I’m also a sculptor.
…
Well, I want to be. I’ve been creating small projects, not many, for a few years now as I also try to learn more about drawing and painting.I’m trying to finish a project, creating glass pocket pieces, that was instigated by Kelly at Fusions Gallery in Ocean Shores. It is much more captivating and time-consuming than the drawings I had been working on. I like the complex problem-solving involved in creating and using molds and the kiln to form glass into art.

The experience:

Sunday
I created several pieces in wax, then started what I hoped would be the simple task of creating efficient molds to use in my studio kiln to produce the pieces. The first attempt was… too ambitious. The second failed miserably, the third…

Well, you get the picture.

I lost blood (carving and drilling tools are sharp!) and sleep. Inspiration almost never comes before the middle of a firing or the middle of a nightmare – whichever (sometimes both) you’re engaged in at the oddest time of day/night. I didn’t draw on ‘the exercises’ project at all, though I thought about it often and kept a couple of the drawings on my easel as goads.

I’m using wax for the models; plaster and wood, and paper, and plastic for the molds.
The first mold was made in C-asta-lot but I soon broke it trying to get it to work (I never got it hot enough).
I finally called Olympic Color Rods to get advice and they told me “Make it hotter.” Duh! ☺
I decided to make molds of plaster till I get it right (plaster is a whole lot cheaper than C-asta-lot) so now I’ve created about four different (2- and 3-part) molds, made copious illustrated notes in my notebook, and taken dozens of photos. I’m ready. Now. To make glass… in a couple days?

But I don’t have any drawings ready for Monday’s critiquing session, so I’ll take some pages of photos to show what I’ve been doing for the last week.

The Lesson:

It’s good to go!

Drawing and painting are the same thing if you believe them to be so… maybe.

We talked briefly about my photos.
We talked at length about Isabel’s, Pat’s and Ellen’s paintings. I discovered that I don’t know very much about painting. It was a good day!

Some time ago I decided, after some thinking about my past artistic and design experiences, and about what I liked doing, that sculpting was #1, drawing was #2, and that painting in pastels was close enough to drawing that I’d enjoy it most of any painting I might do. I draw all the time. I use more charcoal than anybody I know. Some weeks I use more than a single newsprint pad of paper. I carry several dozens of pastels to drawing sessions every week.

Today, I realized that for me the activity called ‘painting’ is different than it is for others. I really think of drawing and painting as somehow separate activities and not everyone does that. Though I know that I could paint with charcoal, I never think to do so. Even when I fill a page with charcoal as tone, it’s in support of line work.

I suppose that I think of the meaning of ‘drawing’ as very close to its use as ‘extracting from’ or ‘pull’ or even ‘derive’. Perhaps to draw is to extract from a source an impression of its likeness and to express that as a graphic image. Likewise, I think of ‘painting’ as very close to its use as ‘covering with color’ – so ‘cover’ a space with a colored expression of a source. I may not have good definitions of either. I do know that I think of the activities differently and that I am less free with paint tools and media than I am with drawing equipment. But I also have less apprenticery (not mastery) of painting than I feel I have of drawing.

I wondered, “what does a real painter think? How?”

What I said was that I think that the internalizing of principals and practices was important so that, effectively, those things – composition, balance, asymmetry, value, color, accuracy, etc. ad nauseum – become thoughtless results of practice. A real painter doesn’t THINK about those things in any direct sense until after(!) the painting is done. The reason for practice, practice, practice for the painter is the same as it is for the musician – to hone the tools to an edge with which they always perform as desired in the hands of the artist, to project the emotions, the will, that drives the image forth. We continue to practice those things so that absence of mastery is never an issue (oh yeah?).

The outcome will be as individual as a voice and as powerful or sweet as a canon shot or an aria (oh yeah).

Then do Picasso and Rockwell both produce… music (oh)? If so, how so?(yeah)