Matress Factory

I spent a fair amount of time looking at a some of the past and permanent installations at Matress Factory. It's too bad most of the images are so small because it's hard to see what is going on in most of the shots. Most of the pages for specific installations have some decent descriptions about the installations, though, and you get a basic idea of what it might be like.

I think my favorite gallery on the site is the page for Greer Lankton. I like the whole set up of the exterior of the installation because it literally houses the piece inside of the space in which it was assembled. Inside the little house there is a room that is decorated with pieces of the artists personal collection of handmade dolls, pictures, etc. The room is arranged in a meaningful way to the artist, and the viewer gets a really interesting perspective on her ideas and interests in her work. The whole installation seems to be especially important because it was the last installation that the artist worked on before her death and serves as a reminder about her life.

Nick Cave

Wow, it's been 2 weeks since my last post. That's lame! I guess I sort of forgot about this blog entirely. Well I don't have much to share this time with sculpture related stuff, but I guess I'll use this post to share some music that I've been getting really into lately. A friend turned me on to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds a few months ago, and I think his career is really interesting. This group has a huge catalog of music, and I've been working my way through a lot of stuff. Some of it is pretty sweet, but there is quite a bit that just isn't my style

Nick Cave started his career with The Birthday Party, then went on to form Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He's also worked on a number of other projects including Grinderman. Here's a few songs that range over a big chunk of his career.

The first song is called Nick the Stripper. Super dark and gritty and raw. This song is pretty representative of what The Birthday Party sounded like in the early 80's. This isn't the stuff that got me hooked on Nick Cave, but it's pretty cool to see what he was doing when he first started.

So here's Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. 8 years after the previous video. This song is pretty upbeat compared to the rest of the tracks off the album, but you can see the style has changed quite a bit.

This is The Weeping Song off of The Good Son album. It's really the only song on that album that I like, but it's much more representative of what the Bad Seeds sound like now. uhh,, and by 'now' I mean like 20 years ago when it was recorded!

This last one is called Stagger Lee from the album Murder Ballads. This was the album that got me hooked on Cave from the beginning and I've been listening to it for months now. I really enjoy going over the whole catalog of Cave's works and paying attention to the long steady transformation his music has gone through. I also really appreciate his dark sense of humor. Hope you enjoyed [at least some of] the music!

Cthulhu!

Alrighty then. So I pretty much destroyed my last sculpture when I was taking it out of the plaster mold (which was pretty lousy itself) but I learned a number of things that I did wrong. The best thing to do now is to start over and correct those mistakes. This time I'm going to choose a different object to sculpt because I'm kind of tired of thinking about that last bust. I've been running a couple ideas about what I want to make, and I think I want to try to do a bust of Cthulhu. Cthulhu is a fictional character in a number of HP Lovecraft stories. The author wrote in the early 20th century and pretty much invented the genre of surreal or weird horror. Cthulhu is mentioned in a number of stories that are now usually referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos. He is an elder god that is believed to live deep under the black waves in the lowest pits of the oceans on Earth. As the story goes, Cthulhu waits, dreaming, in his sunken city of R'lyeh somwhere in the Pacific ocean. He is typically depicted as a bipedal humanoid creature with the head of an octopus and the wings of a bat. A favorite quote from the Cthulhu Mythos goes something like this:

"That which is dead can eternal lie, but in strange eons even death may die."

                                                                             -H.P. Lovecraft

I looked online for some sculptures that others have done, and wasn't surprised to find A LOT. Here are some of the ones I thought were kinda cool. 

Thomas Doyle

It's been a little while since my last post, so hopefully I can make up for a little lost time with a good quality post today. This blog is about the miniature artist Thomas Doyle. I learned about this artist a few years ago in a magazine, probably Juxtapose or something similar. The bulk of Doyle's work is of miniature 1:43rd scale scenes and environments, typically inside a snow-globe like container. His attention to detail on such small objects is impressive. It seems like most of the subject matter in Doyles work has to do with family, community, and the home. His artist statement discusses the timelessness of the scenes in which his work takes places, and discusses that memory is a primary subject matter in his work. His website is really cool because each one of the pieces that is shown is usually represented from several angles. This is important because many of the scenes feature people hiding around corners or out of view from certain positions.

Well after spending some time I'm finding that I can't find a good way to show more of his work here on this blog. I'd recommend spending some time looking through each of the galleries for the Reclamations, Distillation, and Bearings series.

I've been thinking about the process for making molds and I found this helpful tutorial at Dan Perez Studios. There are three pieces to this model for Slimer from Ghostbusters. The artist is using Klean Klay to support the object to be molded. The clay is probably soft and easy to work with so that you can get a smooth and even seal around the prototype object. There are instructions here on how to create key holes, air vents, and pour spouts. The process here looks much more complicated than the method we learned in class, but it's a good visual aid for me to see how to make a complicated object with casting. Here are a few of the cool pics in the tutorial:

Slimer's body supported by globs of Klean Klay

Slimer supported by a bed of clay

Detail of how the artist forms an airtight seal around the prototype

Air hole and pour spout

Finished 1/2 of the cast with key holes and walls

I'm still kind of confused about how some molds are made though. I have a stone gargoyle sculpture that came from The Gargoyle Statuary and I know there were plenty of duplicates around. The object has a lot of "overhanging" features though, and I suspect there must have been several pieces to the mold as far as I can figure, the gargoyle below probably has 4 or 5 pieces for it's cast. I might try to make a cast out of this guy just because I think it would be a cool learning experience. If it worked I'd be able to reproduce this guy in jello. Well, jello is one possibility.

Short post today. Not a whole lot going on. Here's a video of a guy tearing it up on a didjeridoo.

Oh, and speaking of videos of guys in jumpsuits, here's a short clip of FM Einheit of Einsturzende Neubauten tearing it up with some bricks and hunks of wood.

While I'm at it I might as well post a video from the band that Einheit used to be in. Einsturzende Neubauten is a German Industrial/Post-Industrial band. Blixa Bargeld, the vocalist, has also done work with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Learning about casting the other day has got me pumped for this class. I've been a fan of the artist Chet Zar for a few years now, and I keep an eye on some of his current works. Chet's Facebook page is pretty cool because he keeps updating it with images of his current works as he makes them. Most of his work is oil on canvas, usually portrait like work. More recently it seems like he's been doing a lot of sculpting. Here's some images of his recent casts. <p>

[EDIT: I found this page after posting. Here's a little more insight to how Chet and Co. made the cast for the Dead Pope -  Click Here ]

Clay for cast

Finished cast

Duplicates from cast

Finished Bronze