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the skull in the ribcage

March 12, 2025
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i am imagining/expanding my horizon as a sculptor/by sculpting the more than two hundred individual bones/of a human skeleton

and having done that/have the bones be three-dee scanned/and fabricated in porcelain/with a three-dee printer/in enormous quantity/and variety of sizes

and with this huge number of hellish tinkertoys/assemble odd dioramas/such as a bone house/surrounded by a picket fence/made of femurs/connected by clavicles

or a portrait of lincoln/with tiny carpal bones/assembled into his beard/and eyebrows/and a little patella/for his wart

the bones could make anything/from petunias to starships

but what has indelibly seared its image into my brain/is a ribcage and upper spine assembly/within which/is a heart-sized skull

the skull would be made not of porcelain but silicone

and via interior bones and a small motor/and maglev tech/would beat like a heart/faster if excited/slower if asleep

and could travel within the ribcage/peering out of the cage of the ribs/with its eye sockets

imprisoned and wildly free/at the same time

mission: remarkable

February 3, 2025
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the potter is back from hand surgery,/given a green light for unrestricted hand-use. the strictures against water-submersion/and lifting anything heavier than a box of tissues/have been waived goodbye.

now it is time to make stuff./he pretends to be receiving a secret recording á la the old tv spy show “mission: impossible.”

good morning, mr. feldspar. the clay you are looking at is a cone-five porcellaneous clay body colloquially known as “cashmere.” it is fine-grained and will fire white in both bisque and glaze. your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use two one-kilogram portions of this clay, sculpting a bird worthy of gallery display with one portion, and crafting a sixteen-ounce mug of swan-like elegance with the other. as always, if either or both creations prove to be unremarkable, you must disavow the existence of one or both unremarkable creations, rewedging the clay, which isn’t cheap, for a future attempt. good luck, frank. this recording will shelf-destruct in five seconds.

and then comes the fun part,/selecting his mission accomplices from the tools in the studio./like dan briggs and then jim phelps of old,/he peruses the candidates one by one/and puts his choices aside./soon he has françois garrote, the wire tool;/marlo and nero v., the sponge siblings;/natasha stiletto, the needle tool;/arnold t. thyme, the wood rib;/joe kingly, the ribbon trimmer;/and cannes openair, the pry tool.

he beams.

“are we ready, lady and gentlemen?”

they rattle, squinch and scratch in nod-equivalents.

the mission leader smiles, dips marko v. in the bucket-water,/and begins.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice vs. Make It Happen

December 4, 2020
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Something nice started with this lamentatious post I made on Facebook:

Friends, I am Bummed with a capital B. My Phoenix Center for the Arts wheel-throwing class has been canceled mid-stream. The center cites community benchmarks for COVID-19 infection risk. I applaud their proactive efforts to stem the spread, but I also feel like the rug has been yanked from under my feet, landing me on my oversized sit-downer.

I took some clay home. Not much–I was on public trans and on foot, and wasn’t up to lugging a lot of clay around. So I can hand-build, but until I find a reliable studio space/place, I can’t throw, and I can’t really sculpt–I need to bisque-fire what I make.

Rats!!!!!

Several friends commiserated, wished me well, suggested handbuilding, and generally made me feel better, though still bummed. Then I got a Facebook Messenger message from an amazing friend of mine, thus:

It was a link to a demo of someone deftly throwing miniature vessels on a tiny wheel. Looked like fun. We had this text exchange:

G: Very cool! The demo potter makes it look easy, but you’d need surgical steadiness to throw with precision on that scale. Worth exploring, though!!

N: LOL yes I know what you mean, but they are very sweet, something you could do at home

G: Quite so. Tell you what. Find me the product and how to order it, and if it’s under $100 US, I will buy it and make something for you. Deal?

It was a link to an outfit called wish.com. The little wheel was offered at $64. I was amazed that it was so inexpensive, and in fact it wasn’t, quite: what with tax and handling and timely shipping  the bill came to something over $118. 

And just this evening I made the second of two 3D sketches of Queen chess pieces. Neither looks remotely like her. Just getting my feet wet on subject matter I hadn’t handled in many years. I like the vitality of them, though.

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Long story concluded: As I say in the title and in the text exchange, there is “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and there is “Make It Happen.” I’m thrilled that, thanks to my wonderful friend, a setback turned into a new, exciting path.

Would you like to meet my wonderful friend? You bet you would–trust me. Her name is Nina Pak. I knew her as Nina Rogers when we were classmates and (briefly for me) fellow Yoga Club members at Glendale High School. She attended my wedding to Joni Froehling on December 10, 1988, and I have not seen her much face-to-face since, but thanks to social media we maintain our friendship. She looks like this:

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She also looks like this:

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She has been a model, a curator, an art director, a publisher, and many other things. Working out of Vancouver, British Columbia, she has created time-defying, gorgeous tableaux of bygone–or alternate-universe–scenes. The curious need only do an Internet search on “nina pak art” to be privy to a multitude of breath-stopping imagery. She has said of her work, “I am not opposed to making my art look good on someone’s wall, but I feel what I create has a spiritual depth and mystery that stirs something essentially vital:  a longing, a calling, an echo of something forgotten, deja-vu, or something you can’t quite grasp but want to share.”

And she is my friend, thank the All, and this week she helped me do more than daydream about how nice it would be If. Nina, please accept my humble thanks!

Foom-Bozzle-Wozzle, part 3

January 21, 2020
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The house on Krall Street inhabited by my unique friend Martin Klass (see Foom-Bozzle-Wozzle parts 1 and 2) is nestled in diverse overgrowth of bucketed flowers, crawling vines, and trees. Marty is a horticulturist and a hoarder, so much so that the City has issued him at least one citation, and not the good kind, either.

Yesterday I made my public-transport way to Marty’s place, and found to my mild dismay that a ceramic vase, which I had made and either given to Marty or had it dumpster-dived by him when I cleaned out my former workshop after my amicable divorce with the very nice small-town Minnesota gal Joni née Froehling, was in one of Marty’s flower-buckets, toppled over. I grabbed the vase and tried to open the screen door of the house, but it was strangely stuck. “HELLO…”

“Bongo!” replied Martin son of Max & Betty. (He calls me Gary infrequently. “Bongo,” “Ca’Bear,” and “Bernanke” are more frequent forms of address.) “Jussaminit!”

Inside his enslovened abode, I brandished the vase, told him how I’d found it, and accused him of neglect. He nodded in agreement and assured me that many other works of my creation on his property were being neglected, and that some in his back yard had been destroyed in storms. (I knew that already and it didn’t bother me–a lot of what Marty had were “factory seconds” of mine, unsuitable as showpieces. Prolificity’s downside is also its upside.)

I had a proposition for Marty, spawned when I picked up my vase. I was there to pick up the bird sculpture that had been rejected by Bruce Cody, the juror of the Glendale Arts Council’s 57th annual Juried Show. But I would rather have the vase, made by me on the 19th of May 2003 and having a suggestion of hard-to-capture antiquity, of ancient days, about it, than the rejected bird, made recently, which I could easily replicate in a couple of hours spread out over a couple of bisquing/glazing weeks. How about a trade?

Marty instantly agreed, and also agreed to pose for a photo illustrative of the trade:

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I left soon after, but before I left I said, “You’re my best friend,” perhaps quoting Jessica Tandy as Miss Daisy, or perhaps telling him a simple truth.

Hodder than a 2 Dollar Pistol

August 18, 2019
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Deborah Hodder has been making wonderful clay sculpture since before the year 2000, when she was given the Emerging Artist Award from the Shemer Art Center and Museum in their show of that year. She has spent this entire century diligently proving that the award was richly deserved. For myriad examples, please do an Internet search on “Deborah Hodder sculpture.”

So this is a fan letter to her, with love, respect and gratitude for her friendship and for her artistry. Many sculptors carve figures with skill and grace. Deborah sculpts souls, and she does it with quiet passion and gentle might. (Note: the phrase “gentle Might” in my poem refers to both Power and Possibility.)

I only wish this page of mine had even a shadow of the dignity and grace that Deborah has. It is barbaric. It is an awful pun on the now-dated phrase “Hotter than a two-dollar pistol,” which alludes to a cheap mail-order firearm that becomes excruciatingly hot when used. (Note that my spot illustration above is of the type of fake pistol which produces a cigarette-lighting flame when you pull the trigger.) And my drawings of her sculpture, and of her, do not begin to do them and her justice. I hope that viewers will see through the crudity to the love and respect at the heart of this thing. More than that, I hope, Friends, that you will do that search and then see and enjoy her sculpture.

Hodder than a 2 Dollar Pistol

Humanity, True Love, conductance, sleep
Of such her sculpture croons, with friendly Hi
Dimension and evolvement lives and keeps
Delineation of a gentle Might
Enshrined and hewn in clay, arpeggio
Reveals 2 us a carnival of Soul

David Knorr, Sculptor

June 22, 2019
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David Knorr is the star of the solo show “Biomorphic Conversation,” now on display at Five15Arts, in the Roosevelt Arts District in the heart of Phoenix, Arizona. Also on display with his stately and/or whimsical and/or gravity-defying sculptural works is the years of hard and focused work he has put into ceramic sculpting, an endeavor that involves a great deal of failures due to firing mishaps or glaze misbehavior or transport mishandling. The more than a dozen sizable works in the show have a flawlessness to them that belies these pitfalls of the medium.

One sculptural element that occurs in more than one piece is an array of I-beam shapes, small-scale girders in a short stack, curved possibly by the melting that occurs during firing. The curvature is a perfect example of the biomorphosis implied in the show’s title. The little girders are unsuitable for buildings but perfectly suited as support for a living, flexing thing. And the way that they stick out reminded me of the game Jenga, which involves pulling out miniature 4x4s from a tall stack of sucb without making the stack topple. This gave me the phrase “Agenda Jenga,” a happy accident that fit perfectly with the acrostic I was constructing. And the rest of the line, “fancy plain,” was another happy-accident perfect fit, which gave me a new oxymoron (I just love oxymorons!) In this case “fancy” means the same as it does in the phrase “flight of fancy.”

I hope Mr. Knorr will forgive my less-than-masterful portraiture. I’ve put his eyes too close together, and narrowed his broad, friendly face. But I think the expression works: an open, honest, convivial countenance, exuding well-earned confidence.

Distribute I-Beam-esques. OK.

Agenda Jenga, fancy plain.

Vorpal limblets two by two

Inch their way through Whimsy Moor

Demonstrating what whim’s for.

Note: “Vorpal” is a word invented by Lewis Carroll for his “Jabberwocky.” In the 70s the Vorpal Gallery mass-printed certain of M. C. Escher’s works. I and that gallery borrow Carroll’s magic.

 

Four More Demented Birds

April 17, 2019
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I am sick today, but encouraged, because yesterday I was sicker, with a cough with its claws on my throat, and a maddeningly-stuffed, impossible-to-blow nose. Thanks to rest, dried pineapple suggested by my poet friend Sharon Suzuki-Martinez, and a therapeutic breakfast at Bertha’s Cafe, I am better enough to have a realistic hope of going to work tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I’m home, getting more rest, and playing with my recently-sculpted birds the way other children play with Barbie dolls or GI Joes. This is also therapeutic.

Early in this blog-posting journey I did a segment that I think I called “Four Crazy Birds and One Demented Creator. That was six years ago. New birds, but same old Crazy.

Last-Minute Charlie Strikes Again

January 4, 2019
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Every year the Glendale Arts Council presents a juried art show in Glendale, Arizona’s Sahuaro Ranch Park. For the past few years, due to my frequent changes in residence, I haven’t received the application and notice for the show, though I’ve been in the show in every single decade since the 70s, and a few times brought home ribbons, and twice cash.

But this post is about Procrastination, not Bragging. Even when I did receive ample notice I would put off the selection and preparation of two show pieces till the last minute. I had a few day’s notice this year, and produced two pieces in advance of deadline, but due to work and reliance on public transportation was not able to get them to the receiving point in time.

So let’s have a little two-piece art show right here, Friends:

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“Appeal,” armature wire, 9″ x 7″ x 4″. Category: Sculpture.

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“Diptych in Black, White and Gray,” 11″ x 17″. Category: Mixed Media.

Critiques are welcome, Friends, and the more clinically honest, the better.

But we can’t sign off on this post yet. If I want to stop being a Last-Minute Charlie, and believe me I do, there must be an end to this dysfunctional method of preparation. One thing I could do is enter a LOT of Art Shows, not just one a year. The other possibility that comes to mind is having more of these private, blog-posted shows–say one a month. Then there is that which has not occurred to me yet. But that can wait–or can it?

 

Finishline 6th: P°E°N°G°U°I°I°I°N

November 6, 2018
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There’s an energy drink called Red Bull whose slogan is “Red Bull gives you wiiiiings,” give or take a few i’s. Since penguins already have wings, and they’re as visually whimsical as the slogan, I thought I’d throw some i’s at them and see how they liked it. They have not objected.

The original unfinished drawing was done for a 3D design class I had at Scottsdale Community College last year. It was for an assignment to sketch ideas for a cardboard stratification sculpture of an animal of our choosing. The instructor, the superheroically-named James Gamble, didn’t think the penguin form was right for the assignment, since he wanted us to have the sculpture be built on legs and build volume on the way up. He regarded the penguin as too static, even though my sketches were trying to sell that they were anything but. So he had me work from my sketches for a gorilla instead. My gorilla sculpture was a disaster. I hope to make a decent sculpture of a penguiiin some day.

As a final bit of whimsy, I drew without looking at any photo source two impossible reflections of what I tried to make look like Emma Thompson in the eyes of the penguiiin seemingly staring at the viewer (Note: penguin eyes don’t work like that. But since this is not a Penguin, but a Penguiiin, these eyes do. And that goes for all other anatomical discrepancies!). Two reasons: 1) I adore Emma Thompson–she gives ME wiiings; 2) it’s a REALLY WEIRD RIFF on the song “Bette Davis Eyes.” Ladies and Gentlemen, behold, for the first time in human history, a Penguiiin with Emma Thompson eyes. 🙂

Clean Break

March 13, 2018
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Prefatory note: I’ve just been through a breakup. No fault is assigned. I posted about the breakup on Facebook, and dozens of friends offered support and kind words. “Make a clean break,” said felinophile and caring friend Sandra. “Turn your angst into art,” said superbly talented, recent-award-winning artist, and dear friend since high school, Beth. “Make art your key love,” said sweet-natured sculptress supreme Deborah. And so this blog post comes to be.

The poem below partakes of several relationships I’ve had but tries not to be specific about who did what to whom, but also tries to avoid being a jumble of ambiguous mush. The three epigrams are of songs that the inner jukebox in my head has been playing in Scramble mode off and on since the breakup, three days and an eternity ago.

To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before
Who traveled in and out my door
I’m glad they came along
I dedicate this song
To all the girls I’ve loved before…

From “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”
Lyrics and music by Hal David and Albert Hammond
Performed by Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias

YEEAAAHH…now I’m rolling down California 5
With your Laughter in my head…
GONNA HAVE TO BLOCK IT OUT somehow
To survive,
‘Cause those dreams are dead,
And I’m alive.

From “I’m Alive”
Music, lyrics and performance by Jackson Browne

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way I feel
When every Fairy Tale comes real
I’ve looked at Love that way…

But now it’s just another show
You leave ‘em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away…

I’ve looked at Love from both sides now
From Give and Take, and still somehow
It’s Love’s Illusions I recall
I really don’t know Love
At all.

From “Both Sides Now”
Music, lyrics and performance by Joni Mitchell

Collapse of a relationship! Clench fists hang head and sob
Concoct an explanation for the heart that lost its throb
Could be that there was too much scorn upon the daily cob

Lost hope and lost respect will lose the grip of what’s held dear
Loose talk and snarky attitudes make closeness disappear
Left unattended, intimacy withers, it is clear

Entanglements then trip the feet a home becomes a cage
Enlightenment occurs to one or both to disengage

And fancy explanations all add up to Just Don’t Wanna
And then the nearness stifles like an overheated sauna

Now come finalities and benedictions–one last look
New possibilities are on the next page of the book