Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Project 8: Bird Pre-Engagement Ring

Modern lovers, you understand. Foisting a ring on another person feels wrong. All this talk about mutual respect and equality, and then you have to buy your beloved like a goat in Marrakesh?

On the other hand, what is so bad about a little romance? Thus the pre-engagement ring, until all interested parties can pick out a real ring and do everything else together.





Basswood, Spackle, Polyurethane, Fire Island driftwood, Amagansett seashells, Dead Horse Bay sea glass. Also Swarovski crystals from Beads World near Times Square, which is an amazing place if you haven’t been before. Or if you have.









The first challenge was getting a believable bird shape.




Attempt #1 looked more like a chicken, which wasn’t the effect I was going for.





Attempt #2 seemed slightly more graceful.





Then came two miserable weeks grinding glass for the talons, polishing, grinding again, polishing again, breathing glass dust, starting over when pieces disappeared in the backyard, choking on glass dust, grinding fingers when the pieces got too small to hold safely, being partially blinded by glass dust. These were troubled times.





Seashells, on the other hand, are really easy to shape. Plus, they generate lots of calcium powder for your tomato plants.





These are supposed to be legs. Either a shape registers in the mind correctly, or it doesn’t. It’s really cool when you make just a few rough cuts, and then all of a sudden, hey, this looks like a gorilla face! (Maybe this is also why “realistic” animal carvings are so boring … all the detail is superfluous). But if the mind has to stretch to see the intended representation, then something is wrong. Deliberate abstraction doesn’t change anything, and only makes the onus of clarity more important. Point being, I was never fully comfortable with these legs, but didn’t want to carve thinner ones or try for more detail, for fear of breaking them off altogether. Then again, bird legs are never in a natural ring shape, so this may not have worked even if they were as thin as matchsticks and scaly as a post office.






After I put the eyes on it looked more like a frog than a bird. That is less of a concern. Love, like a bird, can sometimes become love, like a frog.




Resolved: use spackle whenever possible.








Originally posted August 2011

















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