Off The Wall Project

We have a 'sculpture wall' in the wood shop, a wall dedicated as a gallery wall, mainly for hanging student wall pieces and paintings for documentation.

I clean and patch the wall up and paint it once a semester. Since there are no classes this summer (attendance numbers for art are WAY DOWN), I've a nice clean freshly painted 12 foot by 7 foot gallery wall to play with.

I started making wall pieces using slip cast clay forms housed in wood frames. I stopped with three pieces, but I like where they are going, and so have decided to decided to create an installation piece.

We'll see how long my enthusiasm lasts.

Off The Wall #4

Off The Wall #5

The idea is to fill up a 5 foot by 10 foot section of the wall with these wall pieces.

The start of the Off The Wall installation piece

Hopefully, they will end up in some coherent composition, but I'm letting them go up one by one and build up 'organically' (as artists are won't to say).

Open space remaining

I'm still working on wax figures for bronze, and probably this next set of figures will be the last of the "Towards a Modern Arcanum" series (see my website).

I'm also continuing with the cast glass critters. I'm trying to get a 3x3 collection of cast glass pieces in  a good looking composition that I can offer up for exhibition to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

We'll see how that goes.

Other things. I'm teaching my 8 week metal casting class. (My proposed mold making class feel through for lack of numbers). My class rosters are all returning students, so I said, well, sandbox time, what do you guys want to do? They want to learn how to make molds.

So, I am teaching them single and multipart plaster molds, and silicone rubber molds as well. Some are very excited, and I can already tell there will be a lot of waxes made from these molds come the fall class. That's fine.

That was the whole idea. Bump 'em all up to the next level of technique and vision. This kind of teaching - of transferring the shit in my brain to theirs, so that hopefully at least one of their brains is smarter than my brain - is the most fun of all.