An old house with a brick patio sporting a nice patina of algae. Seems there is a niche in nature for just about all types to earn a living. A common snail made his way to the salad bar here. Demonic impulses made a light bulb go off. Who says you can’t train gastropods? They’ll even be happy to work in a script font to glorify the name of your girlfriend if need be. (Some training aids required.) Confession: Jusss kidding! Didn’t really saddle up a snail… a Q-Tip and some bleach is waaaaay faster, but it was a fun project to tease Amy with for a while until she got a whiff of what really went on.
Cycling has been a sport I’ve enjoyed for quite some time. Occasionally when I made it to the podium there was a little profit in all that sweating. Most of the time the flow was in the other direction. Over the years I know I must have ridden a bazillion miles and as well, I know I’ve stopped at a 1/2 bazillion stop signs and red lights.
On the pavement of the intersections along with spare change, some pretty good wrenches and some rather hideous stuff not worth mentioning I started accumulating partial sticks of silver solder that fell from A/C and plumbing maintenance trucks. Today I thought I’d give them a try just to get a feel how this solder differs from the jeweler’s silver solder. What better project than a hollow form cuff! With regular solder it can be a challenge to deal with the warping and trying to get a sandwich type seam to perform in a respectable way. With the sticks I collected it was good in some ways that it was less viscous and flowing and bad in that it stayed clumped up until I really poured the heat onto the cuff.
More heat means more oxides and more oxides mean the need to use a really active soldering flux. Nasty stuff! Thank goodness for a decent exhaust system.
In the end things worked out well and the result was very pleasing. See what you think.
Found this on a chain link on a cold autumn day. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything similar before. My best guess is that some critter deposited eggs for safe keeping. A pretty delicate arrangement but ill conceived in that brothers and sisters alike won’t have much to eat hatching out onto some cold piece of metal.
In my backyard there is a stately cedar elm. I like this tree even though it harbors flocks of birds that poop richly all over anything that doesn’t move; sometimes even if moving. One of its characteristics is that it will drop branches after a stiff wind. The morning after some exciting weather I picked up the aftermath and found these. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like these growths before. (Occasionally after a frost some annuals will ooze ice crystals from their destroyed stems that have a similar form…. different origin and material, though.) This seems to be the result of a mutation. Sure strange things happens in a lot of plants, but what is it that gives rise to this shape on opposing sides of the branch, with striated woody layers showing and all?
Found these interesting forms on a stucco gas station built quite a while back. I like the dimensionality of the curves… might be able to echo them in some future work. Lucky us as recently a new business opened up in this building. Yippee! Bar-b-que. What more could the neighbors want??
It’s been a long while coming… a new site format including a blog component (we’ll see if I can get the hang of it), larger portfolio photos and a greater number at that with plenty more on the way. And no Flash (for those on certain Steve Jobs’ mobile devices).
Here on my blog I will be serving up some back story from time to time, including creative inspirations and a behind the scenes look at work in progress at my bench along with any other newsworthy bits such as upcoming shows. Now that I have this blog it allows me to be a little less formal and provides the opportunity to post information less stiff than you might find on a commercial website. This is a good thing, especially when I need to give some credit to Amy Henderson who has been a significant inspiration to me in my artistic endeavors. Not only has Amy propped me up when I was down and felt like my work lacked even a scintilla of merit, she has been the brains, talent and drive behind the effort to present my work to the public in a tasteful manner. This has been done on many fronts from the design of my website and all marketing materials to the photography of each of my finished pieces that is presented for viewing. Beyond being a great designer and photographer/stylist, she also has been the developer on all of my websites. Amy is my sweetie.
Well, let’s get started. I’m looking forward to seeing where this all leads…
– J
