The continuing story of the making of a green vase.

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Openness, transparency and the sharing of knowledge is the ethos of much of the internet and social media. In that spirit, I am trying my hand at "open source" sculpture and write histories of my sculptures. Perhaps you will find it useful. This is the history of a "crazy" vase

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Not too long ago, struggling with my work more than usual, I wondered if and how to continue. Two things happened. First I tossed out the rulesand limitations I had set for myself 20 years ago and decided to experiment with different media. The recent development of powerful (but affordable) computers and software allowed me to try my hand at animation, almost the opposite of sculpture in every way. Secondly, to help me find my way again, I gathered images of my central influences and worked them in sketches and watercolors. Reviewing my artistic sources with renewed attention, I copied them, hoping to find clues to the work's underlying spirit. What had attracted me to these images in the first place? I decided to simplify and isolate shapes. The starting point for "hairtoextraholly" was to morph other artists' shapes into mine and back again. As if mimicking the emotional process of influence would point to the resolution of my artistic crisis. --Read More

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A Quicktime movie of an excerpt of a partially completed stop-action animation. This excerpt incudes music and is composited into "live-action" shots of ink spreading on watercolor paper.

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A Quicktime movie of an excerpt (1) of a partially completed stop-action animation.

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A Quicktime movie of an excerpt (2) of a partially completed stop-action animation.

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A Quicktime movie of an excerpt (3) of a partially completed stop-action animation.

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A Quicktime movie of an excerpt (4) of a partially completed stop-action animation.

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A Quicktime movie of an excerpt (5) of a partially completed stop-action animation.

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I have been thinking about tips, the end of things, the end of objects. From a certain point of view an object ends everywhere its surface meets the space around it. There are also some areas of a shape where we feel it ends more than others, for instance, the edge of a box where two planes meet. But I concentrate on the area of an object we call the tip. (Once you begin to talk about this in an abstract way "tip" becomes difficult to define. "Beginning" and "end" are truly abstract concepts when it comes to physical shapes. Do our bodies begin at our feet and end at our heads? Or do they begin at our heads and end at out feet? Or even do they begin at our skin and end at our skeleton.) When we say "tip", however, we know what we mean. If an object "ends" everywhere, still we feel that it ends at a specific locale, which is often called the tip... the very end. The end of fingers, toes, penis or nipple, the steeple of a church and the point of a knife are all tips. --Read More

note: this is work-in-progress and is kind of a mess... patience, please.

For each of my websites, I create a website on my own computer that exactly mirrors the online version. This is a tutorial that shows you how to set up your computer so it works like a webserver. I make all changes on the local website and test them before they are uploaded to remote websites. There are a few other tutorials that will tell you how to create virtual hosts on your Mac, but this is meant for people with little experience who need step-by-step instructions. I hope it is helpful.

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