Sea slugs are adorable, as everyone knows. Today I was admiring pictures of colourful cutie pie Hypselodoris bennetti, and after doing a general search for nudibranchs, encountered the astonishing Glaucus atlanticus, which is blue and silver and elaborate in the extreme, looking like some kind of feathery futuristic racing vehicle.
Sea slugs. They bring happiness.
Wheeeeeeeeee!
Came across ceramic artist Sophie Woodrow’s work on Bunnylicious. Her figures appeal to me greatly, as does this from her artist statement: “Sophie’s sculptures are not visitors from other worlds, but the ‘might-have-beens’ of this world.” I find many of her pieces have a compelling innocence; others seem more fey and self-aware. Shaped like containers, they seem to invite us to speculate on or intuit what’s inside them.
She’s been a WIP for ages. Tricky because she’s so small and the wax is quite soft. I gave myself a deadline to finish her before I went away (back to Australia again for a few weeks soon), so she’s as good as I could make her in the time I had. I made some things carefully, like her feet, and kept a couple of irregularities on purpose (her ears). She has paws instead of hands. She’ll be cast and given a pale patina, as I’ve seen some pictures of whitish patinas that look lovely, and I’d like to see them ‘in the flesh’.
I want to try to come up some more adventurous imagery. Rosehead would be a good one to make. I’m not that good at thinking of new forms. I can do collage-y things, figures with mixed-up parts, but I tend to be rather literal in how I think of the parts themselves, and I’d like to break out of that and get a bit more expressive if I possibly can.
Sachiko Kodama & Minako Takeno: Protrude, Flow
Sachiko Kodama & Yasushi Miyajima: Morpho Tower / Two Standing Spirals
M. Lobjinski: Ferrofluid Sculpture
Bwaha, I love this poem by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Also love the picture of Elsa. One of these kids is doing her own thing!
I’m so excited to have found The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus, a blog showcasing esoteric, mythic, fantastical and erotic art. The blog’s owner is also an artist.
The rococtopus (left) is still a gleam in the milkman’s eye. She’s going to be a human-headed octopus with a huge rococo wig in place of the mantle. (The wig isn’t there yet!) She was a little pixie girl bust, but I decided that was really too boring. The other head is one of Pan’s spares, which is going to be the head of a 3D model of one of my fetuses with stomach faces.
Test run moulded on wire spine:
The umbilical cord is coming out of the mouth and is going to anchor the fetus in something below that will serve as a base — maybe a placenta, or something weirder. At Stu’s suggestion the sculpture is going to go in a jar.
Wax off, wire adjusted, umbilical cord wired on, wax on:
Once I’m 100% sure the cord’s where I want it to be I might open the wax at the back and secure it with epoxy.
I’ve started fiddling with the face. I need to decide how young to make it look — really like a baby, or older.
(No, Pan isn’t finished yet. He’s at the annoying stage where I need to get fiddly things right, and can spend ages getting nowhere, so indulging in playing with a few other pieces.)
ETA: Actually, I’m not sure the cord’s going to be pourable.
Yesterday I wrote 4000 words. That’s a lot more than my usual. I was wondering why I get so tired of writing, and it occurred to me that because I tend to work slowly, I might be like someone carrying around a heavy suitcase for a long time. There’s effort involved in just mentally holding onto material for that long. I forget things, make piles of notes, lose notes, change my mind, etc. — I waste a lot of energy.
So I decided to try writing fast. Not blurting, “bad writing” fast — it still took me about 10 hours to do those 4000 words — but fast as in, if I wrote like this every day for a month, I’d have a first draft of a novel.
I can only write in that steady way when I know what I want to write — what events occur, what the emotional content is. Too often I don’t know what’s happening, simply don’t know what I want, other than perhaps a certain atmosphere. And I can fiddle around for ages trying to create that atmosphere in a scene, and then plot blows the atmosphere apart. That has been happening with Gunpowder Tea. I’ve been finding it very difficult to get plot, the mechanics of the non-real world, emotion and atmosphere all playing nice together. I’m beginning to wonder whether there are certain atmospheric textures that are damn near impossible to create as sustained qualities in a fantasy world — or at least, a fantasy world with magic or supernatural elements — because the fantastical itself destroys them. It’s a bit like having the light filtering through a shoji screen, and going ooh, isn’t that nice and mysterious, and then a dragon charges through the screen. And the dragon is awesome, but the mysterious, suggestive light is gone. Anyway, the piece I was working on yesterday is mainstream, no fantasy whatsoever.
(ETA: Or maybe the problem is that I sometimes get enamoured with the texture of a film — the whole atmosphere created by colours, lighting, music, the ratio of dialogue to silence, and want to recreate it with the written word, and run into difficulties.)
(ETA 2: Of course, the problem just might be my magpie mind. I get the shoji screen, and then I just have to have that horse with a lamp on its head, and put it in the same room!)
The bed is Mine…
…did I not make Myself clear?
