #3. This guy's got an easy head! About time i got one like that :)

An inch or 3 off all over

2010-05-09T20:24:00.004+10:00

Hm righto so i got started early today. Its sunday, a traditional very quiet day at the studios. I dunno why.. you'd think people would "art" on the weekend a lot more than they seem to do. Anyway its usually dead quiet there on a sundy & i park my bike behind a suddenly rhomboid set of drawers. I guess something happened to em last night during the BBQ party cos i'm pretty sure they were straight square yesterday. No idea why there is a set of drawers in the driveway but its one of many things i don't understand there & like all tedious mysteries, a little goes a long way & after a while u only see them when they change shape.

I had printed up a ton of photos of my subject in his prime & blutacked them up. Yes i HAD looked at em earlier, but since then i'd been studying the photos i took of him when i met him a few weeks ago. I was kinda dismayed to see that he had been hella skinny in his playing days, not so much the muscular hunk i was making, sadly. Bloody hell thats annoying. I had met the guy, and he seemed very fit & gorgeous. Now i find out he was fitter and much skinnier (tho still gorgeous).

Oh dear it'll be an inch or 3 off all over now, i guess. Oy... :(

Mum sez, i should never meet them til i finish. Feel she is right. There must be a great advantage to seeing them, but so far its not really been the case with the sculptures... that its not done much more than confuse me. Not what i'd expect. I guess what i'm making is someone from history not reality. So seeing the reality is gonna be like red herring.

Enjoyed my ride home. Bike is lovely. So high up.. its quite a surprise when i can hardly reach the ground at the stop lights. But when i'm sailing along all high up its almost like flying. And then standing up is cool too. Likely to fall on my nose doing that but its great fun.

Then when i got home i need to do the shopping. I drove my car out & it was rammed home instantly how dreadful that car is. There's nothing like 2 days riding on good suspension to make u realise that the characteristic entertaining wibble your car does is actually worn out shocks with flat tyres wallowing under the hideous dead weight of a huge rusted steel shell and its totally rooted & yer lucky yr wheels don't fall off.

Babysitting & Biking

2010-05-08T19:15:00.000+10:00

Today was a different sorta day to what i was expecting. i got new tyres put on the motobike & that took til 2.30 down at the bike shop cos everybody likes a chat. I chatted with a number of new people i'd never met before. Bikes are so great for that. It matters not what u look like yourself but if you have a bike there will always be people happy to talk to ya & really connect with ya. They really should tell all awkward young kiddies this fact... its a marvellous thing.

There is a retarded teenage kid who hangs around the bike shop lately. He's very nice & likes to help. Its a real worry. He's so helpful he had somebody ride their bike up onto the bike platform & he clamped it in with the handle, when nobody else was out the back. He did a nice job of clamping it but nobody rides up onto the platform on their 20K motorbike, its oily & slippery steel. They always push em up by hand. And he only wanted a pink slip anyway he wasn't needing any work done on it. It make yer blood run cold what could happen if this rider slipped in some oil & it all went down off the platform. If the rider survived to blame somebody, who's fault is that? Its one of them things, where by being nice to someone, the whole bike shop could get its ass sued right off it. It is a difficult thing. Its kinda like babysitting - kids are hard work.

It turn out my new bike is quite impressive to people who know about such things. I knew the previous owner had loved it & kept it immaculate & added a few things but apparently it don't get any better than what he's done to it. I can't take any credit for it of course, but its way cool to know its so awesome. And it is awesome, with the trailwings on it & the knobbys off it, it rides tons better on the road. It was like riding on blobs before, which it was. Now its like riding on real tyres. Cool.

I rode to the studio & carefully parked it at the front door behind the trees. I thought that was nicely outta the way.

I did sweet FA on the sculpture, i got sucked into a discussion about art in the next door studio & hours passed, my cup of tea got ice cold, and darkness began to fall. I started to realise there was a party happening upstairs too. Lots of little kids were coming down & i was having to chase em all out of my studio cos they kept going in to find things & empty my buckets etc. One little girl come up & asked me, she wanted to play with wax like before, she said. I fobbed her off by saying i put all my wax away cos i was using plaster now. Them kids are cute n all but i needed to get some work done & they really suck away your life force in that situation. And there was so many of em i could see my whole studio overrun within moments. All them little kids look the same to me really but obviously i met this one before. I'll probably recognize her next time... i'm not a complete freak, i hope.

I guess this is another situation of babysitting being hard work & there being more to it than just letting them do what they wanna.

I gradually came to realise my motorbike was now parked in the absolute middle of a party with BBQ, tables of food, loud pumping music, DJ, decorations, @40 children & many adults. Geez. I was gonna have to ride thru a frikkin party to escape...

Luckily the bike is awesome & i actually can ride, & regardless of how crap i may be, at least i been doing it for 20 years. So i didn't embarrass myself by falling off it or crashing into the BBQ as i rode thru the party & slipped thru a 6 inch gap between the BBQ & a stack of pallets. The little girl wanted a ride. I asked her if she had a hat cos she couldn't ride without a hat.

I'm getting good at fobbin this kid off..... LOL.

It was a good day of talking to people, if totally unproductive. Tomorrow i start EARLY & get loads done. Time's short.

New bloke

2010-05-02T21:00:00.000+10:00

The new bloke had a good day. They work like that, u will have a crap day or 20 & despair that u ever gonna get anywhere, then if you're lucky you get a good day where u get the feller looking like a feller. Thanks goodness.

I did this one different to usual, i used about 8 cans of expanding foam to build up a figure on an armature. I made the steel armature based on the little twiggy figure i made out of kebab stix, then i liquid nailed some polystyrene sheet pieces on to fatten it up a bit & give something for the expanding foam to stick onto. Then i built him out of puffy foam. Cool huh. I can't make dust in the studio so i set to make him out of foam, then. 99% foam with a thin coating of something on top. I seem to have gone with plaster for the thin coating & i'm happy with that.

I thought the foam might be a bit expensive to blow thru, but its 15 bucks a can & i'm sure i go thru at least 7 bags of plaster per figure at about 17 a bag... hmm yeah so well it is more expensive maybe, if i use the spare can i still got... but its much EASIER to use, OK... saves loads of time too. Just got to be patient enough to get it all carved & sorted out dead right before adding the skin of plaster, else the skin of plaster is gonna be inches thick & you'll have to cut bits off etc, & all in all, a pain in the butt.

Reckon i had a pile of puffy offcuts about the size of a shetland pony on the ground & that classily & transparently segways into the next sculpture which will be a horse made out of puffy foam. Yes i really like puffy foam. Well i did, till some bloody studio denizen tell me its horrifically toxic. Blah. Its not affected me yet 'tall.

Hoppin to the Berra

2010-04-19T21:24:00.000+10:00

I went off to Canberra to present a proposal for a sculpture. I think i did 100 times better than last time, but really when they ask u a question like how is this gonna complement the architecture, which doesn’t yet exist except in some photocopied pictures, well what can u say really. Besides, they want a particular object made, to look like wot it does. So if it doesn’t really suit any architecture except the bottom of a swamp, well.. what can u say then eh. I just said it will have a strong clean silhouette.

Besides that nervous-making stuff, i went & saw some glassblowing at the Glassworks. I can’t get over glass, its so amazing. I reckon if i had time i’d be into it. I bet it takes ages to learn how to do it beautiful, but anyway i’d still like to have a go. The cool thing is you CAN have a go at the Glassworks. Well if u are in the area. Normally i’m not.

I learned a few things while i was away. When u drive a lot, u cogitate & stew on things a bit & eventually the fluff blows away & little hard rocklike truths fall out. Some of the little truths i discovered were:

1) There is nothing like trying to drive at night in an unknown place to show u just how bad u need that eye operation.

2) ..... bugger... I can’t remember the rest. I think there were 3 main points. Hm. Maybe they will come to me next time i'm thataway, & i might even WRITE EM DOWN.

I stayed overnite at the usual overpriced place. I keep saying i won’t do it again & then i just go there anyway cos i know it & its got a real good bookshop across the rd. Next time its Formula1 or summink...for sure... anyway i went for a walk in town in the evening, now my foot is good & i feel like walking (thank g-d). Its a funny town its kinda unformed & alien. There was a street of just snow gear shops. I finally settled on pizza for tea & while i was waiting there a large group of young men walked past only in underpants with socks stuffed down the front & names written on the back. They strategically pantsed each other just as they drew level with the pizzeria as it was the only lit & peopled premises in the whole street.

There should be a lot more of this, and less of the drinking, for young people.

The next morning the hotel fire alarm went off & we all got evacuated at 6.50am. The hotel was full too so there was about 100 ppl all standing out with bad hair on the grass. I did the wrong thing & packed my bags & carried them out, cos from my previous fire alarm experience we could be standing outside for hours. I didn’t wanna spend the day standing out here thanks, on my one free half day in Canberra.

But it was over soon & they offered us a free brekky in the nice dining room. Very classy.

Then i spent the weekend in the studio & worked on the life sized armature welding. I made a little stick version this time, out of those very handy kebab skewers (A new studio staple - is there nothing they can't do???). I put the maquette on the desk & got the angles right in the kebab stix held together with little blobs of wax, next to it. Then i made the life sized using my own measurements for arms & legs & that, and the angles off the kebab armature & there u bloody well go. I found this a really good way to do it & i think i got the armature pretty much sorted right out. I did waste a lot of time watching Bones on a laptop tho & also got visitors both days. But i like visitors & i like Bones so well its all a matter of self discipline, which of i ain't got none. Still, did get some progress, certainly. If it weren't a rush job again i'd be very pleased with how far i got. Its just the way it is when they pay u to do stuff i guess.

Back at day job work today. Not happy about it. Something's got to change.

I wrote this in the Test WebCT page (somewhat inspired by seeing Winston Churchill on the latest Dr Who yesterdy):

Never before has so much been done, for no apparent reason, for a pack of whingeing tards, for no visible gain nor thanks.

Yet as we stand here shaking gently on the dawn of a new week, we give thanks that they do continue to pay us. For without that we are but leafs in the wind, just tatters on the flag.

And lo, we can also be grateful for our ICT morning teas, i've personally never seen one, but hear they are wonderful indeed.

A new week brings with it the bracing challenge of a new age. A new age of streamlining, of improvements and of new procedures that excite the gristle encrusted soul particles of every broken down clapped out employee.

Thusly, we ride the continuum of change that envelops our glorious silver rimmed ICT - into the new week!

Proposed Presentation

2010-04-13T21:42:00.000+10:00

OK well i feel, for the first time in forever that i can remember, that i'm actually prepared for this presentation on thurs. I got to travel to the capital & give a blurb in the hope of getting a job making a sculpture. Of course as usual its all confidential so sadly i won't go into details but u know who u are etc. Anyway this time yes i have a Powerpoint, yes i have ONE model, and a fully realised very simple straightforward yet slightly witty Idea. So i'm happy about that.

The life sized man tho well its progress has been stopped completely while i got ready for this other thing & perhaps that is a bad thing. Anyway i'm still stumped at how on earth i'm gonna make it in this new studio, like out of what material. I'm almost even falling into the idea of plasticene. i really hate the lack of fightback it has & i see many horrible sculptures from it. But it doesn't need to have the last word does it. After all its up to me to beat it into submission.

Anway i won't be taking a lovely little holiday in the capital i will be coming more or less back the next day & get back to work on life sized dude.

Am really thinking my days in my real waged job are coming to a close. i realised today that used to enjoy the job a bit, it had its moments & was generally good. But i struggle to remember when i had fun at work last or hell even did anything slightly interesting. I feel like i have forgotten how to learn new things as when i need to, it is usually under great stress & u never learn anything properly under great stress do ya. Not when u have other stresses waiting on ya too. So get a clue fast, make a guess, hack it together & u may never even know what happened but you're already hacking something else so no time to think.

Not good, not sustainable either. The Xmas rush sucked severely but we thought we'd get a rest later. Not gonna though eh. It never ends, there is always some asshole causing trouble.

.

New one starting

2010-04-03T21:46:00.000+11:00

Started making the armature for the next one. I'm using an old base on wheels i used once or twice before, so i needed to grind off the worst of the rust & grease the wheel bearings & check the welds aren't rusted thru. I'd had to cut it up to fit it in the car to take it to the studio, so i then had to weld it back together. So when i felt hey an achievement to get those bits welded on straight, i suddenly realised it wasn't, cos i'd bloody cut it off myself. Dang nab it.
Then painted it in french blue cos i got a tin of that & its a way cool colour to cover rust & bare steel.
Tomorrow i'm going to actually make the armature of the actual figure. So all that preamble was just getting started really. Hm.

Sadly the amount of toxic smoke & dust i managed to manufacture in that airtight room from a simple bit of grinding & welding makes me think doing plaster work in here is a bad bad idea. Kinda sad about that.

I'm negotiating for a larger studio, which would be great. Doing one thing at a time is ok in here but if i want to do wax & clay modelling as well, then there ain't enough room really. I don't think the dust thing is gonna be any easier tho in a bigger room, there's still not much air.

Make mag has a lot to answer for

2010-03-28T23:20:00.005+11:00

Make mag... beloved of geekery everywhere it is an icon of logic in a sea of chaff & bondi cigars. Yet... there is a dark side.

And that dark side showed itself lately round the traps. Picture an art show...

Item #1: a 44 gallon drum.
Item #2: a fucked-in-sorrow feedback loop amplified to tooth-drilling volume.
Item #3: some corn flour in water.
Yes you guessed it... they did that science experiment that is so well known that they prolly do it in primary school. And have a flamin guess. They called it Art. FFS.
And yes it was switched on ALL FUCKING DAY while i was trying to work in my studio.
And what is saddest of saddery, it didn't actually make the cornflour do anything. So it didn't even Work.

Please, get a 3rd grade kid in to do it right. And realise that if u found it on the internet on You Tube, then so can everybody else. And its not art unless there's a FLAMIN POINT TO IT.

Unless the point was to annoy the living fuck out of everybody in earshot. Hell, they should put it in the Archibald.

Sex & the sculpture

2010-03-23T21:52:00.003+11:00

Yesterday decided i had a crush on a bloke at work. I guess it was all the testosterone around the place lately what with the footballers & all the hard work we been doing & he does have a cute butt/broad shoulders combo which gets me every time. A hangover from the first BF back in the mists of time who was a seriously gorgeous hunk of a bloke & there u are, forever reverting whenever u drop a hat.

Anyway it has worn off already, like a 12 hr virus. But it was way cool that i took that energy & went to the studio after work & did some sculpture & put on some music & worked very hard & humming along to the mp3z & made some work. Generally if u need an energy boost & help to concentrate then a bit of infatuation will do it for ya. I must admit to not being stirred by anybody in flamin ages i spose i just been working too hard for too long to care about anything much, but a couple of slower days at work & there you go the mind starts to wander.

The Arts work better with sex involved, generally. Like where would rock n roll be if the blokes in their codpieces & mascara weren't trying to get laid? Like where would any artistic endeavour come from if not originally to attract attention? With rock n roll it even works LOL.
Heh... sculpture... pfft. Maybe i'll choose better in the next life or summink.

A charming interlude

2010-03-17T22:28:00.002+11:00

A charming interlude in an otherwise mcfucked day full of disaster soak-up & abasement before IT-injured lecturers baying for our filthy silicon laced blood, was a special lunchbreak: meeting with the subject of next sculpture. A football player, taking off his shirt in the old unused server admin room at work for me so i could take some research snapshots of a particular pose. He did half an hour of football passing using a box of tissues for a footy. My, what pecs u have... and arms like tree trunks wth huge veins & rather entertaining muscle definition. I love anatomy, whoo boy. And i think a gorgeous bloke with his shirt off is much like a joy forever. If only i had a lunchbreak like this every day, i could probably get thru the work day easier, and crack a smile at least sometimes.

A productive weekend

2010-03-07T21:36:00.006+11:00

That light at the end of the tunnel was a train coming. So work is still arse. But i have to admit it helps to crystalize the desire to be a real artist.

But this weekend i was a real artist! I did some waxing & some plaster. Even though i had to run into work briefly & had a visit from a friend with 2 insane children, i still managed it! I made a footballer, a speed skater & a dragonesque bunyip out of wax. Then i made a large head out of plaster. Dunno if thats gonna work out but its kinda cool to make something that big. Are details still details if they are really BIG?

Been doing wax work in the studio. I went in 8am both days. I never been able to work on wax before in the morning but cos its quiet there then, its been coming along sweet. Using the rice cooker to melt wax is a new way too, its faster to get started than using a hot water bottle to soften the wax. So now i have a better System.

Bin a while

2010-03-01T21:43:00.003+11:00

Bin a bit quiet lately as the day job been horrendous. Can see light at the end of tunnel now as i got to go home only 10 minutes after usual time. Hooray. The light may yet turn into mirage but i have a glimmer of hope.

We just have to push on & its too late to say management fucked us over totally by lumbering us with this stuff to do or that we should have fought back cos it couldn't be done. Now we just got to keep hacking at it til it dies or we do. Like chewing like hell what management have bit off for ya. Sure along the way we will all get RSI & respiritry infections & rashes & our homelife will suffer greatly marriages break up kids start takin drugs pets starve.

And for what. Well yeah don't go there oK.

too much moaning

2010-02-13T21:47:00.003+11:00

Sorry bout the fart post, universe. i promised to whinge less this yr, n tryin to hold to it. i'm not depressed or nothin, just not feelin a whole lotta progress with important things. Workin real hard for work just seems like a rat on a treadmill & truly it have the same effect on the world. Sometimes u gotta wait & things come good. I've always bin patient. Bein in ma 40's now but, it doesn't behoove me all that much to hang about waitin too much bloody longer tho, eh. Cripes if i don't get things shiftin soon i'll be too weak w old age to ever get em moving. Been reading Lis Frinks Biography. Its inspired me to think about going to England & checkin that out. The arts council mob got a new residency in liverpool & nobody much went for it last year, cos like who wants to go there, eh? But now i do wanna go there & maybe i got a chance this next time to apply. i also got a mate moving to wales sometime in the next yr or so & that makes it easier, having a local friend. i mean wales isn't england (or is it? wot?) but he's moving to the bit o wales thats nearest to london, so thats nice. Its good but, England, they speak da english there, thats a total bonus eh.

A fart at dawn

2010-02-10T21:47:00.003+11:00

A friend once told me that during a particularly bad stretch in his life, the only enjoyment he got for months was to smell his own fart occasionally. Well i feel a bit like that these days, except since i'm a girl & girls don't fart i have even less fun than that. However, i reckon i'm amazinly lucky really & if i just survive this patch (probably by quittin my job) i will be havin more actual fun someday..

Been researchin this Frink dame (yep she was a Dame in actual fact). Found a great book in the library her catalog raisonne whch has nothing to do with breakfast cereal but has loads of pictures of her work in it & some words about it all including from herself. She had a way fascinating childhood, for e.g. bein a teen at the end of the war & bombers on fire crashing about the place, & a great life with loads of acclaim & like 3 husbands or summink. Like, how cool would it be do u think if the Tate Gallery bought yer first exhibited work? Most ppl these days would go straight out & get a cocaine habit once they got established like that but she had the strength o character to just keep doing brilliant sculptures thereafter for the rest o her life.

(Sadly this type o thing could never happen to anybloody in sydney since the AGNSW never ever buys any sculpture.

But hell if it saves just 1 child-like art student....)

Sunday evening

2010-02-07T18:04:00.011+11:00

I'm all showered & wearing my celebration shirt, the thai one, all pillowed up on my bed, typing this thru the magic of wifi: humdullah, i have finished the sculpture! Humdullah means as G-d wills it or summink similar. Its what my sister said when i announced the status of the project... :)

The head was stuck on alright, i patched the cracks, strengthened it, haired it, tarted it all up real nice all over, making accents with the great new flexible plastering blade with teeth. Its a bit of extra texture on this one, a little more than usual. Its way cool how you can spend months building up all the forms & chunks & then in one day bring them all together with a bit of drawing on the surface. Its almost a "Doh" moment. Ah, its finished-looking now. Sweet!

i think it helped a lot that i took last weekend off. I must remember that.. you get your strength back & a fresher outlook. You can be objective about what needs doing then & just do it. Work life balance bleat bleat.

Lately I been all inspired by a pair of 2 minute podcasts about Elizabeth Frink. She used to do direct plaster too. She was real big on rough texture. The podcasts say she used to turn bright lights on her sculpture at night & move em round to see the textures well. She hacked at em with chisels & rasps. I bet she'd go off if she had some of the power tools i got. I met her many yrs ago, when i was a bright young unformed fart student - she was havin a show at David Jones in town & she rung the art schools to make sure there were some students there so it wouldn't be too stuck up. She wore a gold lame shirt i remember, looked like a bloody big glomesh handbag material shirt, which was lke real smart cos it meant *everybody* knew who the artist of the evening was. She weren't gonna get lost in the crowd. She said hello to me :) And now i'm older i know what i would have said to her, but she's been dead a while now, so.. but you get that. There were some real nice works there particularly some horses that even then inspired me & there were a couple of huge bronze heads which i never really liked a whole lot, but lookin back, bloody hell - what a massive job! To make and to cast, and to carry upstairs into David Jones.

September bekons

2010-02-06T13:45:00.009+11:00

Work is nuts we are doing the final stretch to get much labs ready for semester 1 & its long hours every day. we are promised time off in loo eventually which is good for me. Hard work tho. Its toughening me up tho which is good.

Decided to have a show in September at this little gallery who asked me. Its cool there are no strings attached. They'll earn a nice chunk if some get sold & i'll have fun. We negotiated that i can take my expenses off before the commission gets taken, which is right nice eh. Had some choices of date, decided sept rather than june cos its really too much to do it for june, sadly. Gonna be making some Awesome work intend it to be the best i ever did & bigger ones. I got 2 windows to put nice big tall ones in & then you need a couple of nice big/medium sized flatter ones inside & the rest can be smaller but still incredibly spectacular. LOL. Well if you start ambitious u can scale down later, i always do... :P

Anyway its all very exciting. Been doing lots of drawing.

Today i was back on the big man to finish it this weekend. Its had a date extension of about 3 months, they would rather everybody agree & be happy than just run it thru on time, which is real good. Today i detailed the clothes with a cutting blade on the grinder & a cool new flexible plaster slathering blade with teeth, & cut off his head to put a tweak in his neck so his heads a bit crookeder. By golly the bastard head was on there good, it took me over an hour just to dislodge the thing. I remembered then that i'd stuck a steel square tube up to keep it on. Ah yes that is hard to remove... I did the usual hold the head in place while the plaster sets business. Its a bit gruelling on a miserable rainy day i was gettin wet & pushin hard on his forehead just so for like 20 or 30 mins waiting for the plaster to set. Then it didn't work... i ended up doing this 3 bloody times it damn near kilt me. By the end i'd got my second wind tho & if not for a sudden spasm of "had enough" pain thru my arm i woulda been orright but then i gave it away for a bit cos i need that arm. It did set in the end with just a 2mm droop crack & i'll see if thats a real crack tomorrow when i pull on it, but for now i leave that thing. its still on the metal tube so hopefully it won't fall off.

Bad news good news

2010-01-29T22:00:00.006+11:00

Its been very sad to watch the dissolution of a great workplace into a hovel. Half my work friends have left now & the other half hate working here & most want to go.

It used to be a fun place to work, and i'm glad i saw that for a while, cos you don't see that much. I mean you can have fun with your fellow peons in a lot of jobs sort of in spite of things, like in most jobs where your boss sucks, but here even the managers used to be great. Wow respect from a manager as if you were a real person. Awesome concept. Now we have ghost whispy jobsworth bosses, n workers trying like rudderless boats to row thru the morass that is their lot since they changed everything. You can tell the people who are still trying by the wide eyed desperate look they have.

One a positive note i was havin a chatter up the closest possible gallery to work yesterday at lunchtime, buying some tools actually, started chattin, anyway to cut a along story short they have offered me a show. Nice eh. Kinda exciting really. Anyway i need to revisit them for a proper discussion with all sorts of numbers 'n that in it, so if that sux then it could all come to naught, but on the other hand it could be a wonderful opportunity. Could even do some abstract kinda work now, cos they often show ceramics, so their clientele is used to the materials being as loud as the form, so ta speak. They also like figurative work there cos seen a lot of it in their past shows.

Anyway its worth a chat next week when i got a lunchtime to walk back up there. It is funny though i have a history of getting a gallery thats across the road from whatever job i have at the time etc there must be some explanation for it but whatever it is, its bloody convenient anyway.

Regards the current life sized man, well they are seeing theres issues & the date for delivery is put way into the future now, June or summink. This is both good n bad, i sure as f*** don't want it hangin round that long, but of course its already too late for it to get installed by march so its just as well innit.

They came over today, well some of em, cos they got stuck in traffic & it was all a bit crap really & only some of em made it at all & some had to leave before the others arrived & so the full discussion i need from everybody i still hain't got, but they did all try very hard & we will have to all try again next week too... But anyway the few ppl who did chat about it were v positive & the prob is not with my sculpture it is rather with ppl's expectations & they all got to get to discussin them & agreeing with each other & then telling me what they really really want & then i can just do it eh.

Me n a Prius

2010-01-21T17:09:00.006+11:00

Today i loaned a Prius, one of them electric hybrid cars. They have a slew of em available & i found out how to request one. I been spending the week walking everywhere & while its been great for my health its a total waste of time when we got so little time to spare. Tho it took me 20 mins to work out HTF to get it started, and other 5 to find the handbrake (hint u don't use your hand!) so that was a bit counter prod. Fun little thing tho it was quite nice to drive once u sussed it out. Just like a car :) I like wheeled things.

I was first trying to gain access to the 2 labs i had failed to gain access to the day before. This was pretty stupid waste of time but this what happens when someone goes on leave & u get to come to actual grips with the rotting corpse u have been handed, & that bagful of loose keys u grabbed from their desk drawer don't save your ass at all. Anyway after some serious emailing i got some pin code for a lab & finally (not easily at all, but i don't wanna bore u too bad) got in to discover - one pc & no working network whatsoever. The really great bit was that there was a back door... that was unlocked... that i had actually walked into yesterday, but it'd been really dark in there yesty & i had sorta barely seen thru the darkness that there were empty desks, with some comms cabinets LEDs flickering up the back, so why would it enter my mind this was a lab... I would say a solid 4 hrs work (and walk) over 2 days got me into this unlocked unlab. Priceless.

I found a person who knew vaguely about this lab, and she told me the real person was on holidays, but she went looking for the pc's. I didn't really want her to go looking for the pc's, cos i wasn't gonna do anything with them anyways, i just wanted her to produce the key to the other lab i needed. I did say this, a few times, but we traipsed across the faculty & got to a building with a sign on the door, Bees have escaped into this building, do not enter for 48 hrs. She let me stay outside. She came out, no, there's no computers in there. Good thing too - what was i gonna do with em.. prolly full a bees.

After various detours she got the key. Finally got into that 2nd lab - i wasn't bloody going to quit before i got in there. My goal for today was to kick these 2 labs in the guts. Success. Sorta. I did get in, but kicking guts was problematic. Anyway the bees, the prius & the pinpad non-lab were the highlights of my week, and all happened on the same day!

Hard

2010-01-18T21:51:00.002+11:00

Finding it really hard to address this sculpture. Need a week off. I worked all weekend on it, and it did improve, but the face is now like beyond me being able to see it at all. I think this is what happens to my work, in the end. In the end it gets to a point where i can't stand to work on it one more second & thats it, its finished. Not ideal i guess. And its certainly not how i finish my own work. Tho with my own work i finish it much earlier & leave it half done & i like it like that. When u work for other people u try to make it more perfect cos well they are paying for it it better be excellent.

Anyway if i had my druthers i'd have a week off then take a long look as if it were fresh n new & then modify & then another week off etc. Perfect world that would be but we don't live there, & here is always deadlines.

Work is arse. But i'm getting fitter walking many miles to different labs. i now have an offsider to suffer along with me. Not sure why.

Saturday

2010-01-16T22:22:00.003+11:00

Hey another saturday has visited upon us. Today was my birthday i did get an awesome broom as i had hinted really hard about :) Its a wonderful thing to have a good tool. I can sweep the carport out in 5 strokes. Its very satisfying.

Today I rung the dude with the results of the commissioners' viewpoint from the other day & told him he needs to look 17 in this sculpture. He was less than impressed for some reason even though i said it very tactfully i think, i left a lot out. But hell i have never been tactful so maybe someone else may have said it better. He was also coming back to the shoulder business. He been thinking it needs to have shoulder-head situation "rising up" kinda thing. He was pretty sure about this before, tho he seemed to be happy enough with the changes i made earlier, but he's decided not, now. I can't really see it in the photos like he sees it. To me it looks like a trick of perspective in the picture, and it comes from the legs more than the shoulders really... but thats just what think i see, cos i don't really understand it. Anyway today i was stumped again cos he seems to really want this. And most of the main changes he's wanted have been positive & improved it heaps. So anyway i went all 'lateral thinkin' on it's ass, & decided to lift the thing at the front by the base & place it on my 2 Wood Blocks. Bobs yer uncle its all different now, it rises outta the ground more. I set to levelling out the base, & cut off the back foot & put a bend n the back leg & when i get that sorted out proper she'll be right. It will be more powerful like this. I am happy i feel some Progress in positive direction. Even tho this will take some time, it will be better so its worth it.

Still working on the face too tho so we'll see. Gotta get it done tomorrow - another viewing is tuesday.

Verdict: Fail

2010-01-13T21:00:00.002+11:00

Today sucked. I had the morning from hell in the computer labs trying to install some dongle licence files on half finished computers. Some program called Wonderware which is impossible to pronounce as anything else but Underware & while it may be the prog of choice for reactor engineers its dongle userfriendliness leaves somthing to be desired in a lab situation where they're all wired in to avoid em getting nicked. A morn of all the worst excesses of user irritation that Windows can provide with slow logins, flickin off USB drives & group policy fails making everything stuff up all over the place. When u got to do so many of em it crumbles away your heart & soul.

I went & had a coffee when i couldn't stand another moment. I went to the new building where they had a cafe. There was the usual windtunnel effect u get in new buildings & the furniture was moving past me as i sat there holding down my macaroon & cappachino. The girl come out & put it all back but it was scraping back along on the concrete before she got back in the door. It was pretty funny really but i was too stressed. Sadly the coffee made me more stressed & i went back into the lab feelin worse than when i left, which is unusual. That was a long long morning then.

I was worryin cos the commissioners were coming this arvo. They kept slipping the time earlier by 15 mins each time they confirmed it so that i was stressing out that i wouldn't even get home before they did. Anyway i did, at 80kmh, 5 mins to spare...

Verdict... they said he looks too old. They want him young like 17 or so. I thought i'd took at least 50 yrs off him but there u go. Studying the old feller was maybe the last thing i shoulda ever done. They said they'd rather i'd not met him til after i finished it! Well thats debatable cos i reckon u can always learn *something* from meeting yer subject. But well yeah it has sure caused me LOADS of problems. But i dunno if i'd do it different next time.

So i'll be working thru my birthday. Not happy cat.

Sign of the time

2010-01-12T21:32:00.003+11:00

I found a "Please Queue Here" sign, on a pile of crap for neighborhood junk day. The possibilities!

I stuck his head on tonight. I finished it in darkess, so let's see how scary it is tomorrow. Its my birthday on the weekend but i guess i'll be working thru it. Damn it. This is really starting to wear on me. I'm getting sick again, today at work i went & laid on the desks in the room next door, where the windows server guys used to work, its dark & empty there now. So i had a nap at lunchtime. Its kinda good in a way, cos sometimes u need a nap for lunch & we never had a place to go do that before, not that was inside. Every sharp edge has a silver line then, or what. I was gifted (after a little prompting) with a lovely device from there, it is a ridiculously long power board with about 20 or more sockets on it. Its off a server chassis & it bloody funny. There are a couple under the desks there. There is such a thing as a server geek joke you can hold in your hand :)

Still intrigued

2010-01-11T13:37:00.006+11:00

I'm still intrigued by Henry Moore & his pebbles. I feel cheated somehow, that none of the pebbles i've ever found look anything like the extraordinary little hollowed out blobular sculptures he used to find all over the beach when he went to the sea side every year. I was just reading that he used to see & be excited by different shapes every year, like he'd get obsessed with one type of shape. But if he sat down with a pile of em he would see new things there that he liked. Well, der. I mean is the ability to put into words the bleedin obvious a sign of genius? Perhaps it is.
I'm not bagging him... i can see from that how its sposed to be, you know. Simple truths are the real ones, usually. And whats more simple than making things/being a sculptor. It should be a fantastically less difficult thing than i'm making it into, thats for sure. ;)
New years resolution #2: make it easier.

I wonder what beach had those pebbles?

Dawgs

2010-01-10T21:25:00.003+11:00

Well i'm feelin a bit like a dead dog - or something deader - but i think i've done the FACE at last. I've spent so much time on this lately that its like its my sentence.
The dude came yesterday & he still didn't see himself in there. Which is cool, cos i didn't think he was there either. But today i sat down & worked for 6 hrs straight on a new clay head & i finally got the bastard. Instead of studying the dude's head as it is now, like i been doing, which is not working at all, i took all the studying i done of his current head & used a 50 yr old photo. so it was a mix of what shape his skull is in reality & what he looked like back in the day. Basically: remove a lot of Character. Young blokes are pretty, but, well, not the same amount of sculpting excitement, not so much hollows & creases eh.
I applied rubber mould to it & in the darkness this evening just before Bones started on TV i finished the plaster mothermould. So should be able to pop out a plaster tomorrow after work & then cut off his old head with an angle grinder & apply the new one maybe the next evening. Then we have visit from the commissioners the afternoon after. So not a moment too soon by golly.

Work is getting in the way of my career

2010-01-05T14:49:00.003+11:00

Yeah. As above.

Break'n

2010-01-03T22:26:00.004+11:00

So having a wee break. A day of being sick is about all i give myself. I think i've become some kinda weird workaholic type. I don't think i *want* to be a workaholic it is just thrust upon me, since i'm still sure my natural state is to bludge like anything. But maybe it can creep up on ya like a disease.

I spent last couple of days working on this dude's head & it is slowly getting there. Shwaya shwaya as the egyptians say, slowly slowly. It will come. Hopefully. I fobbed off the commissioners an extra week & so i reckon i get one more weekend & then what i have is what u get. The head is looking loads better. I had to let go of some parts & imagine others. It now has a youthful determined look. I have to take 50 years off the real dude but i do take his point that he couldn't quite see himself in there yet. Think i have improved it plenty since but. I think his is the most difficult head i ever seen. Deceptively simple as they say in the real estate ads. Anyway I give it til saturday to invite him back. That gives me wiggle room with my flu. Today was a write off for example. Tomorrow, sadly, terribly, is back to work. Luckily i'm pretty sick i might have a sickie since i doubt i will be productive & i certainly can't walk half an hour distance to press a button in a lab which is part of my duties at the moment.

It does kinda stump me how this likeness stuff gets *harder* with practice. I sure hope in the end it all adds up to some skill set or something. Can't see it now but. One point can be stressed is its easier to do dead guys. LOL. They don't care as much :)

Saw Avatar in 3d friday night. That was cos i couldn't face the fact i done nothing but work all the hols. Gee what a great treat it was. I love this digital projector stuff too - the first time in history that projected movies are in FOCUS! Hooray & bring out the champers.

Been a couple sad things happen in the sculpturin world lately but both of em too new to talk about. Sober u up though. Gird them loins for one & RIP the other.

Fail territory

2009-12-31T14:58:00.003+11:00

The dude & his wife came yesty & while immediately they thought it was awesome they did start to pick niggles soon after & it went from there into fail territory by the time we were finished pickin it to bits. I pulled out the tools & the plaster bucket & did some instant reno work & we got closer but still when they left we were indecisive on things. Have asked them to return in a few days. Then i got to work & worked all day on it. Made large changes. Had a revelation regards the cheek/jowl area. Incrementally i may be getting the guys face. Cannot believe how hard this is. He says it himself though when he looks thru photos of himself they are "all different!". The books i read about portrait sculpture have not helped much. I can do better eyebrow areas so ppl don't look surprised, but thats it. They didn't help with a likeness at all.

Sick today. Horrible head cold. Typical. But no whingeing. No whingeing til 2010, i resolved. Think i will make a NY resolution to do less whingeing generally. I won't say do none, cos it can be entertaining to hear a proper good humorous whinge & sometimes whingeing has its place, lets face it i would write much less blog if i didn't whinge. But its a bit negative really innit.

Anyway having a sick day. Biggest effort, which left me wringing in sweat & shaking legs was wrapping 2 sets of birthday presents. Lest u think thats not much work, well it took about a hour so it was hard yakka. Have now 2 bags of b'day presents & not sure which is whose. Bugger. Ah yes no there is 1 way to tell but i won't write it here in case they look. Which they don't cos nobody reads this blog but Ben. Hi Ben!

The Do

2009-12-28T21:31:00.007+11:00

The dude is much better now that i have like adjusted his hair style. Funny that cos really in all the photos his Do is kinda different, & esp now he is a elder dude in reality, there ain't much left at all - but it STILL improves the likeness & thank christ it no longer has the hitleresque hair style that really doesn't flatter anybody or anything. Thats a real bummer when u finish up at the end of the day on a likeness & the thing looks like hitler. FFS. F_F_S. But now his Do is a little flouncier & all is improved. Now if i can just get his eyes to look similar.. but think i nearly got it.

Once again proving if u keep at it long after a sane person would have chucked it in 1000 times over, u WILL get there. Not that i'm quite there, but nearly i can see that oncoming train at the end of the tunnel. I even put on his number on his shirt. Lookin good there. One thing i can do good is the numbers.

One thing thats powered me ahead is i got some new glasses, the Opto gave them to me. They are like 1.5x enlarging plain sorta glasses that u can buy down the chemist for 20 bucks he sez. But the good bit is that they don't muck with yer perspective like my prescription ones did. That was a different Opto. Some total wanker i suspect, he wanted to "improve" my vision by fucking it up totally. The more i think about that the more pissed off i get. He said my eyes were weird & in two diff directions so he wanted to solve that by somehow turning one eye around via those glasses. Without considering that i BEEN SEEING LIKE THAT FOR MY ENTIRE LiFE ALREADY & didn't need my bloody eye turned around i needed a cataract fixed, which he said i didn't have. FFS i should go back there & shoot him.

On a break this arvo i sat down in armchair with the Kaossilator & a little mono speaker attached & mucked about. I made this sweet simple quiet hypnotic little loop & feel asleep to it. Woke up it was still going. That was real nice.

Drawing

2009-12-28T15:04:00.002+11:00

Today i sat down & tried to draw this guy. I think sitting about drawing or painting is just so xcellent bludge.. cup of tea, a heater, a cat purrin nearby maybe, i can see why painters feel so superior. Dumbass sculptors out there in the cold, rain, sleet, heat, etc slavin away & getting filthy & catching cold & dermatitis & rotting feet out in plaster mud. Gross innit. Yes it is. But anyway i have kinda got a bit better into the guys head. Externally speaking. Went out & attacked the real thing after that & i feel slightly better about it. This time i'm just building his face in plaster, on the body. I guess its kinda cool to do that, cos its really not an easy way to do it. But my lack of progress in the studio working in clay has kinda depressed me. And this seems to be working well.

Xmas passed in a whirl of junk food & a bit of outings. There's 3 birthdays this month of the 4 ppl in this house & we all been shoppin furiously lately but yet preending to be all casual.

I've hinted for a Sabco broom.

More xmas choppin

2009-12-24T10:19:00.006+11:00

Been doing yet more food shopping. Seem to have caught the terror that everybody gets this time of yr when the shops shut for 2 whole days. Tho we have 4 people to feed at the moment, at least one of them appears to not actually eat anything so its hard to see where it all goes. Anyway apart from a dearth of chocolate & lettuce, we are set now for the next 2 days, Xmas & Boxing Day.

The dude of whom i am sculpting came over yesty with his wife, so she could have a look. She is a painter & did the same art school as me, even. She is awesome - not only did she really like the sculpture, but she went into great detail & depth on the dudes head & got him to suffer there while she pointed out all the strange parts of his head & explained his head was quite weird & how hard it was as she had tried to paint his portrait many times. We again discussed his nose in enormous depth & she made me feel his nose so i can understand it now where the bone is & how the cartilage works cos i studied nose anatomy before (i can feel u laffing but its true i have) and now i can understand why his is shaped like that. He has an original nose, he reckons it was never broken while he played, but maybe as a kid. Anyway eyebrows & nose, planes of face, i learned a lot. And i've asked them to come back next week & they would love to, which is way nice eh. It can't just be the cake & tea, i'm sure they would like a good sculpture too. Which is what i want! So i should get it fairly well along & then get it checked out again when they come back, & so i'm feeling real pleased about it.

Feeling people's head is a fantastic way to understand them BTW but i doubt most sculptors do that. I don't think people would really like to get their head groped just cos they commissioned a head - but its a shame cos it really shows you a lot about how their head is. I wonder if my failing eyesight was once better enough that i could have got all this data without fingering a person's head? Maybe, I think the hands just shortcut what the eyes need to decode. I'll never know that for sure cos i never did likeness type heads when i was young & my eyes worked top. Maybe after i get my eyes fixed they'll work better. But I'm scared to get my eyes fixed in case they work like they do now with glasses, which is i lose all nuances of depth perception. The world is like paper cutouts laid on top of each other, so there is some type of depth there, but each object is dead flat. This makes me very unhappy. It makes me realise though, maybe, why most sculptors go abstract as they get on. Its possibly a camoflaging manouver so nobody knows they can't see for shit anymore.

Xmas choppin

2009-12-23T10:41:00.001+11:00

Had a great time xmas shopping.. we don't "do" xmas really but yet still suffer the slings n arrows of the xmas shoppin xperience due to everybody else "doing" xmas. U get that if u live in civilization i.e. big city in Aus. But i've taken to the after hrs xmas shoppin universe & this is very satisfactory. Being out at 10pm wandering alone thru the toy aisles - all of em fully stocked mind you, which never happens - what a relaxing time. More store staff than shoppers actually. The star wars stormtroopers i been eking out of ebay are on the shelves now. i bought one, it is actually luke whatsisface under the helmet, chose that one cos i know his helmet doesn't fall off all the time. Having played (is that ok for a grownup?) with a friend's child's collection & studied this up. Its a beauty & the family most impressed with how expressive it is. Even sis, who is not easily moved to playing with toys, whatsoever, or approving of same, quite likes this little dude.

Also got a little Terminator for $3 which quite a good bargain, nobody else seems to want those things. I can understand, its not much like a real Terminator in looks for a start, & its poseability is very limited. $3 is about right. Yet there is a strange feeling of godlike power to hold a Terminator in the palm of yr hand, esp if you have seen the movies, cos they are evil little f'ers in the real world. Heh.

On hols - Xmas

2009-12-20T15:32:00.003+11:00

The dude upon which the life sized man is based come for another visit. He picked out some more issues with the 'spring off the hip' action. Bit of a bugger that there is only weeks of time left, there are major changes needed so this isn't gonna be easy. Still this is yet another important thing i'm learning, get em early. I may have learned that before, but if i just get it right next time, that would rock.

Bro-in-law is here now for a month of physio & told us the story he was looking for a bank down the local mall & ended up in the hairdressers trying to get the exchange rate out of the guy there & then arguing about it when he said he had no internet. Pretty funny. I countered that story with my embarrassing story of ringing the tyre place last week & them losing my car, when it was the wrong tyre place; & it seems like i possibly been consistently booking my car in at Jax & then dropping it off at Jobsons which are on the same intersection, almost. For years.

Yesterday watched Pandorum the sci fi horror flick, its pretty good & some of the gore was so intense & vast that i think it cracked a new level of grossout in my brain. Great stuff then eh.

Today we went to see dad's new gravestone. It was pretty good, the spelling & all & it was straight etc all spot on, except it was on the wrong plot. He had someone's grandma's grave on his plot & she must have had his, unless there were more graves involved in the total fuckup. We like to imagine that dad would be laughing about it but i'm not actually sure, and we're definitely pissed & some of us were in tears about it so i'm on the phone first thing tomorrow & get right up em. FFS there is one really important & yet quite simple thing you have absolutely to get right, eh. How can you get that wrong?

2009 resolution

2009-12-17T21:22:00.006+11:00

December resolution, no more whingeing till 2010.

Hmm so what does that leave to talk about... ah yes, i'm on hols now. Yahoo! 2 weeks orf u little BEWDY!!!

Got measured for a cataract op this morning, i was under the impression it would take 2 hrs of measuring & i wouldn't be able to see good after, like my eyes'd be all blurry. So i went to work for just 2 hrs real early & said i'd be then off for the rest o the day on sick leave. However i was exceedingly happy to discover the opto was over in 30 mins & I could see normal. Whoo-hoo! The vista of an afternoon to MYSELF was suddenly appearing. A real anal retentive swot would have gone back to work, but a mob o orangutans could not have dragged me. I went shopping & got a tiny boom box for the studio from Aldi's. I dunno how u could call a cup-sized radio a boom box its more like a tweet box but anyway it plays mp3's off cd & it was cheap as. Had a lovely nap at home while listening to a Skeptoid podcast. Ah this is the life. Tho one could also admit it was so damn hot u could do little else. But no whingeing... Then out to do a bit o sculpting in the carport. The big man is kinda pleasing now even without a head. It looks pretty well sprung like its about to chuck that ball right at ya. I like that. The dude himself will come check it out tomorrow. I had tried to do the head sunday but i got sick. Went to the studio, tried but got nowhere. It was that earache thing coming to a head. Or to my stomach, anyway. It all went away the next day but.

Applied as Geek In Residence with Arts Council. You never know. Got to try it could be really cool.

New studio start

2009-12-13T10:40:00.002+11:00

Sunday... I finally did a stroke of work in the new studio yesterday. I made a head of the current life sized dude. Its cool how if you just flog yourself mercilessly for hours you do eventually get a vague likeness. I'm not being sarcarstic there i actually mean it. Need to do it again & it should get better. I'm about to go for the day. This time i will have a working light bulb in my desk light so i might be able to get some shadow & that makes it easier to work. The poor old light has been moved so many times & the bulb always survived but all good things etc.

I'm very lucky- my studio is on the lower level & cool & i got Dave's mofo floor fan. Just need a bar fridge....

Good news... finally took the car to the shop & said can u tell me what that scary noise is & it turn out its most likely a wheel bearing which means its UNDER WARRANTY cos they put the things in a little while ago. Well thanks goodness i was expecting it to be like the tailshaft or the diff or something, cos thats all that hasn't been bloody replaced on the car in the last few yrs... But thats great eh. Hopefully they'll fix that tomorrow.

Cracking up & along

2009-12-11T22:04:00.009+11:00

One of my workmates cracked & started yelling & stormed out this arvo. Just a bit too much micromanagement. She's bloodywell gonna use Gmail for calendar from now on instead cos she can never get the colours right enough for the team calendar. She uses Entourage apparently this gives a colour difference with Outlook. I guess mac uses Pantone colours or summink.

I've been brought close to it myself a few times recently. I particularly don't like the veiled sarcasm that pretends to answer a question that you start to think (after a long long time of listening to this rambling simmering anger BS answer) that maybe you shouldn't have asked, thats a fave, and if it happens again i'm gonna use that cool rejoinder that Sharon was telling me about: "i don't like the tone of your voice", & that should go down perfect.

And there's the whats going on i need to know/why don't you tell the person who needs to know type of catch 22 experience.

But i think you have to try to be patient & try to do your best for the team & not tell your boss to F'off, cos *maybe* there is some point to the annoying tasks. And how to refuse to jump up at the beck n call, without seeming just to be lazy? Whatever faint shadow of whimsy crosses the bossmind i get the bloody job. Get some cables we might need some sometime in the future. Fuck. The cables are 5 steps from our room. Sadly its up to me to curb this idiocy, cos i allow the power, that goes to boss' head. I have to stop doing what i'm told.

For a week or so i've had this occasional intense pain in the back of my neck at the left. Its like being stabbed. I realised that when i was seated at my desk this area of my neck was pointed at the exact spot at which my boss sits. I have other horrible symptoms as well. Got an earache that goes right down inside my neck, that ones on the right, keeps me awake at night. I feel pretty rotten generally & i'm getting flashbacks of bad things that depress me. I always get weird symptoms when i'm in some situation i shouldn't be in. Its funny, my body just starts yelling at me. This must be "body language".

On a positive side we had some nice xmas work things lately. The IT xmas party which was not a bloody orgy of back & front stabbing & fisticuffs that i expected, it was quite pleasant. Probably cos most ppl who care enough to ruckus have been purged already. And the VC's do, which was absolutely awesome, in the quad at sunset. I'm sure we won't do anything in our team itself, but to be quite frank, who cares. ....... And thats why we won't, LOL!

Never let it be said

2009-12-09T20:54:00.003+11:00

that i don't bloody try hard sometimes. Or plan to.
I was very far down yesterday & almost planning a sickie.. and i was really just cruising for a car breakdown on the way in this morn so i could go get the car fixed & thus miss most of work. Not that car isn't wanting to oblige, its been right shitful lately. That noise is very loud now. But it dragged me in there. Kickin & screamin inside.

Anyway i have decided to go hard on this job business. i got to learn it & be good as i can at it, as long as i can manage it MAINLY at work. I'm not so crazed or have enough time to do homework. Tho i'm writing this as i wait for visual basic free version to download & install so i can do a wee bit of vb programming at home, so hmm. Still, some RUNS ON THE BORED is what i need to manufacture. I guess. WTF do i know about getting a head in business.

Aprez work i ditched a work mate who wanted to keep drinking beer til it was time to go eat seaweed & got a sulk out of that. Stuff it i got Thangs to Do. Got home & did nothin. But i'd still be out, if i'd gone, and i'm so sleepy.

7 days back

2009-12-08T18:51:00.003+11:00

And i want to go on 10 months leave again.

I've been replaced by that weedy handshake boy, i worked it out today. Thats pretty depressing. Considering i was there from like at least a year before anyone else currently in the whole team, i'm now the newbie & lowest on the pecking order & the team leaders secretary. Funny how easily u can fall innit. I imagine its just like this if you go off to pop a sprog too. But fuck em. He may be up to speed & one o da boyz but at least i don't make shit up when i dunno something.

However - making shit up does tend to make you look good. You look efficient & knowledgeable, professional. Sigh. Ain't it the way. The only thing you can hope is that kinda person rises rapidly to managership.

Red Card Green Card

2009-12-05T21:33:00.009+11:00

So.... you thought i might stop bloggin just cos i said i was finished. Well, i'm still here. Just cos i like talking crap i guess.

I went back to work, and its been 5 days of work. Feels like a billion years i must say. Getting up at 6am every day got old fast. Work is hard. Its not really a pleasure, except for the people there that i like, i enjoy their company. Its hard, & long hrs & no time for facebook/email/surfing. Sigh. It felt Ok though.. even tho i'd had a week of solid depression about going back it was not as bad as i had feared. People are not already disappointed at my lack o skills. That will come with time LOL.

I cracked out the old motorbike. Polished the bits i could reach. Squirted half a can of Start Ya Bastard down its gullet & it started first pop. Rode it 2 days & got such nasty blisters on my clutch hand that i'm over the "no neutral with heavy clutch" thing in traffic. Trade it in on a postie bike..

I went to see the National art school grad show thurs evening. First i slipped into Photography & immediately regretted it. I started to feel like why did i come. Why do they always have the teddy bears being stabbed with scissors? Escaped. Grabbed a beer & a kiss from a Technical Assistant & slipped away to avoid the speeches. I went to Painting, which used to be the Butchery & Pastry Cooking. I'd never been up inside those buildings & i really went in for the architecture. Tested the walkway up outside it where i'd always wanted to walk. Saw some shit painting. Lot of shit painting. Somebody had done some nice sketch paintings & then done them bigger but somehow lost all the skill they'd had in the sketches. That was depressing. A small glimmer & then it went away. Hopefully it'll come back. Its got to come back. Back downstairs i saw my old toolstore had been transformed into a little black painted dark curtained room with kinetic art in it with wee lights & stuff. Great. I loved my room, but this is cool.

Was pretty disappointed with the sculpture. Some of the work was ok but mainly they had this idea that they needed loads of SPACE between the exhibited items. Not much work either, but oddly presented. The space was arse. Stupid & pointless space, badly placed & annoying. I never been optically offended by space before... which was kinda interesting actually.

Friday was training course at work in being in a big team. Beats working, anyway. It was less bad than expected. There was a small subteam there who we are about to amagamate. They consistently fucked up the team activities by being self centred rather than working with everybody. Red card only when everybody else was green card. This doesn't bode well.

One skinny stalk of success i did have this past week. I crowned myself Queen of the Dells... i successfully dismantled my purple dell mini 10v & changed the ram to a 2 gig stick. Thats the most it can take & to do that you need to strip the entire thing down to 1 circuit board. I watched a video walkthru on youtube about it. Only had to watch it 1.0001 times, it was very clear. Bit nerve wracking working at the plastic fittings, thats all. i used a lot of plastic credit cards etc to help with the leverage on the bits that clip on. Everything very small... 3mm wide ribbon cables & stuff... a couple of times i took macro shots with the camera & zoomed in just so i could tell how to undo something. Done it but. It made me happy. Technical stuff rocks. Bow down little dells your queen is here.

Last day of bludging

2009-11-29T08:08:00.002+11:00

Today's my last day o free. Back to work tomorrow. De blog will become redundant & the journey is finish baby. Today i will attempt to ready myself for work again. That means breaking out the motorbike, oiling various bits of it, polishing the corrosion off it, getting depressed about the shape its in & maybe charging the battery & trying to kick it over. The ol tin of "Start Ya Bastard" will be necessary. Then finding enough clean clothes for 5 whole days in a row, buying sliced bread for sambos & all that tedious shite that is the white fellas burden.

People r saying i can 'make my own' job there. Like figure something & run with it. I would say hey yeah i will be the sculptor then. But sadly it doesn't work that way. Its got to be something related to real work LOL. Narrow boundaries narrow vision narrow choices. If i cannae be sculptor then i have to admit i don't care enough about it to make my own job. Hard to find the inspiration to give a sh*t really. Gawd - i hope my attitude improves. I hear we are all "team spirit" etc with the new young boss. Bring one thing u been working on to talk about in our monthly meeting. Bleah. 20 people each talking about something u couldn't care less about its a little xtra torture. Work. There's a reason they have to pay you to do it.

Car shite

2009-11-28T12:53:00.002+11:00

Yesterday i just went looking at car things. I went looking for vans & i tried to get my car looked at to find out what makes that horrible noise but you really got to ring ahead for these things. Fridays are everybody's day off nowadays & they manage then to be the busiest days to try to get anything done.

I laid the big bloke down & reattached his shoulders. Thats all i did yesterday cos to tell the truth i was a little peeved with it. Today i started making his arms up again & i sorted out the crotch... thats much easier done when they're laid upside down and their arms have fallen off. As the bishop said to the folk singer. Anyway then i decided righto before he gets too heavy i better stand him up again. That was extremely difficult & i'm sitting here now trying to work out if i did any permanent damage to myself when i did it. I guess i'll get over it cos i can still type. Anyway cos he's got wheels on its extraordinarily difficult to stand him up even when you can barely support the weight & he tried to get away. I reckon that doubles the difficulty. So i'm on the net to look into block n tackle outfits...

Bit of disaster

2009-11-26T22:45:00.002+11:00

Well had a bit of a disaster this arvo. After the real dude came & went, i stood there with my coffee & decided where i was gonna cut, and then i did cut, a giant wedge out of his back. I chiselled a huge wedge shaped hole in his back alomost thru to the front. Then i carefully pasted a bit bit of hessian & plaster in such a way that i had a great big sturdy hinge across the top shoulder. I waited for that the get set & strong then i loosed up the rest of him with the mallet & chisel. I hinged him into position & wedged him by the football that he holds, on 2 milk crates & a variety of big ugly wood blocks i keep for these occasions. I pasted some plaster in the now skinnier wedge & it all looked quite ok. I let it set an appropriate amt of time, i thought, then i cut some of the hinge off & the whole fuckin thing went down like a car crash & his arms & head all bust off & there was a bunch of body parts all skittered everywhere & a loud bang as quite a significant weight was involved. So u know how when u really fuck up proper, u don't even swear. Well i didn't say a word i didn't even like breathe heavy or nothing. I guess when something like that happens u kinda been expecting it all along really. I feel strangely more professional when they fail than when they work, cos u know u been skating near the stupid zone i guess. Pusch the envelope & its you that gets folded spindled & mutilated.
Poo. More work to do now, & not much time.

Bad habit needed

2009-11-26T13:13:00.001+11:00

A sculptor needs to smoke... u need the oral thing while staring. I tend to eat instead, or drink litres & litres of cold instant coffee. This is one reason i'm fat. You can be fat or smoke. But you really need to stare & hypnotise yourself at the same time. I got some massive changes to make now on the life sized dude & it would be good to meditate & smoke while staring. If only there were something like smoking that wasn't eating.

The real dude came to visit this morn, a true old gent & he has picked out some probs with the entire form of it. He demo'd how to pass a ball & explained what it all means. I have the legs & top half of the body at a stage where the arms should then be different, like have almost already unloaded the ball. So i need to move the body back to a quarter second earlier in the movement. The legs are not gonna be changed, though the feet might. It all makes much more sense once explained. As usually happens its way late in the time i have & we got the prospect of total skeletal renovation in order to get it right. He brought along a ream of excellent photos & put my meagre little photocopy stack to shame. If i'd had all these images months ago. But that tends not to happen. I just got to overcome this sorta thing, thats why they pay me. Though they would pay me if it was easy, too. Hm.

Anyway i got to stand out there & meditate while staring at it, without a cig. I got to work out where to cut to do the changes & if i can cut as little as possible to make the changes i want. Its like origami, probably. If i cut here, i may lose a section that i will have to remake but then i can avoid cutting there & there & there & there. Deep thought for a thursday.

Gloomy daze

2009-11-26T08:44:00.003+11:00

Feeling quite down today. I haven't been as down since years. I guess arguing with sis doesn't help but i guess it is just that i'm about to go back to work & nothing else seems to be working out.

Thats totally wrong BTW cos everything is falling into place but of course it won't all get finished this week before i move into what seem like a different life which is FT work again.

I guess the overwhelming feeling is that i haven't finished what i need to do & also the usual which is that i get the feeling this 10 months off was just marking time & why didn't i enjoy it at all? But you know, it were work, weren't it. It wasn't 10 months of umbrella drinks, it was 10 months of work, just not *real* work like they know it jim. And i wasn't like miserable. I was pretty content, i guess. i woke up when i wanted, worked as hard as i could, and never got time to do anything else hahaha. I went down the mall (rarely) at the times when there was least people, i got my car fixed when it broke (often) without the stress of organizing around work. Took appointments without regard for what day. Having not been at work was very very good, i just shouldn't forget that. Its not what you get done, entirely, its also what didn't get done to YOU cos you were not goin in to WORK:
10 months of not commuting in any regular fashion
10 months of not being tempted by the junk food tray in the lunch room
10 months of not sitting in the lunchroom *EVER* (bad vibe)
10 months of not using the lunchroom fridge (really bad vibe)
Or microwave (juz don't go there)
10 months of not using ITSM or Sharepoint or any other broken stupid instruments of drip torture
10 months of not having to come up with metrics about irellevant rubbish you can't remember doing, but its "countable"
10 months of not caring what chair u have in the office or who got the biggest monitor
10 months of not feelin stupid cos u dunno stuff nobody told you & is not written anywhere

Yeah fuck knows why i'd be depressed about coming back for that shit again.

Its the next day now. Due to lack of internet we can only use it in the mornings so sticking the blogshite up is not so easy.
Started off today mediocre. But ended all depressed again. I hain't been this down in years.
I tarted up the studio. I have a shelf unit there that needs 4 tiny screws to set the cross brace else it all falls over like a floppy parallelogram (is that a rhombus?)
So of course i have lost those 4 screws. in spite of remembering, in fact mentally visually seeing that i put them in my drawer, they ain't there. I probably put them in SOME drawer but having checked them all, fuck nose. Anyway i took some boxes of computer screws over there & incredibly lucky i got exactly 4 screws that actually fit & have the right thread etc. Amazing really. Should make me really happy. I was slightly satisfied/relieved but thats about as good as it gets this week. I filled the shelves with my crap off the floor & rearranged everything & much improved. Its a long skinny space, so how to make it feel vast & wonderful. I'm putting all the shelves & boxes up the far end across the back wall. Then i can put tables in the middle, hopefully to encourage the walk round work-in-the-round. I dunno if that really works but lights would really help too. Well working on it... Going to get a bar fridge as there are precedents. Its a shame i can't get my own toilet too as the ones there are very much art school student share house style. Tho they flush. What more u need? Just don't ask what more u want. i brung my piece of blue astroturf in. I was gonna use it as a wee carpet. But its so small a piece that it looks pretty stupid. I wonder if reverse garbage ever gets in any of that. Spose it goes out faster than it comes in. I'd love to do the whole floor. And walls & ceiling.

The subject of the life sized man is coming to see himself in the front yard tomorrow & me to study his head. 10am. Thank goodness i will be able to progress a bit. It could be another reason i'm depressed cos u get that when there is a severe deadline & you're just stuck.
i got some spicy fruit rolls to offer with tea cos being an older codger its probably all he's allowed to have. Boring biscuit with a tinge of almost being slightly tasty. Anyway i know he's got a lunch to go to straight after so he won't want to fill up. Its a great honour to have him visit. I dunno anything about sport really but this dude was pretty great.

I got a new place to go & mope. Its a new boat ramp they put in on foreshore drive there in botany, its only been open a week or somethink. At the moment its quite cool they are building the container terminal & there's boats out there driving pylons or whatever they do into the underwater floor & its still open water to stare across, tho when they finish you'll be metres away from a fucking massive ugly container terminal instead. Anyway now is the time to go there & watch the sun set etc & the airplanes come & go constantly as you watch. Its like watching tennis your head goes left right left right watching the planes landing & taking off on the runways that cross right across in front of ya. I took photos with my phone of the sunset but they didn't save. Nothing i've taken with that bastard phone has saved for months. I just found that out this evening. Chalk that up to it being a complete POS lemon of a phone cos thats what it is. If it belonged to me i'd set fire to it.

When i got home it was dark. Put the old mattress out on the nature strip & i lay on it hoping the garbage men would take me away too. Some big bug was buzz flickin at me at random moments. When the stupid fluffy white dog next door started barking i gave it up.

Today is Thurs. I slept in & now run about trying to clean up the place for the big visit. Its a shame i hain't improved the life sized man, but maybe i still got time for a quick coat of oxide.

Sweeping times

2009-11-23T21:49:00.004+11:00

Went into the studio today to sweep it out & lock the door. Some more furniture to move in but i wanna sweep first. Might even mop, with my awesome new mopping skillz that i gained when moving out of old studio. I know why old ladies can slap u so hard, it cos they mopped, in their day. Anyway i swept up a big pile of broken fluoro light glass & a goodly amount of black metal dust & assorted thingys. I guess i will need to source this type of debris again when i leave, if i am to leave it as i found it.

Found the electrician & got him to remove the hanging down wires & its all lookin quite good. I need some decent lighting, but i might make do with just some nice shades on the 2 globes there, and some desklamps. I think i'll be doing desk work there til i get started on a Project.

Lookin for some trestles now. Or i might go the milk crates. I'm over finding & moving big tables... doors on stands will be spot on for big tables. They got lots of spare doors here.

Got enough room in the studio for my sofa again, but i'll wait n see on that. :)

Decided to go on strike re the life sized man till i get the face working. If i never meet the guy i'm hardly gonna get it done. I keep pestering. I should be able to do it off photos, cos i done that before. But still if the guy's alive, it got to help heaps to have a look.

Sorta stalled

2009-11-22T22:28:00.004+11:00

Feelin a bit stalled, still have not met properly the subject of current life sized man & it would be good to get his head sorted. 1 week to go til back to work. Like puttin your arms out for the handcuffs. Yuck. Still, [insert here positive words about work... i can't think of anything], so thats good.

Need to get studio sorted into some form of awesome home away from home, even tho i won't be able to go there much while workin FT. Need a good place to go to to give me hope. Its a bit of a prick of a place to get to.. whenever somebody breaks down on the M5, it takes more than 1/2 hr from home, even if you don't actually go on the M5. On the rare occasion nobody has broke down on the M5, its about 10 min. I need to find some anti-M5 routes that go nowhere near it.

There is a rotten lookin sculpture in Wolli there on the way, which i don't think puts me in a great mood for makin art. Got to find an angle where it inspires me... like, hey if that was put there as public art, maybe... Rather than thinkin hell if that is the standard i will never understand what drugs, etc etc. Its this pukey not quite grass green colour & kinda very standard boring irrelevant shape cut out steel. Its like the sculpture u have when you're not havin a sculpture. A place holder for saying this is where there should be a bit of art. If i sound grumpy its cos i am :P Its too hot today.

2 knockbacks in fast succession

2009-11-21T19:37:00.002+11:00

...but i'm STILL going to keep trying...

Paris residency, AGAIN i got the flick. I am so gonna try for the 12 month Germany one next year. Forget Paris, it sucks anyway, i hear a cup a coffee is very expensive. And in Germany, Juz can make the coffee... :P

A sculpture show for January, my work didn't suit the content of the show (lovely excuse actually). Blast.

Someone said that, the most important thing is winning awards for yer art. What a load of bollocks is my response to that. But yeah you know once you win one, well you keep winning em...

Much like people who win residencies, keep on winning em. How the HELL do they do it?

HR

2009-11-20T20:46:00.005+11:00

Hmm i went to see the HR dude at work re returning to wk. In the end we agree that going back FT is best in my old job. I also used that session as a bit of psychoanalysis on myself & i now realise my stress over returning is mostly cos of my mini-boss's nerves (worrying about whether i can get up to speed fast enough to be a help with the deadlines) & not actually anything to do with the job. All jobs are hard when u got to learn em & learning a different job wouldn't actually be any easier, for me. And its my job & my life innit. So stuff it.

I also on speaking to a colleague have found out what weedy handshake boy's duties were, and to my surprise its nothing like what i thought. In fact he is doing his old job, that he did before they centralised. So in other words its no wonder he looked guilty when he met me, a bit shifty. Its cos he is getting away with blue bloody murder, on a bigger wage, doing exactly what he did before, not pushing himself or being pushed, or learning anything at all.

Far out. It really does boggle me. Here i am killing myself worrying about him being better at my job, when he hasn't been doing it. I was going to ask for the same training wot he got. But there was none. And of course he's doing a great job - at his own old job. Its absolutely bloody shonky.

How can i take any of it serious now? No wonder mini-boss is nervy about me coming back. Its a total joke. It just show you, don't it, that your job is what u make it. Or, what u can get away with. Whole new outlook is dawning on my workmind.

A day in the inland sth

2009-11-16T21:19:00.005+11:00

Monday i was took on a lovely warm tour of the southern highlands round picton & thirlmere & douglas park & buxton & i forget the name of the actual target town, starts with a C. Anyway i'm left with visions of hundreds of tall skinny trees & crunchy walking. Twas mighty hot out there, tho Camden beat it heatwise on the way back. Farkin ell. I was spared tho from the drivin duties cos I was couriered in style in Ash's little british racin green touring car. Its lovely to get out & see some cows & goats n check out the hi life of picton, with shops but almost no people. I could live with this lack o traffic.

Then over the past few daze been moving slowly into the studio. Its twice the size, and has awesome doors from the film set of Underbelly which was being shot across the rd & this mob acquired a bunch of doors, just before the building was demolished. Its an area where they knock down factories & put up yuppy blocks of flats. I have a suss the studios won't last long. Hope they took a decent lease.

The life sized man is a bit stifled. I been trying to do the face. I haven't met the guy properly yet & have stuff all photos. Its not surprising that its not going so well eh.

Have practically decided to go back to work FT. The part time work they offered is like pretty crap. I mean its nice they offered but i think (and everybody who i talk about it with) that i'm throwing too much away. I'm losing loads of good conditions like taking my lunch whenever i like, being respected, and a few pay levels. I tend to try to look at it as if i am getting "what i want" rather than losing something. But maybe thats the wrong way to look. How on earth would i ever get a job as good as that again, and it took me a while to get there, even tho it all happened sorta by accident. And like ppl keep saying, its your job, don't throw it away just to be good to the team. Well yes i see that point. I think i can count on the fingers of my arse how many ppl "put the team first" when considering their job (i.e. none, in case yr wondering about my arse).

Working FT tho, there is a lot more opportunity to get something different from inside. I can always quit later, anyway. I hope i can handle FT again, thats all. I'm tired now :) let alone going to work gettin up at 6am. I'm not a real sleep-inner tho i get up naturally at 6.30. Still it can be hard leapin up & running at that time o day. I usually lounge about drinking coffee.

Got my welder back after 2 weeks & a new circuit board. $240 later. But coulda been worse, i've heard of boards in big welders worth many grand. That was when i was learning to weld. Art students were always resting coffees on the welders. One spilled down the back of the machine & ZAP its a new board. The new welders are smaller & cheaper, thanks goodness.

Three Weeks

2009-11-14T18:30:00.012+11:00

I said to mum just now, hey thats only taken 3 weeks, the footballer, to get to this, i reckon if i keep getting faster i might get it down to one month to make a life sized man!
Its not near finished but its coming along really fast. He's even got a collar on his shirt. No face yet, but i just got to sit down & sort that in a couple of days & then it'll be not much left to do.
She said 3 weeks? Its been 1 week.
I said no no no etc.
But actually if my welder has been in the shop since 1 week ago yesterday, well that was the day i welded up the armature, see, so i didn't start any earlier.
8 days :) :) :) F***!!!Wow!!!
It sure FEELS like 3 weeks cos i been working so damn hard, and it really seems like 3 weeks worth of sleeping as well...
Weird. But COOL!

It helped to have the other body there, which made the beginning of it all much easier. I think this really (as usual) points to the old masters being right - make a bloody good first model (i do that), then make a largish one, where u solve all the problems, then do the full size. I never do the large model usually, thinking i don't have time. But actually if it SAVES this much time... This was a full sized "model" but having it there was just so handy. It made reproducing it really easy, and i actually changed it significantly cos it had some scaling issues (i.e. it was a touch too big & the legs were just slightly wrong).

They're always right, them old fellers. Charles Sargeant Jagger wrote a rockin good book, & his teacher old Lanteri, who wrote the sculptor's bloody bible, awesome stuff. Every hard earned thing you figure out painfully over ages, well its all in those books. You see it on repeated readings sometimes just a tiny few words you never noticed last time you skimmed thru.

And to be truthful i really enjoy being back home & working in the yard. Its better than a studio in this weather. I'm working really hard cos i don't have to drive anyplace or plan my day to avoid peak time traffic (the afternoon peak is from 2.30 to 7pm thank u very much!), i can write myself off if i want cos i just go sit down & rest. I eat healthy lunch too. Its nice to be outside in spring in the front yard, there's lots going on & neighbours give me big smiles. I'm making a foul mess of the carport though, its all white & dusty.

Anyway my 10 months of bludging is kinda coming to a close. To the .0001 person who reads these words, i feel a responsibility to come to some conclusion about what happened to me during this time...

Well i won't probably be able to figure it all out in 1 blog post but some things that changed...

While doing this latest bloke, i got so much stronger that i can now break a geek's neck like a twig. My hands are abraded from rasping plaster. My hair is feral. Since my hairdresser retired & i got 2 ratshit haircuts, i decided to either get a #2 skin head or just let it grow long. For some reason i've gone with long. Inertia i guess. With a kilo of plaster dust in it, its got the consistency of mummified straw, a bit like dreadlocks on a corpse. There is a schizo killer on the loose & i'm *sure* the cops went round the block & stopped next to me at the lights to check me out yesterday. If you seen the chap i mean, my hair is like that... but hey it was twilight, i don't have the killer expression, really. I guess i better get it neatened up slightly before going back to work.

My finances didn't improve massively during the time, but i saved a few grand so i didn't do the usual 'starving artist' thing.

I didn't get a chance to go away, at all. I never went to Italy or Paree. Just never actually had time... It may have been more a programming issue. I guess i could have got 2 weeks out somewhere if i could have planned ahead. But if you have 10 months off - wouldn't you try to squeeze more than 2 weeks out of a trip OS? Does it seem worth going for less than a month? Obviously grabbin 2 weeks would have been better than not going. But, fact remains i never went. Didn't even go down to Mystery Bay for the weekend. Pathetic really.

Never traded my falling apart car either. Though i still got time, thats an ongoing task. An indicator fell off it last week, at about the same time as all the fluid finished draining out of the steering.

Did i decide i was a sculptor? well yeah, but there's lots of sculptors working in IT. Do i feel like i should quit work to be one? Well YEAH. But i'm not feeling quite confident enough right now to do it. One more year at work.. maybe. If i can stay a year ;)

Lookin for my MS SMS text book to study up for work. I think i hid that book very well :(

The untimely demise of a big hairy spider

2009-11-13T22:43:00.007+11:00

I don't like big hairy spiders but it appears i must have squashed one inside the blind early this morn when i put it up. Mum found it when she pulled it down this evening. A big hairy spider squashed up on the blind. Grooooooossssssss. A sad end, as it must have took some time to grow so big a spider. And all for this?

There's been some untimely demises lately in the news. Very sad. How bloody annoying to go learn french & then die in some wasteful way before you get to france. How annoying to get a PhD & then pfft its all over before you use it to get a job as a uni professor teaching PhD students. They say only humans can worry about such things as imminent demise, & animals don't, thats why humans are different. Thats crap. I'm sure everybody's seen a depressed dog or a horse afficted with ennui, or a cat who's lost it & decided to live large cos they don't care anymore. well its cos they thought too much, which is what humans done to come up with the idea they're special.

The big man is coming along. I've decided i will go for a bit of artistic licence on this one & try to make it enjoyable, at least a bit. These things are so incredibly taxing on the mind & body its quite amazing. I'm ridiculously strong in the arms now. Thats maybe a plus. But i figure maybe i'm going about it wrong. I just think, what would Henry Moore do? Though as i've said before, Henry Moore would make a Henry Moore. while i sure ain't no Henry Moore i could perhaps relax a little & try to make something more me than usual. More enjoyable & fun. Usually i endeavour to make it more the subject in every possible scratch & bump. Every little nuance etc etc. But this time i still haven't met the guy properly, so i'm going to invent him, cos otherwise i will not get it done in time. I would reckon as long as his face is good & the body shape not too far off the few photos that are around, then people will be right happy, & perhaps killing myself for the last 10000 details is not actually necessary anyway.
I'm sure i will still try for the last 10000 details though. If there is any time left at all then the 10000 details will fill it. Everything fills the time available. And i still haven't started the face!

The new studio is ready to move into. Its a shame i'm gonna be paying for it while i have to work on this big guy still here, cos the studio is like pretty air tight & not ideal for a plaster dust cloud in it. Hope it'll be good & i get some use out of it. I'm only taking 3 month lease to start though so thats not long, really.

Sitting up now restoring the user on this problem laptop. If only i'd emptied the internet cache & trash etc first. this is much slower than when i saved the user. Damn maybe its USB 1.1 Argh. Groan. There's still 11,000 jpgs to go. Fuck. I want to go to sleep :(

Decisions decisions

2009-11-12T11:34:00.004+11:00

OK so now i have made my decision regarding going back to work... i told them i'd prefer part time but if there's nothing available i'll go back full time in my old job. I was so pleased to have come up with this conclusion, far more pleased than you might think from its basic simplicity n all. But what it does is put some of the responsibility onto them to find me a part time position if they don't want me back in my old job. I had been labouring under the difficulty of only wanting part time when there seems to be no job like that, it was like i could only quit altogether. But anyway since it turns out i didn't get the big commission i went for, and that was the condition i set for returning to work, well that condition is met & technically if i went with my original plan i'd be coming back anyway. So asking for part time is a new step i guess.

I got rejected from a sculpture show i was trying to get into for january. They sent a nicely worded email about how this particular work didn't fit into the vision for the show & i guess not, but still its kinda depressing. But actually in the end i do make stuff for myself cos i like making em. I just got to take a step back & remember that. Selling one just means i can afford to make more, that was always what i lived by. Sometimes u got to sell your children to afford to have more kidz eh. But then if you got a decent job you can afford to cast for no reason but cos u wanna. Could eb good to get back to work then eh.

The big man is coming along OK. Its been quite great to have the old one next to the new & very quick to make the new one. Its only been less than 2 weeks & i'm about at where the other one was, except its better :) He has already one sock, but his arse is too big, bit like mine. Its hard to keep yourself out of your art.

I destroyed the old one this morning, cut him into 2 legs, a torso with head, and 2 arms, along with some battered corpses i had lying around. We ordered a personal junk day, so there are a plethora of body parts on the nature strip awaiting collection. I got some cuts & blisters out of it but i think i'm much fitter than i was & i don't appear to have done my back in or anything. Hooray. You'd need to be fit to go back to a tedious desk job i guess. Not.

Good balls

2009-11-09T21:25:00.004+11:00

Those foam balls are very good. You can file down areas very much easier. Of course filing down solid plaster is a hard thing to do. Now i'm wondering how i ever had the energy to do it at all, ha ha. Its hard enough with foam balls in it. Tomorrow i'll get out the grinder & the mofo disk & blow half of it away in moments. Lovely. Feeling a bit crap, but getting into vitamins & green leafies from today & should be a bit better in a few days. Been staying up til midnight a lot, attempting to fix a mate's laptop. Its pretty dead. The registry appears to have broken. My trusty old knoppix wouldn't even boot on it so i searched around til i got something called Hawk PE which is a collection of useful stuff starting with a version of winxp in PE form, so it'll boot & run off the CD, Slax linux & some useful apps. Its obviously been created by someone who is so excruciatingly geeky they have PE desktop with a montage of star trek commanders across the screen. The boot chooser screen has the Enterprise. The laptop didn't appear to have any formatted drive in windows PE, it thinks its a raw drive, but i got the data off using Slax which found the entire file system. Awesome. I love them linuxes. When windows can't find itself, look in a linux.

Balls

2009-11-07T14:52:00.003+11:00

In a massive brainwave the likes of which haven't been suffered thru since the great brain tsunami of last month when i created something *large* that would fall to bits on being moved, i have bought some bean bag balls & i'm mixing them in with my plaster to bulk out the big man.

I kind of expect a similar disaster, but i'm hoping..

On bright news a man just came & checked out my 2 scooters & says he will buy em. Much as its sad to see them go they take up way too much space & i'm so damn glad to see the back of em i can't tell u. Dinner's on me :)

DVD Piracy - just (don't?) do it!

2009-11-07T14:00:00.011+11:00

Its been a week since i bought the Star Trek DVD. I found it last week in Big W for 23 bucks & i thought hell top film i'll grab that. Its been a week without being able to open the case cos it has a security lock & I didn't realise til i'd got home.

I had to find 2 HDD magnets so that i could open it & its taken a week to find them. Why didn't you take it back? You may ask. Well because if i did i would not be satisfied by the mere unlocking of the case, i would expect a limo ride from my house to the shop & back again, with cocktails. But that STILL wastes my time. Maybe if they just sent a courier to pick up & return it that would suffice, tho they should do it within 1 hr of me realising i can't open the damned case. There is no way in hell i'm going back to the mall just to get unlocked a dvd case even if it means i have to drill the case. FFFFFFS. FI.

For unique amusement, once i'd finally opened it, inside this BOUGHT & PAID FOR DVD is a double sided big glossy bit of paper telling me not to pirate DVDs & how it puts ushers out of business blah blah blah.

Now if i were serious about living with my own morals & ethics, which include the possibility of revenge as a positive force & the furious hatred of wilful stupidity, then i would NEVER BUY ANOTHER FRIKKEN DVD EVER AGAIN & JUST DOWNLOAD EVERYTHING.

Don't RIP my lovely little welder

2009-11-06T21:12:00.004+11:00

Poor little welder stopped working today. Bit disappointing really as i was using it at the time. Suddenly, no sparky. Took it to the shop & they confirmed it was both busted & no longer under warranty. So its wire & string for now... not quite as sturdy (tho that is debatable when u contemplate my quality of welding). But gravity is on my side with the few connections i still have to do, so should be right. hopefully.

Thinking now i should go back to work part time. i think FT is a bit too hard. You basically never get a weekend if you work full time & try to sculpt, you're doing 2 jobs. It sucks. I done it. Yeah much as i have a sense of doom & failure in not going back to my job, cos i got this sense that i wonder if i would have done the job OK, seeing how its changed totally since i was working in it. So its my pride at stake. And sense of self & competence. Geez. But even then sometimes u got to let go. Guess i could even forget that i care about it & just be happy... a.k.a.: denial. I'm good at denial. Queen o' de Nile, thats me.

Things since then

2009-11-05T23:45:00.004+11:00

Well i'm 99% out of the studio. I got to keep paying rent for 2 weeks, so i'm not killing myself to mop the floor, but it'll get done. Since i moved out i went in to work to meet my bosses & see about comng back or not. In the end of course its my decision & i guess they are a bit exasperated that i can't make up my mind but on the other hand they don't actually care either way except that whichever way it goes there will be some more paperwork. I met the dude who has been aligning himself to take my job. Said hi & shook his hand, it was a tiny thin damp limp little hand, that disappeared inside mine in such a way that it was kinda difficult to grab anything to shake. I do have big hands i spose but not that big. Could be an alien species maybe. Have met the guy before he didn't really impress me but the guys say he's doing OK so hope that is true.

It was a stinker hot day. As i drove home alternating the air con with the low fuel light warning, noticed a little red car ahead. It seemed to have a dog in the back. No, a koala. There was a koala with ears & it was waggling its head. I finally got close enough to see it was the driver with her hair up in those stupid lookin wee things like pigtails but they stuck out on her head like koala ears. She was having an animated discussion with her passenger. I remember thinking, pulling yr hair up like that surely must have an effect on the brain. One min later she smashed up the back of another car.

I found that a combination of travel in 2 ton truck, chutzpathic welding & experimental use of polystyrene foam as a structural material have all contributed to the miserable failure of the armature in the big man. Its failed in quite a boring way & i've decided to totally start over rather than attempt to drill into him & repar. Its OK i can use the old one as a template, so to speak. So i spent today welding up a new armature. After having wasted 1 & a half weeks being unable to work for fear of making dust I have now started over. What could be stupider? Well, NOT starting over would be stupider. But they're both right up there.

Time's pretty tight eh.

2 ton truck

2009-11-01T18:54:00.005+11:00

I drove a truck today. It was a 2 ton truck, i dunno if thats how heavy it is or how much it can carry, but its no worries all i cared about was that it had a lift on the back & it did. It turned out to be manual so i had to remember how to drive manual again. I was Ok once i realised that reverse was where 1st should be & i didn't need to even use 1st at all anyway. The magic point, which is where the gear lever returns to, they always "spring" to some point don't they, was in between 2nd & 3rd, & so thats what made me realise 1st was probably an acquired taste. !st was for heavy loads on a hill or something, starting in 2nd was perfect. I really enjoyed driving it, though its hard to remember you have such a big wide bus behind you. Reversing is very difficult u can't see a thing & guessing how long you are, well i had no idea so i tried not to reverse much. Was good tho, i got 2 mates help in the morning & we put 98% of the studio in the truck & yes its been a terrible tiring day. I'm pretty well finished for about a week i imagine & the only reason i can sit here & type at all is that i had a wee nap & pizza for tea. Early night i hope.

It appears to have come as a surprise to the studio owner that i moved out, even tho we been discussing it & i asked her if she was ok with it & she was, but then she's been preoccupied with family disasters lately. She has billed me for the next month but hopefully we can come to some agreement. If i knew i was still paying for it i would have left a table & chair there at bloody least.

The Open Studio went well, considering i started the day with a bastard headache & it all went from there. Lots of people came, & all my friends seemed to buy stuff off the printmakers & so my mates spent about a grand on their stuff while they drank my cider & sucked my chocolate eyeballs, basically. Was a good day.

I did get a dude come put a deposit on a sculpture, & tho he was gona do that anyway, it was very nice way to do it cos the studio all looked so pro when he turned up. All "showy" n that. Noice.

Poured James out at the train station & puddled off home with a boatload of sculptures. Just a start on the next day's move-out.

The good thing about an open studio is you can do whatever the hell you like. I been tied up with the poo strings of gallery owners too bloody long, so whatever i choose to do, it all feels like FREEDOM. I wrote out my sheet of listing adding a line about each one, a little description of each or a little joke. And i put out loads of NFS ones, maquettes & practice heads cast in plaster. Its only an open studio, it ain't a show. But i like this freedom business. A bit more polished it could be a goer.

Cleaning cleaning cleaning

2009-10-30T21:31:00.004+11:00

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

2009-10-29T21:54:00.002+11:00

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

2009-10-29T00:07:00.002+11:00

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

2009-10-27T21:39:00.012+11:00

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

2009-10-25T16:41:00.007+11:00

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

2009-10-23T23:33:00.008+11:00

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 :)