A Certifiable Weekend

This past weekend I taught the first class in my (not so) little, private studiolo here in Richmond Virginia and I'm pleased to report that it went swimmingly. It was so nice to have everything I needed right at hand, without the muss, fuss, and struggle of lugging all my tools and equipment to another location. I have two small rooms that border a larger conference room. One is my working space where I have a table for metal clay and a bench for hard metals fitted out with a Foredom, soldering station, and bench pin. The other room holds bookcases of supplies and a lovely table from Harbor Freight supports my two kilns (an SC2 and a brick Spitfire One). The conference table is large enough to accommodate 7 students with me at the head. I had 4 students this weekend, so they could all spread out while still being close enough to bond as they worked.

The projects were a three stone ring, woven PMC sheet,
Pillow bead with carving and syringe drawing.

3 of my students were very experienced, and one was a total newbie! I was so proud of how well each one of them did in this very fast paced class. A certification class is not really the place for a beginner as Kathie discovered. Certain skills were difficult for her to master, and learning the idiosyncrasies of the material was a bit more challenging than she had imagined. To her credit, she decided to think of the workshop as a learning experience and opted not to try to finish the projects. The lentil bead and one stone ring she made were really well done for a first timer and she's determined to become more proficient with metal clay. Each of the students learned a new skill, and Pam found that she liked drawing with syringe!

Jane Stark, Pam Duska, Kathy Kennedy. Syringe Drawing.

I'm really looking forward to working with them again in November's Level 2 and am excited to be working on other advanced classes that I'll offer here. I like this teaching in my own space! I think I'll do it again. :)

Eye Candy - Patina

A selection from my 'Wonderful World' board

Oh, the beauty of patina! I'm known for my use of pure, black, patina's in my work. I use a hydrochloric acid type solution, like Black Max - often applied with a toothpick to get into tight spots. I've found that if I apply patina to fine silver and then use a polishing pad to remove it from high points, the pad may take off too much color, but the porous metal clay retains enough under the skin that it looks more like sterling than fine silver, making the surface more uniform than I intended. Because I love high contrast, I apply patina only where I want it so that the polished fine silver stays as 'white' as possible.

How do these images inspire you? Isn't the black lion spectacular? His coloring is due to a condition called 'melanism' - the exact opposite of albinism. Nature never ceases to amaze me. 

Eye Candy

Pinterest board: Decreptitude

Isn't it so interesting how, at the height of our technological prowess, we as a society seem to be reaching towards the past for inspiration? And not just the past per se, but the poor, falling down, ready to return to nature past. The appreciation for 'Shabby Chic' focuses on not only old worn design elements, but on pants that simply must hang down to the lowest common denominator (born out of hand me downs from elder siblings), depression era oversized dresses (remember the dress clips we wore in the 90's? Just like they did in the dust bowl depression?), peeling paint, broken statuary, abandoned estates... the list could go on and on. 

It seems we love the aesthetic (me included!), but romantically delete from our frames of reference the actual living conditions and day to day hardships that people from the chosen era had to endure. Would reenactors really like to fight in a civil war battle if they had to rely on 19th century medical practices? Would we find ancient Roman and Greek sculpture so elegant if it were painted with the lifelike (perhaps garish) colors scientists have found evidence of? These thoughts are what drive my personal design ethic. They are what compel me to pick up bits and pieces of flotsom and jetsom, to use found objects in my work, and to decorate my home with architectural salvage and hundred year old family photos.

How do you feel about looking to the past as a way to inform the present?

The Return of the Eye Candy

I spent a couple of hours today cleaning up and rearranging my Pinterest boards. I think I made my first pin sometime last year, and now I have 2,721 pins on 66 boards. Wow!  Very prolific. But as often as I find beautiful images to upload and re-pin, I seldom take time to review and renew their inspiration. Today's exercise was a treat. With a purring kitty on my lap, and so many images to re visit, I almost didn't want the organization to end.

I found so many stunning images that I had forgotten about, that I thought I'd share them with you. One per week, with a little added commentary. Now, don't let me tempt you into looking at all my pins! Anticipation is a good thing, and waiting to be surprised each week will bring it's own kind of pleasure. But if you find yourself with time on your hands and a sketchbook in your fingertips, Enjoy.

Niebla combeoides (syn. Vermilacinia combioides, "bouquet fog lichen")

I thought this image of lichen clinging to a rock somewhere on the California coast would be a perfect inspiration for a brooch or pair of clip earrings. Wouldn't those little floral forms be wonderful with some powdery enamel? Fabricated from bronze or copper a verdigris finish would add the perfect realistic touch. This image is from my "I see Jewelry" board.

A Jewelry Artist in Art jewelry

Many years ago I was asked to submit some photos to Art Jewelry, I no longer remember why. Well, they never used any of the photos I sent along. Until the July 2013 issue. Color me gobmsmacked. And delighted!

I originally made the copper focal element in a hydraulic forming workshop with Cynthia Eid many years ago, and it sat on my bench for a long while until I finally got the bright idea to use it in a class sample illustrating how to set an unusually shaped cabochon for the Level Three certification project. While this isn't a cabochon per se, it is an irregularly shaped object with a flat back - and that is all that is really needed.

This project is successful in many ways. Not only do the partial bezels and clay prongs function to hold the copper piece in place securely (which is the crux of the project), but the whole setting compliments the focal and repeats decorative elements, which reinforces the design. Notice how the spirals (made by curling a piece of wire and pressing it into the copper sheet) are repeated with metal clay syringe on the top of the silver setting, how the scalloped edges of the camera left side of the copper (perhaps obscured by prongs) are repeated in the scalloped edges of the bezels, and the scalloped edge of the backing piece, and a syringe squiggle is repeated three times on the upper right, upper left, and bottom center of the backing. On the back, I left a window in the silver, covered by a piece of thin glass, that reveals the underside of the hydraulic form.

All these repetitions create an inviting sense of rhythm and encourage the viewer's eye to travel around the piece. The longer someone's eyes linger on a piece, the more interesting they find it, the more they are drawn to it, and in the case of a potential collector, the more they may be inclined to want to buy it.

Using the principles of design in your work - balance, proportion, rhythm, and emphasis - will help you to create strong, dynamic pieces.

Sharing

I didn't mean for it to last this long! I just wanted to take a little break from social media.

I'm pretty sure everybody who reads this blog knows that I recently re located from Los Angeles, where I was born and have lived all my life, to Richmond, Virginia.  I'm also confident that I've reported that as much as I'm loving the East, my cousins, and my new home and studio - I've had a hard time acclimating. Not to the weather - it never got too cold for me, I've been in snow before, worked in it, played in it, tried to get 'from here to there' in it; certainly not to my apartment, it was very easy to get used to 750 sq ft of hardwood floors and turn of the century moldings after living in builder grade, carpeted 300 sq ft for 26 years; and not to my lovely cousins Sally and Pat who have made me feel so very welcome and cared for. Yes, I've missed my friends in LA, and California cousin Joan, and my day to day habits and goings-on - but sometimes one takes things for granted without ever realizing it. I knew I loved living by the beach (although I seldom set foot on the sand in the last 10 years), driving up the coast, and enjoying all the other amazing natural gifts California has to offer. But it wasn't until I went home for a visit earlier this month that I was gobsmacked with a realization.

A view of Santa Monica from up high.
Photo by Amy Lewis Madnick

The vast difference between LA and almost all of Southern California, and the parts of Virginia that I've explored so far, are the terrain and the flora. And the impact they have on my psyche. Los Angeles is actually a mountainous desert. Water is imported primarily from Colorado (remember the movie Chinatown?). Many trees and other plants are imported from Mexico, Australia, Africa, and other dry climates. Which ultimately means that although I certainly wouldn't compare metro LA to the Gobi Desert, as far as an overabundance of vegetation - LA is rather sparse.

Richmond on the other hand is completely flat with nary a mountain in view, rich with forested land, green leaves, and short, quaint buildings. What do buildings have to do with it? Vista! Even the highways are surrounded with corridors of tall foliage. And in winter when leaves have dropped, the skeletal limbs provide a woody curtain that obscures the view of the passing countryside.

There's life outside of those trees, but
 it's all hidden from sight.

When I first visited Virginia the beautiful highways were one of the things that most attracted me. No tagged graffiti on underpasses, no homeless communities along the sides of the roads, no trash, no mess, nothing but verdant curtains and considerate drivers. But although I knew I loved sitting on the beach, contemplating a horizon of blue water into blue sky, and knew how much I'd miss it - I hadn't realized just how important wide vistas were to me. Until the beginning of this month when I was stuck in traffic on the 110 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, right near the buildings with murals of the orchestra members (if you know the area) and was looking off to the left and realized I could see forever! There's a reason 'On a Clear Day' was written. It's an amazing feeling of expansiveness and calm to me. Then when I was back in Virginia and took my cousin to the hospital for an outpatient procedure, and was in a 7th floor waiting room, that same feeling of peace came over me again as I gazed out the window over the tree-line, saw the horizon, and gave a deep sigh of satisfaction.

I've felt closed off from myself for a reason. Closed off from creativity, from activity, from ambition, from so many things - and this latest realization may hold a clue to why I've felt the compulsion to isolate. My hope is that the realization itself will also hold the key to recovery.

I am finally feeling more comfortable here. Loving going to the studio every day (well almost every day at least), loving nesting in my new home - choosing just the right pieces to share my habitat, of course loving how much the kitties love their new expanded playland. I'm back to submitting proposals, and working on new metal clay techniques, and now feel like rejoining the social media world. A bit at a time. I may still be absent on FaceBook from time to time. And may only tweet occasionally. But I have thoughts and plans and hope to put them into place as life goes on.

I've started a monthly newsletter and certainly hope some of you will send me your email addresses so I can sign you up (still haven't figured out how to link to a sign up here) and have made one video (with 4 more in the planning stages) and added it to my nascent YouTube channel.

Thanks for sticking with me, and for reading, and for all the support always. Here's to a place to feel at peace, a place of comfort and expansive emotions. Here's to all of our soft places to fall.

Best Laid Plans...

Well, the week just got away from me. No posts, no brooches, no eye candy. But I wrote an article for the next Metal Clay Artist Magazine, shredded receipts from 2004 and on, and am now getting ready to travel to Baltimore to check out the American Craft Council (ACC) show with Vickie Hallmark, Cindy Silas, and Donna Penoyer.

The ACC show is a high end craft show, with both wholesale and retail days. We'll be going to the retail portion. I don't think I'll buy anything, but there will be lots to drool over. Hope you have an inspirational weekend!