dayton is not in ohio

In the background are big canvases being prepped for painting… I haven’t painted in years…

Here’s a short video of a small model I made to work out some of the mechanics of the hitting machine. It’s made of wood, metal tubing, a spring salvaged from an old typewriter (is that redundant?), and a motor.

These are some images of one of my current projects. Almost all of my work right now is dealing with cheating and failure in professional baseball. This is a machine that will hit baseballs. I have a couple of weeks of work left on this. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to hit the balls at.

Digital Model

Crank arm and axle

Axle detail

Crank arm detail

October has been insane. I had my first full day in the studio for a month yesterday… Too much travel. Last week it was New York for a CIVA board meeting, including a half-day of galleries and a studio visit to my friend Wayne Adams’ space. Visit Wayne’s blog to hear what we did together in NYC.

So, I have several projects going, but none are very far along. One is a FEMA trailer project, birthed while daydreaming about the wonderfully baroque architecture of our gorgeous church, the incarnation of Jesus, and the Advent season. The large project is suspended currently because FEMA has stopped the sale of old trailers due to health concerns surrounding the formaldehyde used to preserve the MDF of which the interiors are largely constructed. I am continuing work on a model trailer regardless, although this is not one of the trailers used by FEMA per se.

I also have a baseball related project that involves building a batting machine, ‘corking’ bats with various materials like cork, steel, Vaseline, fluorescent light bulb, felt, other things, and probably a series of paintings based on Bill Buckner.

Also in the pipeline is a swashbuckling, edited short story project, and a currently top-secret project that involves someone else’s artwork, sculpture, painting and a little innocent mail fraud.

When I arrived at the Art Institute I got a pretty good draw in the ’studio lottery’ where student’s names are drawn at random and you may pick the studio you want from what’s available. We first year student got to pick from the dregs, but I did end up in one of the nicer of the studios that was left. I’ve enjoyed it.

Last week on the drive to a Bible study during rush hour, I called in for a contest on ESPN 1000 radio here in Chicago. I won. Now just in case you folks that live way out don’t understand, a whole lot of people listen to sports radio in Chicago. I’ve tried before and never gotten through, but this time I was caller 10 and won tickets to a Fantasy Football Convention. Oh, speaking of fantasy football, I got home that night and I had been randomly selected to pick first in the draft. I’m on a roll here…

So now comes the ‘07-’08 studio lottery, and, face it, Fortuna’s wheel spins both ways. What goes up, must come down.

There was a studio that I have coveted ever since arriving at the Art Institute. Our studios are in the basement, so while we get 15-foot ceilings, we get no natural light… except this one studio at the front of the building. Its ceiling is two stories high, about 30 or so feet, and so it has huge windows high above so that folks can look down on you from outside the building while you work, and the sunlight can stream in. I like two things: natural light, and company. I also don’t mind 30-foot ceilings.

I wasn’t picked first. The first four or so folks were pre-set for various reasons, but then the real lottery came and someone else was picked. They picked me next. I seriously couldn’t believe that that studio was still left. Some folks are just bothered by people spying on them, I guess. Understandable. This studio is nearly twice the size of my previous one (not counting the ceiling) and the studios got a lot smaller after that pick. I’m a very, very happy camper.

Studio from up above, outside.

Looking up.

From the hall.

First of all, it’s finally warmed up a bit here in Chicago. By warm, I mean low 90s, which, by comparison to where I grew up (New Orleans), is like a nice late fall day. It’s really not hot at all, y’all. I think it’s appropriate to pay homage to Chicago summer weather to atone for my snide attacks this winter (1, 2). It has been, by far, the most comfortable summer of my life. Frankly, I think it makes the winters worth enduring.

Work is going well for me, although between my working and Karen dancing I have very little time to spend in the studio. I’m OK with this, actually. Summer has always been a slow time for me regarding production of work, but I tend to do a bit of the important reading and thinking that make fall and winter my most productive seasons. One very exciting part of my summer job has been learning to use some of the advanced fabrication equipment at the school. Had I not taken this job, I would have had to take a class to learn some of these things — and probably not as thoroughly. I actually conducted a CNC orientation yesterday. Here’s the machine we use. To know it well enough to teach it is very exciting. And I’m getting paid!

Karen is out of town right now, for a dance workshop in Houston. Karen’s folks are here while she’s gone. It’s a great exchange: they get to spend lots of time with Anna, and I get to retain my sanity. I can remember how difficult it was surviving without Karen while she was traveling with Momix, and I’m happy that Anna is spared being subjected to life as the daughter of a bachelor, if even for one week. She does like mac and cheese and “Ronald Donald,” but no healthy, growing kid deserves cuisine like that for an entire week. She already generally looks a bit like Ronald McDonald when I get her dressed. That is, like a clown. A final note on having help this week: I’m a pretty good craftsman, and I can build, or learn to build/fabricate most things while working pretty naturally with a variety of materials, but I think God created long, silky hair to keep folks like me very humble. I have NO idea how the women in this family install a hair clip so that it won’t fall out within five minutes. I’m in awe, and I’m grateful Grammy is around!

Sometimes I second-guess my frequent sports posts. (how’s that for a non sequitur…) I think that perhaps it’s not good to follow a sports team so closely. Professional sports really is a fantasy world. That’s why I can’t wait for college football season. Seriously, my main reservation about following sports is the time it takes up to listen, watch and to read about. If I spent all of that time reading good literature, exploring the library, and doing other kinds of research, I’d probably be better off as an artist. To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. Part of me wants to respond that this makes me more well-rounded, but that’s probably hogwash. I’m sure there are plenty of well-rounded people out there who become well rounded by learning to play the piano, not listening to ball games. The Romans had a phrase that I remember from high school latin, Panem et Circenses: Bread and Circuses. I remember it vaguely as referring to the means by which the Roman ruling authority was able to keep the citizens pacified. As long as you keep the people fed, and keep the people entertained, then you can do what you will. I think fed and distracted is even more accurate. The one thing an artist cannot afford to be for any long period of time, is distracted. I willingly distract myself far too frequently with infinite, meaningless rabbit trails (”reading the news”) on the internet, and keeping up with baseball, football, golf, auto racing, cycling, etc… I so willingly and easily distract myself with all of the distracting offerings that life in America affords. Panem et Circenses… gotta give that one some thought.

I’m currently reading Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, on my brother’s recommendation. I’m finding it fascinating, and very enjoyable to read. It’s an imagined account of Jesus as a seven year-old. I think I’m enjoying it so much because, as a former atheist, Rice explicitly affirms the incarnation in her introduction. It’s allowed me to relax reading it and know that I’m not reading some veiled attack on orthodox Christian theology.

I’m currently listening to Bach arrangements by Leopold Stokowski. Karen is currently rehearsing a reconstructed Doris Humphrey modern dance work titled Passacaglia, set to Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. We searched iTunes to find the piece so that I could listen to it, and stumbled across Stokowski, who arranged the version the dance it set to. I love Bach, but I have never heard Bach played like Stokowski conducts it. I’m tempted to say that I’ve never heard Bach before. It’s just unbelievable to have heard a particular piece of music so many times, to have loved it, and then hear it one more time and marvel at the fact that it can become so completely brand new, so completely, completely sublime.

I’m off to the studio today, for a bit. I need to begin cleaning and organizing for the school year. I also might try to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute to see some shows that I’ve neglected seeing yet.

Some of you may know that I’m an avid disc golf player. This is the craziest putt I’ve ever made. A long one too.
I lofted the disc high in the air to play it safe, it slid into the basket from the right never touching the chains, flipped over and onto the rim, rotated out, and became suspended by the rim of the disc on the outside of the basket. The first picture is taken from where I shot from.