Part 1 - Where do sculpture ideas come from?

I'm often asked where I get my ideas. In the following series of blog posts I'm going to detail a recent experience of recursive inspiration. 

Many years ago I threw some damaged sculpture parts into the wood recycle bin at the Ashford transfer station. Several weeks later we were all amused to find these parts displayed in an artful arrangement on the side of a local barn. Recycled art art!

 

Two years ago we repainted the outside of the studio. I had some extra Pegasus parts and decided to follow my neighbor's example by painting and attaching them to the front of the building. End of story I thought. 

Jump forward to the summer of 2008. I walked by the painted parts as I had hundreds of times before but this time it occurred to me that this arrangement might make an interesting patterning wheel to use with my "Focus" type mechanism.

 

I've learned to save good ideas in a way that I'll be reminded of them later. I took a photo of the wall with my trusty iPhone, mailed it to myself, and left it in my mail inbox. This way I keep bumping into the photo when I clean out my inbox. I don't do this all that often so the "bumps" come at random times. I recently discovered the email and photo when I was updating my email notification list for the Falling Water sculpture. That "discovery" started a design sequence that I'm going to detail in the next few posts. They will chronicle the evolution of an idea. Stay tuned!

 

To continue to part 2: Click Here

Design Month at Wood That Works

July is a "design month". I don't schedule any production and it feels like vacation! I use the time to read, swim, and, if there's time, work on some new ideas and finish up some old ones. The swimming has been great, I have a good book and I'm making progress with some designs. I finished a new sculpture Variation Dream and have a new piece with a working name of Pinwheel up and running. Three other new designs are partially done. They all use variations of a new mechanism I'm working on that isn't quite right yet. This mechanism has potential but will take more time and study to get right. So far it is too complex for the user to set up and not reliable enough.

August is just about here and it is back to work. I'm making Sky Dance in August, working on a replacement design for Seascape and plugging away at the stubborn new mechanism.

Seascape at Home

I built Seascape in 2002 for the special sculpture wall in our home. My wife Marji designed and we built our home/studio in 1978. A prime requirement was that it have interesting walls. There is one special wall in our living room where I get to "play" with whatever comes into my head. It is my creative canvas.

I had two goals when I started this design - I wanted a smooth flowing, wave like motion and a long run time.

For the run time I decided to use my first triple winding mechanism. I have used double winding mechanisms in several designs that give me about 16 hours of run time. I hoped that by adding another spring and winder I could push the run time to 24 hours. My experiment was successful and Seascape does run for 24 hours on a single winding.

You can see the motion in the short video below.

Exploring "bird" motion

A year or so ago I decided it was time to explore "bird" motion a bit more.  The first sculpture was a large piece with a slow, graceful motion. It went through several iterations as I played with the form of the bird carrying wheels but I was pleased with the efficiency of the form of the swooping "legs" or power levers. The only problem with the piece was that it was too large to be an edition sculpture. Sculptures look much smaller on the computer screen when I'm designing! 

I took this design and reduced it by about half. I had to modify the mechanism to make it work correctly but I liked the effect of the reduced size. The motion was quicker and more dynamic and I could pack the sculpture in box that would fit within normal UPS size requirements.

The first sculpture I named Eagle for its soaring motion. The second sculpture became Falcon because it had elements of the soaring motion combined with a quicker darting effect.

At about this same time I started working on another bird sculpture with an entirely new mechanism. The working title for this piece was Sparrow because I thought of it as a smaller piece with a more unpredictable motion. Sparrow ended up being the most challenging of the three designs. I almost gave up on it numerous times. It the end the name Sparrow didn't fit any longer and it became Journey.

Falcon and Journey are both on the web site and in my studio as edition sculptures. Eagle sold before I had a chance to show it on my web site.  Putting up photos is yet another item on my to-do list!