LANDSCAPE REDUX

I created landscape with found objects, using a wire mesh as my canvas. I inset the green metal shell of a Coleman camping stove and added to it a computer-enhanced photo of clouds and burned-out trees taken in the hills behind my house. I added dried grasses and thistles gathered from the same area. The metal blade from a lawn edger, pulled from my neighbor’s trash and spray painted yellow, became the sun. Two rusted metal early-auto pieces dug out of the hills above Durango, Colorado became foreground. Long plant fronds woven into the mesh, their bulky stem ends standing out, added dimension. Random strips of old cotton shirts and tablecloths applied like strokes of paint added color. Lastly, an old, bent and twisty, heavy gage wire, painted blue, became streams and rivulets.

MAGIC BOX

The chosen box was a leather-clad wooden Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2 camera. Not only did the technology verge on the magical, it could also capture memories and tell stories. I decided to make it my centerpiece and find a way to present some of its magic. To display the camera, I created a ring of wood and colorful hand-made paper to suggest its promise. I researched online images from 1890 through 1910 when these cameras were made, finding photos that captured the common and uncommon events of this period: Teddy Roosevelt as a Roughrider, Wilbur Wright flying around the Statue of Liberty, a gag photo of boy with his chicken, intake photos of prisoners, a Suffragette, and San Francisco in 1897. I created a three-layer canvas of wire mesh to present the turn-of-the-century magic.

A MOMENT

There was a large sycamore tree in Tennessee. My youngest son, Max, wanted to climb it with his cousins. I lifted him up to a low-hanging branch and told him to hold on. As he held on, I turned to grab my camera and Max panicked. Seeing him panic, I moved quickly to capture this singular moment. His feet were only a foot off the ground, but for him it was terrifying. I wanted to depict this father-and-son experience in bas-relief, carved into a panel of white pine. I added a real tree branch and a piece of found painted wood as the ground. I wanted to express the moment of panic Max experienced – the force of a boy’s inexperienced imagination and the foolishness of the dad he trusted. I added the cat to accentuate the lack of real danger. My self-image is a composite.

PARADIGM SHIFT

The shift from analog to digital communication has been a paradigm shift, starting with the introduction of digital typography. Email began soon after, and later the Internet erupted. There were two parts to the shift: the technology that drove the change, exemplified by Babbage, Turing, Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, and Tim Burners-Lee; and the creative power exemplified by Pixar and various digital artists. With the computer, I could communicate with clients anywhere in the world as fast as electrons could move from my studio to their office. Two discarded pieces of wire mesh, one piece wrapped inside another, created an optical pattern that captured the visual dissonance I was after. A discarded computer mouse worked as the transmitter passing through into the future.

ALPHABET

I love type. Alphabet soup came to mind – letters floating in a pot, but more visual if pouring out of the pot. I used wire mesh as the pouring liquid and suspended a collection of colorful, plastic refrigerator letters in it. Above the pot I added “Soup du Jour” (Soup of The Day), and spelled the days of the week pouring from the pot, although they have a more unstructured look because of the undulations of the wire liquid. So, I was able to give them context and yet gain the feeling of random letters floating in liquid. The pot was found in a salvage yard and painted to resemble a paint-spatter enamel pan. The spoon was added to give a sense of things caught in a moment of falling. The pot is mounted on a stove’s gas-burner grate.

PANDEMONIUM

Coined by John Milton (1608-1674) to name the home Satan created for his feverish and crazed minions when he was cast down from Heaven in Paradise Lost, pandemonium today is defined as panicked confusion. With this exotic etymology, images of fire, panic, and the phrase "out of the frying pan and into the fire" came to mind. I found a frying pan to which I attached the colorful mismatched letters of pandemonium, helping to express its explosive, disjointed purpose. I wanted the word to help give focus and identity to the pan’s central role in the assemblage. To express panic I turned to favorite cartoonists whose humor was more physical than intellectual. Placing Milton at the top followed below by the frying pan and a traffic arrow pointing down gave me my Heaven and Hell. 

RISIBLE

Laughable – I needed some form of obvious physical humor as a focal point. I turned to cartoons because they are best at depicting human emotions in the most direct and readable way. A written joke could seem repetitive after a short while, but a captured moment of physical malfeasance can bring a smile each time. Pie throwing seemed an excellent way to depict a laughable incident without dire consequences for any of the participants. While characters like Wiley Coyote are often blown up or smashed by heavy objects without apparent damage, the images can still be difficult for some to view. Pie throwing, while difficult viewing for the very neat, generally brings a laugh without a wince. I found the best pie-throwing cartoon possible – Dagwood pied by a pie maker.

SKULLDUGGERY

A beaver skull from a friend started me working on an idea based on fraud, chicanery, and false idols. I created a myth linking the moon and its phases to the industrious beaver, promising the return of the moon for money. A ping-pong ball became the moon; rusted, enameled metal and a hole-punched piece of sheet metal became the cloud and starry sky. Hand-made paper, soaked and formed into concentric circles became the moonlit pond. Sea glass and pottery shards became the moonlight shattered by the beaver’s tail. I added the weave of birch bark strips and a birch branch as the beaver’s food source. When a friend dropped a quarter in the box at the bottom, I said, “Now you have a piece of the moon, but a dollar would promise you the whole thing.”

SPOONS

I’d been collecting old and new wooden spoons for years, imagining faces carved on their undersides. Studying African and Polynesian masks, I tried to get a feel for how they were constructed. Some were carved and some were built by adding details. Instead of cutting into the spoons, which were often made of hard wood and difficult to carve, I decided to add rather than subtract. I gathered beads, shells, strips of palm bark, buttons, sea glass, found plastic objects, and spiraled strips of aluminum trimmed from another project. Each creature evolved without plan as I added pieces that helped make a face. I mounted the spoons on a piece of rusted wire mesh, adding wood and wire posts to help them float. I added a piece of found wood with a stick-like figure stenciled on it as a visual anchor.

STRONG WEAK

My first two thoughts were one – opposites attract, and two – cartoonists use expression and body language to depict intense emotions. I considered various cartoon couples, friends and lovers, who might also fit the strong and weak paradigm. Popeye and Olive Oil were the clear choice. By a lucky twist, I found the reverse of what I expected – the bumptious Popeye looking meek and the demure Olive Oil angrily yelling. They were in one Sunday strip, but in separate frames, so I recombined them in one tableau. I stenciled them in black line onto the white enameled inner surface of a washing machine lid, and cut the words out of wood, painted them in opposing colors, and then interlocked and floated them out in front of the image.  I added cartoon grawlix in the corners to embellish the conflict.

SUSURRUS

The sound of wind moving through leaves, or water flowing over rocks. I chose wind flowing through eucalyptus leaves. I cut and shaped the leaves life-size out of sheet metal, and painted them. As I painted, I stuck each leaf’s wire stem in a vertical block of styrofoam to dry. Together, they hung strait down looking very un-windblown. At one point, I had to move the styrofoam and the leaves swiveled every which way, finally looking windblown. I had my design. I wrapped a rectangle of plywood in handmade paper embedded with thin pieces of string that helped animate the surface, painting it blue to suggest air or water. The leaves also remind me of brush strokes or koi in a pond. I made the SUSURRUS letters out of wire and positioned them to suggest their passing breeze-like through the leaves.

TIME

Time may just be a human construct invented to remind us that we live from moment to moment, sometimes getting stuck there and sometimes wishing we could return there. I researched images that fit some of our favorite time-phrases, humorously if possible. In most cases I reworked and colorized the images. I chose the Big Bang of Time’s origin as my visual anchor, adding a large, ladle-shaped piece of palm casing as background to suggest the flow of time. Displaying all the time phrases together illustrates our constant awareness of time’s flow and our complex interaction with it. In comparison, I presented a less subjective view of time by adding a clock face and gears from a dismantled clock, and a cartoon about a misunderstood request for the time being answered with its precise definition.

TO BEE OR NOT TO BE

Hamlet’s famous question brought to mind the wordplay possible between “be” and “bee.” To create a base, I cut out a large B, painted it red, and turned it sideways to stand on its serifs. This created a bottom space to hold the phrase “To Bee or Not to Be.” The humps of the B gave me two areas to hold images, suggesting a beginning and an end. So, we have the hive and bees from the birds and bees, and the tombstone for those no longer being. Online, I found photos of a straw bee skep, several tombstones from which I built one, and images of bees and putti. I reworked and colorized them in Photoshop. I wrote the tombstone text as a play on Hamlet’s soliloquy, making it about a beekeeper who died of bee stings. By the luck of shadows, the tombstone face looks anxiously down at the emerging queen bee.

TOP O' THE MORNING

A new day is dawning. A large, red plastic “O” inset with a hand-cut and -painted crowing rooster is the centerpiece. I placed hand-cut and -painted sheet metal stars on copper wire springs around the rooster to add dimension and a bit of movement. Above the rooster, I added the phrase “Top O’ The Morning” in plastic letters to emphasize the piece’s playful nature. Brightly colored plastic bottle and jar caps fill the sky as light rising, accompanied by streaks of dawn suggested by painted strips of canvas. I chose a 1” wire mesh as my canvas to keep the piece lightweight, allow me to suspend the caps and canvas strips, and to allow a sense of open sky for the bright colors to move through. In depicting the beginning of a new day, centering the rooster in the “O” was a reference to the MGM logo with its roaring lion that appears at the beginning of each film.

TRAFFIC SIGNAL

Discarded toys from a recycle center stand in for the red, yellow, and green signal lights housed in a shoebox, painted black. A discarded, beat-up yellow-and-black traffic caution sign became the canvas. Being a strong vertical, it needed something to accompany the shoebox traffic signal. I added one of my son’s discarded Nintendo video hand controllers and a scavenged stovetop heating element. They transformed the traffic signal motif into a video game. I added children’s block letters that spell HIT and MIS(S), and an orange cat to stand-in for the flashing winner’s light on old pinball games. These transitioned the piece from semi-realistic Traffic Signal to an implied virtual traffic game. I added letters suspended on wire spelling VIRTUAL TRAFFIC on either side of the traffic signal

CONTRADICTION

Having purchased a welder’s helmet years before at a sidewalk sale, I decided to decorate it with a flowered vine to contrast with its ominously protective feel. I remembered a wadded-up length of rusted barbed wire found on a hike that seemed to fit with the controlling aspect of the helmet. I also had several pieces of randomly shaped plywood left over from a scroll-saw cut for a previous assemblage project. When cut further, sanded, and spray-painted, they looked like wisps of sky, meandering rivers, drifting dunes, and swaths of vegetation. I surrounded the helmet with these forms, floating them off the base with wire supports. I then threaded the barbed wire through the forms and around the helmet to evoke the contradiction between the balance of the natural world and humankind’s need to control and manage it. To make the image more personal, I added a Photoshopped pair of eyes looking out.

MEANDER

This abstract grew out of thinking about meandering rivers. I considered the places a river might wander. I had three irregularly shaped pieces of scrap plywood left over after being stacked and cut to create three identical circles for another project. There were also two pieces of plywood left over from cutting out a large S. These two pieces, rearranged and papered in blue, became the meandering river. Mounted above a circular base covered in a fern-printed paper, the three stacked pieces were covered in patterned paper and became the landforms and structures the river passed through and beneath. They created a central focus for the assemblage. I placed a small circle as the focal point, covered with a scrap of antique map to represent human habitation.

OCTOPUS

A central head with multiple arms that enable it to reach out, grab, and explore. That image evolved into the Earth in the center with living habitats in orbit, reaching out to explore the cosmos. Then Andy Warhol’s head replaced the Earth, playing off his self-centered portraits in a fright wig. The habitats evolved into soup cans, his first claim to fame. I added an “Andy” signature to the top of each can, to emphasize his curious process of appropriating products and people, making his fame by identifying them as totems of our culture. His dual process of seeking fame while hiding within the world of the Factory references the octopuses’ voracious appetite and ability to visually and physically disappear into its background. I added a base of three expanding forms, painted colors Warhol might have used.

SCINTILLATE

To sparkle or radiate like the surface of a stream or a Hollywood starlet. I chose the latter. I developed several starlet portraits using black-and-white photos found online and reworked them in Photoshop, adding color and contour. Using plywood, I cut and painted the asymmetric background bursts of light. I wanted the bursts to appear animated, not static. It took me a while to get each shape to look spontaneous and unbalanced, yet have both working together to create a full background. Marilyn Monroe was always at the center, but once she was in place, none of the others seemed necessary. The large, red, plastic “S” was found online and purchased with several other movie marque letters. It seemed kismet to combine Marilyn with a bigger-than-life movie marque letter.