From My Upstairs Studio

I have always wanted to make a ceramic work of Greenman, but it was Treebeard, the Ent from Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, that was my real inspiration.  But it was the more human-like ceramic faces made by two friends, Brittany Stracke and Randy Simpson that were my motivation to finally begin this series was set.

Faces

So far I have created three, but there are more in my mind to make.

Treebeard…

My First Day Working at Jerrys

My first day working at Jerry’s Artaramawas so much fun I couldn’t believe I was getting paid.  After a brief walk-around the store with my manager, who showed my where the restock items were hidden and other secrets about the store, I was assigned aligning the paint products.   I wasn’t supposed to just blindly ‘align the paint tubes’; if I ran across something I hadn’t seen before I was told to…

Thursday, the last day of 2015, my contract with AT&T ended and I turned in my building access badge.  Only twice in over twenty-five years have I had to do this.  The first was a couple years ago when after 25 years of service I retired from the State of Texas; the second time was today.  Leaving is odd.  I had a feeling of trepidation and nervousness.  When I handed my badge to the manager on…

Taking my own advice

I took my motivational advice from a recent writing.  Giving my artistic muse a kick in the pants, I left my studio for an outing with pad and pencil in hand and met up with some artist friends at the Texas Memorial Museum to relax and draw.  Saturday morning a half-dozen members of the Austin Urban Sketchers and I met at what should be called the Texas Natural History Museum instead of the Texas…

From the Driver’s Side

Again, looking forward while still looking behind; this time from the drivers side.  For those worried about my driving habits, I don’t typically take photographs at 70 MPH; this is for the most part from my ironclad memory and the use of artistic freedom.

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I haven’t been anywhere with vast open plains of late.  Though this reminds me of west Texas after a wetter than normal fall, when the…

Where have you been?

Looking in the mirrors of a car provides two perspectives of the world.  Where you’ve been, clear and sharp, and where you are going, proportionally blurred with the speed of the moving car.

From the passenger seat on a recent trip, I pondered these two views,

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Back in my studio I began by laying out the basic shapes of the mirror and landscape.

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From the sky of Cyan and Titanium White to the…

For some reason I must try everything, learn everything.   I have always had the affliction to learn new things, but it seems to have grown stronger the older I get.  Maybe I’m not satisfied mastering one thing, I must master them all, hence my foray into my new media. Maybe I just see I’m running out of time.

I’ve been tinkering with pottery the past few months, but now I’m ready to move further…