Fountain

Happy. Sad.

Opening night at Four Walls was amazing. For the first time, I showed my drawings to droves of a discriminating, responsive public. My friends and family came. Artists I spammed came. I sold a drawing, and many people wanted to know the details of my process and inspiration. Meanwhile, I was wondering where Kate was. She was taking Henry, our kitty, to the vet because she had lost weight over the past couple of weeks, and had been to the vet a week ago and sent home. They said she was fine, and they didn't know why she was so skinny, because they said they could tell she was eating. That week home she deteriorated. She became very lethargic and at times spacey, staring off into the distance. We waited too long. Kate had to put her to sleep during my opening, and I didn't know until I got home.

You probably thought I disappeared, but no, here I am. I hope you all haven't given up on me. I have been plugging away in my studio, and now I'm getting back to the point where I can step back a little bit to post on the blog. Kate and I are now happily married, and are so relieved to not have to get married again. The wedding was great! It was a sweaty day, but it sure looked pretty in the pictures. Here's a photo of the wedding party:
All you people who want pictures will get a "greatest hits" disk, don't you worry; however, I won't post any more here. This is my art space!

My drawing show will be up in November! Yay! It's a two person show with Matthew Mahler at Four Walls Gallery, 564 Congress Street in Portland. Please do check out www.fourwallsgallery.com I'm not listed on the website as one of their artists yet but I will be. The show will be a part of the First Friday Art Walk on November 2.

I just finished the drawing I posted on August 3rd. I said it would take between 13 and 106 days to finish, it took 69. I titled it Vessicle because it was modelled after cell components. Basically a cell wall without all the stuff inside (organelles) is a vessicle. These can be made in a lab. It's a tiny lipid bubble that separates watery liquid. Here's the drawing:
So that leaves one more drawing to finish, get photographed by Jay York, and get framed by November:
You thought the other ones were crazy. Sure, what's so crazy about a spiral? Well, the linear structure is organized into 4 sided polygons and grows from the center out in a spiral. The Innermost polygon is divided into triangles and each adjacent cell has one less triangle until the outermost big polygon is its own undivided cell. So the density within each big polygon increases as you enter the vortex. The area of each big polygon varies with the width of the band as well and this contributes to some pretty interesting value changes. The thin black spiral just counters and slices through the main spiral, dividing it into tasty croissants. The whole thing will be filled in.


I'm experimenting with crystal growth. I have no positive results yet, and I blame it on the humidity. Or better yet--I blame the internet. First, I heated up some water and then I mixed in some demerrara sugar until it would no longer dissolve. I made a super-saturated solution. Then I set a bowl of it on a bench and waited. It has been about a week and no real crystals yet. There is some crystal-like residue where some of the water evaporated, but I want rock candy. I might need to dangle string into a larger container full of sugar water.
I'm trying the same thing with a salt solution, but in this I suspended a steel armature, that in my wildest fantasies will become encrusted with huge square salt crystals. There is some small crystal growth, but this could also be called white residue. The steel is rusting, which may inhibit crystal growth. I'm worried that as salt crystallizes and is removed from the solution, the solution left with be less saturated and melt the crystal in a vicious cycle. This is why I hope my basement gets less humid so evaporation will get those freakin' crystals growing.I need to go to bed....later.

more is all around

I finished an ink drawing on Independence Day that I've been working on for what seems like all of time. It's hard for things like this to not finish anti-climactically, but it takes a long soaking period to decide for sure whether it's crap. Working for so long on it, keeping focus and not going astray is a fairly good indicator IMHO (LOL) of its worth.

On a more colorful note, we decided to go to the land for the 5th , just to see what was going down. It had rained moments before.

The mosquitoes and flies were going nuts for the CO2 coming out of our car's exhaust and our mouths. I went wandering in the woods. I came upon a porcupine that started to climb a small pine tree when I approached. He moved slowly and deliberately, like a sloth I saw on the TV once. Unfortunately, the sun was behind him so the picture of him could be any random blob in a tree.

This past weekend we went up to 'The Land' in Farmingdale, where we camped it up with the Sylvains on Hutchinson Pond. Our first wedding gift was an acre of land abutting the Sylvain's 4 acres deeded to us from Kate's Mum Debbie. Yay! We're very excited. There are beautiful hardwood trees, swampage, frogs, snapping turtles and countless other things to keep a wannabe naturalist like myself busy. I found some diseased raspberry plants that were beautifully disgusting. I found ferns growing in every direction. Baby spiders were huddling on a leaf for safety. Suzanna and Johnny made a teeter-totter out of a dead tree that I pushed down. I found loads of carnivorous sundew plants.

some photos from our 2004 road trip

Better late than never