Mosaic Portrait I

I've started the mosaic portrait - well I've done the set up for it.

This is a black & white photograph, scanned at a high resolution that's been taken it into PhotoShop, enlarged to 11" x 17", printed and then hand colored.

It has been taped down on a board, covered with a layer of clear plastic and then covered with fiberglass mesh.

Next I will start cutting smalti to fit the areas of color and gluing them to the mesh. Once the face and neck are done I will trim around the mosaic and affix it to a substrate and finish the piece.

Dragon Mosaic

Finished the glass work on the Dragon mosaic last night. Still need to put the hanging hardware on it and finish the edges.

Dragon Mosaic

Last night I had the mosaic class at my house. I'm thinking that I will have more of them there. I think that what I will do is have the beginning mosaic class at the Winona Arts Center once a year. Then the rest of the year I will have an "open" mosaic studio at the house. I'll pick two nights a month and people can come, make a small donation for supplies and resources, and make mosaics for a couple hours.

If I wasn't really teaching, but there as a resource I would not ask as much of a class fee. And I would work on my on mosaics during the session - except for the time I spent helping others.

That's how it went last night, except of course there was no fee since it was part of the workshop they had already paid for.

I got a little bit closer to finishing the Dragon:

Art in the Mall

Fine arts move to the mall | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ

I'm trying to decide what I think about this.

I think I'm okay with it. If the Winona Mall got more foot traffic it might be a good thing to do here; there's some empty storefronts.

If art is to be relevant it has to be in front of as many people as possible. It needs to have a bit of mystery, but it also needs demystifying too. That's a contradiction, I know, but it's also somewhat true.

I suppose the biggest problem with this idea is the diffusion of  the idea of Art, the blending of Art and consumerism. But isn't it already blended? I don't know many artists who don't like it when they sell work. We're producing for a consumer society already...

It might be that something like this mall project could get people talking about what Art really is...

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Art is more than what has historically been labeled Art. It's also less than what has recently been labeled Art. By this I am referring to two tendencies - the tendency for people to consider only painting, drawing or sculpture as Art, and the tendency to hold as Art many objects that were created as illustrations, or functional pieces.

At what point does an Artifact become Art? Is a 2,000 year-old sculpture, originally meant for worship (maybe), Art because it's 2,000 years old? Because it's a sculpture? Or is it even Art? Does placing it in the Museum make it Art? What about a mural on a church wall? What about a vase? Or a textile?

---

I don't limit Art in terms of what is or is not Art. I do think that there are some qualifiers in regard to quality of the workmanship, but my definition of Art can encompass a great many things beyond drawing, painting and sculpture.

I have come to believe that art is giving ideas shape; art is the conscious use of creative imagination, and is in no way limited to the traditional forms historically imposed, but encompasses and includes a great many  things.

When I say shape I am referring to a form in which the work can be received. This description can and would include conceptual artists, performing artists and their works – it seems to me that the definition works equally  well for any art form, any medium, any discipline.

Taking the position that art is giving ideas shape, that it is the conscious use of creative imagination, allows us to accept as art a wider range of “ideas” made manifest than what the historical, European, male authority has designated as “art.” My idea of what art is has been, in part, formed by the fact that my practice includes
much that has been considered utilitarian craft by many art historians.

Mosaics

Just a quick update on the Dragon mosaic. Haven't had much time to work on it, but it's getting closer to being finished. I'm hoping that I have enough of the dark lapis smalti to finish it. If not I'll be visiting the Smalti.com booth at the upcoming American Mosaic Summit.

Who am I kidding? I'll be visiting their booth anyway...

One Tiny Mosaic

I had a jack antenna ball (from a Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant)... now I have a mosaic antenna ball.

Dragon Smalti Mosaic

I am really enjoying working with the Mexican smalti. There really is nothing like it for color and texture. It's harder to work with than the other glass that I've used. It is much easier to make a bad cut. It would be nice to take the advanced hammer techniques workshop at the American Mosaic Summit, but I weighed the choice of taking one workshop or coming home with $220 more glass and other supplies. Supplies won.

The hard thing about getting more proficient with the hammer and hardie is that you end up wasting so much smalti and smalti is so expensive. That's probably why the workshop is so expensive; they know you're going to chew through a bunch of smalti.

Here is last night's progress on the Dragon.

Dragon Mosaic

Made some progress this weekend, but not as much as I'd hoped.
Spent some time:

1. with daughter #4 and her partner, playing our favorite board game, Arkham Horror, a game based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. 
2. going to a friend's 70th birthday party - in an art gallery. Very cool. 
3. doing way more work than I wanted on a website that I'm working on for a local group.
4. clearing the ice from the roof of the side entrance at the Winona Arts Center. The ice was melting and causing a leak. Will need to get back up there and fix the roof soon.
5. and doing the household chores that I tend to let slide when I'm more interested in doing art than doing chores (which is almost always...). Didn't get much of that done though...

Anyway, here's where I'm at with the mosaic:

Need to finish soon, the next mosaic is clamoring to get out of my head and become something real.

Dragon Mosaic Progress

Last night's progress:

Hopefully I'm not being too boring with these incremental (or what sometimes feels incremental) photographs. I just like to see the progress.

I also want to document the process a bit.

I've rediscovered that I set tough goals for myself - in regard to the artwork I do. It's not all that intentional, I just design projects that are not easy to do. For example, the dragons spine ridge - it's very slow going getting the pieces of smalti cut for that area. I thought, as of yesterday's post, that I'd have around 10-15 more hours in this piece, but in all probability, it will be more like 15-20 more hours, because of all the special cut background for those damn triangles... The glass grinder is helping, but even using it to smooth out the edges of the cuts I'm making, it's going to take a long time. I'll probably have around 60 hours in this by the end. And that will make the selling price up between $1,800 and $2,000.

But I have to say that even if I had realized in the beginning that this design would take so much time, I would not have done this mosaic differently.

And, looking at this photo, I realize that I forgot to add last night's tally to the hours. Add 3 more tic marks to the 40 that are there.

Dragon Mosaic Progress

Last night's progress:

I now have around 40 hours in this mosaic. It will probably take me another 10 - 15 to finish it.

Hopefully I'll be done by the end of the weekend.

... and the mosaic isn't curved at the bottom, that's just the angle I took the photo from creating that effect. I have to shoot from an angle to keep the flash from glaring out on the glass.

I will eventually take the time (mostly involving moving a whole lot of heavy things around in the studio) to create a photo area where I can use diffused lighting and shoot the photos correctly...

Dragon Mosaic

Here's a quick update...

After a few weeks of working on other projects I have returned to the dragon mosaic. I hope to finish it this week because another mosaic is burning away at my brain...

Here's what the dragon looks like now. Sorry that the image is a bit blurry. I took it on my way out the door this morning using the little camera instead of my professional camera. And everything about me is blurry in the mornings these days... I really need to get my breathing machine fixed so that I can sleep right again. It takes me until 7:30 or 8:00 to feel like I am tracking well...

I've finished all of the work on the dragon's body (except that I might do a bit of adjusting here and there...) and now I am laying in the background. I'll have to take a close up so that everyone can see the great color variation in the smalti. The background is a very dark blue with streaks and swirls and speckles of a medium blue. I am so much more happy with it than I was with the black. Doing the entire background with the black would have flattened the piece.You can see the area in the upper left corner where I had laid down the black and had to pull it up.

Of Poets and Poems

I'd like to challenge Winona to do this. It seems like a great idea. Sharpen your pencils: St Paul looking for more sidewalk poems

If anyone is interested in working on a project like this I'd like to be in on it.

------------------------------------

I was at the Valentine's Day Poetry night at the Winona Arts Center last week. I hadn't originally planned on going, but I feel that as the new WAC board president, I need to go to every performance event.

I didn't know what exactly to expect. I thought there might be a handful of poetry readers waxing euphoric over sophomoric lines with a couple stellar poets leading the way... something fun, but not a must-repeat event.

Turns out it was a great evening. The theme of the evening was love poems - in honor of the upcoming St. Valentine's Day. Winona's Poet Laureate, Ken McCullough led the evening with grace, gentle encouragement and at times, bawdy renditions of poems written by himself and other poets. His co-poet for the evening, Marilyn Klinkner, also read poems of her own creation and poems that have caused her both pain and joy. These poet-leaders brought a huge stack of poetry books which they spread out on the floor in the middle of our circle for others to peruse for poems to read out loud.

After hearing a bit from the poet-leaders, others in the group of around 20 joined in. I read two of my poems - Rain & Renewal. I hadn't know that people would be reading poetry written by others - so I only had my poems with me. But I did have my computer and I looked up a few other poems. I ended up reading Wandering Aengus, by William Butler Yeats; Dove Sta Amore, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and a Carl Sandburg poem that I cannot remember the name of. Someone asked me to look up Blessing by James Wright, which I then read. 

I'm thinking that we should consider having a poetry gathering a few times per year.

Update: Foot in the Door 4

Final count - just about 5,000 entrants for the exhibit. Hopefully they won't all come to the opening reception - or if they do, hopefully it won't be all at the same time.

I think we'll go early.

Installing the exhibit

And I still don't see Lake Smalti in any of these photographs.  

Sketchbook - No. 055

Another nondeterministic* drawing. This one is in link. Everyone is telling me that the pencil ones smear too much. I kind of like the smearing, but I'll experiment with ink - I just might find that I like it too...

Anyway, here is last night's drawing.

* wikipedia discusses nondetermistic in regard to computer programming algorithms:

"a nondeterministic algorithm is an algorithm with one or more choice points where multiple different continuations are possible, without any specification of which one will be taken."

This definition actually works to describe how my sketches are constructed since I never know what they will look like when I start. I don't plan them as they progress; I just wait and see what happens next once a mark/section/line is laid down. What comes before guides what comes next. There are no mistakes. Everything has potential.

Sustainability - Problems & Solutions

One problem with talking about sustainability is that it is an overwhelming idea. There is great resistance to changing our lives, especially if we think it means deprivation of any kind... even inconveniencing ourselves is sometimes more than we can deal with. I admit it - I have those days.

Another issue is that it is so very difficult to know when we are hearing/reading valid information, and when what we are hearing/reading is just sales hype - just Greenwashing.

A third major problem with sustaining the sustainability movement is it is so DAMN expensive to go green - or at least it feels like it is. Products seem to cost so much more when it bears the label - "Green."

And one last issue (at least the last that I can think of right now) is that there is not much solidarity in the movement. So many people are doing so many different things. I know that there rarely is the unity in a social movement that people think there is, but I cannot help thinking that a bit more unity and common direction would help considerably.

So, we are adding new sustainable ways to our lives, one thing at a time - CF lightbulbs, buying local produce, using cloth tote bags, riding bicycles whenever possible, driving less, investing responsibly, using fewer toxic chemicals and trying to talk more with people about sustainable living.

I have to think about all the work it takes incrementally or I will give up on it.

Foot in the Door 4

Update: Foot in the Door 4 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

Just look at all these "feet" in the door!

They are getting the show installed:



I don't see Lake Smalti in any of these photos... but this is only the tip of the iceberg. I've heard that they've filled two galleries at the institute and have requested another one... haven't seen any numbers on how many works were accepted.

Wish I could be there to help out.
Maybe next time - in 2020, for Foot in the Door 5.

The opening reception is on the 18th, 6-9pm. It should be amazing to see all this art in one spot. I'm definitely going to go. I have my artist pass hanging on the (broken) refrigerator just waiting to be snatched up as I head out the door next Thursday morning.

Sustainable Living

Most people I know talk about sustainability in regard to the environment. I think that is a rather narrow path to take. Sustainable living involves more than just dealing with environmental issues.

Sustainability is approached (not achieved) when the environment, the economy and society develop in collaboration using only the resources that can be replaced. An essential element of the concept is ensuring future generations’ ability to do the same. It involves fair trade and social justice. It means livable lives for everyone. If we cannot come up with lifestyles that everyone can adopt, it isn't really sustainable, is it?

Abelisto talks about sustainability and the treadmill of production. I have trouble thinking my way through that discussion. I, like so many others, keep trying to find ways that we can produce our way out of this mess. But I know we cannot. I know that we cannot have continual growth, our economy cannot keep growing - most of the growth we have achieved in the last 50 years seems to me to be a shell game, a global "robbing-peter-to-pay-paul." How can you call it growth if all you are looking at is profits? What about all those costs that keep getting deferred? Costs my children and grandchildren will end up paying...

As I said, I know we cannot fix this by producing - but I am having a hard time grokking it. Maybe it's denial - if we cannot produce our way out of this dilemma, how do we get out of it? Or can we?

Makes me want to buy a piece of ground and get sheep again (and all the other crap for a self-sustaining lifestyle). I think  I have read too many apocalyptic SciFi novels...

Best Super Bowl Commercial

I don't have a television so I don't watch things on tv... not much anyway.

I did not watch the Super Bowl, so I missed all the commercials. I heard they weren't anything to write home about this year. But someone mentioned that this one was definitely worth seeing.

It is... I love it.

Foot in the Door Show

On Saturday I am taking a mosaic up to the Minneapolis Institute of Art for submission for the Foot in the Door 4 show. It's open to all Minnesota artists. The work needs to be no larger than 12' x 12" x 12" or longer than 80 seconds (for video or time-based work).

The mosaic I'm taking is Lake Smalti. It's only 6" x 6".

Lake Smalti, finished but before thinset mortar was cleaned up.

If you're a Minnesota artist and if you have a small piece of work, I encourage you to take it to MIA this weekend.

Dali Lami, Darwin, and more

Listening to Tadie and Abelisto last night set my head to spinning.

If there were more hours in a day, I'd take some more philosophy classes, some more history classes, some more theory classes, so that I could more fully participate in the discussion. But there isn't, so I'll concentrate on the things I must know, instead of the things I'd like to know.

Life is interesting. Each choice we make both expands and limits our horizons. Well, each choice has the potential to do so. Some merely limit us.

Wild Thing

I was just talking to my boss about the music of our young days...




This pre-dates us - we were 9 & 10 (or 11)  in 1966. But damn, this is a fun video... the clothing, hair styles and attitudes and passion.

Dragon Mosaic

I've progressed far enough on the websites to devote a small bit of time to the dragon mosaic. Tonight I finished the dragon's beard. I might do just a bit more on its mane, but for now I'm going to concentrate on its underbelly. I'm using the lighter olive green that you can see in this image for the underbelly. The pieces here are not glued down. I'm just getting a feel for the color and how it will work in regard to the shape...

Jumpers

Laughing out loud funny - in a weird way...



Pringle of Scotland
Really expensive clothing, but some interesting designs.

It's a WTF day.

I'm having one of those days. Being prone to apocalyptic visions is not what it's cracked up to be. Tends to make one surly in the mornings, overly bright and sunny by mid-afternoon, and agitated and sleepless in the wee hours.

Actually I think I'm a bit overwhelmed by the political/religious/public/media circus... going for the lowest, meanest, grubbiest, most contentious, most degrading, irrelevant, disrespectful, hateful, hurtful... available 24/7

We have become a nation of people, nay a world of people, where someone like Pat Robertson actually gets air time with the same old blame the victims song and dance - earthquakes caused by deals with the devil, what idiocy - a nation of people who live to disagree, who think compromise is a sin, who accuse those with different viewpoints of being evil, or ignorant.

Ad hominem rules the world, followed closely by the red herring, straw man, post hoc and biased sample.

I'm disappointed in us. We make me think of a three-year old child having a tantrum fit. Someone needs to swat our collective bottom and make us think about what we're doing to the world and each other.

Sketchbook p1

Not exactly what I should have been doing, but...

[pencil on paper]

Temptation

The smalti (glass) order arrived today. Gorgeous glass, absolutely gorgeous.

So much for wrapping up all the website/portfolio tasks before it arrived... I wanted to use the weekend to get all the web stuff I need to do for my own website and for all the sites I do (free... unfortunately) for other people/organizations before the temptation of getting back to the dragon mosaic...

Now, I'll have to be ultra-disciplined... damn.

The “year of citizens’ rights”

Going to try not to buy goods from China anymore. That will align with my ecological views and my political views...

In Sentence of Activist, China Gives West a Chill

By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: December 26, 2009

Human rights advocates said the punishment for Liu Xiaobo was intended to send an unequivocal message to others who might agitate for political reform.


But this will make it hard to do...um, make that impossible.

Earth-Friendly Elements, Mined Destructively

By KEITH BRADSHER

Published: December 26, 2009

Some renewable energy technologies rely on a group of elements called rare earths, but they mainly come from environmentally damaging mines in China.

New Website Address

I've put a new website up at http://montagaelmay.com.

It's the same design with new galleries of my visual art work added. There are four galleries: mosaic work (which if you've been reading this blog for very long you have seen most of the mosaics); sculpture; Interstices (a two artist show I participated in); and a gallery of encaustic Artist Trading Cards.

There's also a selection of my written stories, and a bit more about me and my art practice and my views on sustainable living.

Hammer & Hardie

The hammer and hardie have shipped (notification came at 8:30pm tonight - thanks Di Mosaico). I should have them on Thursday.

I've been waiting on the tools before doing any significant work on the dragon mosaic. I'm also still waiting to order some more smalti - a result of the Great Debit Card Debacle...

Once our new cards arrive I will probably order a few more pounds of smalti in a few more colors. They've mailed the cards, but we haven't had them arrive yet. Hopefully they'll arrive soon (so I can spend more money on glass).

A Step Toward a More Manageable Life

Tonight I deleted over 3000 emails from my Gmail inbox (over 500 of them were unread emails...) and canceled subscriptions to a great many email newsletters and distribution lists. I feel liberated

Now I need to do the same with my work email...

Dragon Mosaic Progress

Haven't posted a progress update for a while - here's the mosaic after tonight's work (at approximately 24 hours of work):

The photo was taken at an angle to avoid excessive reflection from the studio lights and the flash on the camera. I really need to build a set up for photographing mosaics - some photo-floodlights with diffusers and some sort of stand or prop - I don't add the hanging hardware until a mosaic is finished.

I'm still waiting on the hammer and hardie. The company I ordered them from was out of hardies, but expects them to come in on Monday or Tuesday. They promised, when I spoke with them last night, to ship the tools as soon as the hardies come in.

I need to get a bit more smalti - I had intended to get some yellows and yellow-oranges, some black and some dark indigo blue. I thought I might get a pound of the yellows/oranges each and then maybe skip the black and get several pounds of the dark indigo blue. If I do that I'll pull up the black background and do the background in the blue. The dark indigo blue has a considerable amount of black in it and I think it would give the piece much more depth than doing it with the black and a random smattering of the indigo blue and the really dark green.  But I'd need at least 5 pounds of the stuff, which, at nearly $20/lb (when you consider the added shipping costs), would make the next purchase over $150 if I got the indigo blue and the necessary yellows and yellow-oranges...

Still, I think it will make the piece a much better one.