kadmium

I just built a new site for Katie’s mom Betty. Her gallery bought a nice quarter-page ad in a national art magazine, and included a URL for a web site that they said they would build. The ad ran in October. The ULR for that web site still has a “Coming soon!” message on it, which is abhorrent to me.

So Katie and Betty worked to pull together a bunch of content and I put the site together over a couple of weekends. Go have a look. We’re all pretty happy with it.

http://bettyatkinson.info

The Harry Ransom Center Center at UT Austin has a complete Gutenberg bible, one of five in the US, one of twenty-two complete copies, and one of forty-eight still in existence. In conjunction with an online exhibit about the book, they’ve digitized every page of it, so you can find your favorite passages (if you can read Latin set in Gothic German type). The exhibit also includes plenty of information about the background of the Gutenberg Bible and its place in history.

viewfrommywindow.com is a new site that asks for people to post their own photographs, with one stipulation. The subject should be on the other side of a window. From the site:

We look through windows all the time. There are windows in buildings and windows in cars. Some people have to wear windows over their eyes so they can see.



Viewfrommywindow is a place to post the pictures you take through the windows you see. Whether it’s from your bathroom, the bus you take to work, or your hotel on a trip to New Zealand, upload your picture now and tell us something about it!

If you get a chance, go see this movie. It’s three hours long, has an all-Inuit cast, and it’s in Inuktitut with English subtitles. And it’s great.

The production company, Lot 47, also has a site.

Friday night was a good class. The class was getting friendly with each other and talking pretty openly about things. Most of the class had some sort of Native Alaskan background. I think there were two white guys (including me), and one black guy. Everyone else was either native or part-native. I told the class about a dream that I had the night before where I took a Bad Man mask and a Good Man mask and split them both between the upper lip and nose, then used the halves as drawer handles on a two-drawer dresser. (The idea being that when the drawers were closed, the masks would be whole, one on each side of the dresser.) I was kind of embarassed after I said it, because it suddenly occured to me that it might be offensive. These masks are considered a very important part of the native culture and you don’t monkey around with the traditional ones lightly — using them as drawer pulls would pretty much qualify as “not traditional”. Then one of the native women said, “Oh, sure. It’s always the white guys who have the good dreams!” and started laughing.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has just put up their first online-only exhibit. It’s about the German Expressionist group Die Brücke and goes into a great deal of depth discussing their motivations, styles, and methods.

Requires Flash.

No class on Monday because of the snow (we’re going to make it up on Saturday), and I’ve been too busy to get back and update, so here ya go.

My mask now looks like a mask. I’m starting to think about what decoration I might put on it. Traditionally Bad Man/Good Man isn’t painted like some other masks, but it does have feathers or hair attached to it. I’m thinking about some non-traditional attachments, like bolts and wires, but I’m not sure yet.

Oh, and pictures of the mask after Class 6 and Class 7. The earlier pictures will be posted after I send the film in.

More attention to detail tonight. I defined the lips pretty well, because the inside of the mouth is going to be the low point of the compound arc that makes up the face. So to keep from making anything else too low, I needed to establish that line. After that was well set, I set about redefining the cheeks. They were too large and too tall, so lots of whittling down.

I moved a lot of wood tonight. And gave myself a nifty-looking bruise on my left forearm.

Tonight I formed the basic compound arc of the face. I mostly used a gouge and a mallet, which required holding down one end of the block while I whacked at the opposite end. Because of the way I’m set up to work, I couldn’t clamp the piece and ended up leaning on it with my left arm while driving the gouge with my right. I now have a 4” long, 2” wide bruise from the equal and opposite reaction. Art hurts.

Much progress tonight, although it was more mental than anything else. I did remove a pile of wood from my block, but most of it was in the back – the part that has to be hollowed out so you can wear the mask. One of the issues of working with a big chunk of wood like this (about 10” long x 7” wide x 5” thick) is cracking, and one of the primary causes of cracks differences in moisture content throughout the block due to density. As you remove wood from one area of the block, you need to remove it from the opposing area to keep things balanced. So I spent this evening taking primarily removing wood from the back of the mask to balance all the rough work that I did on Monday.

Class tonight basically involved each student deciding which of two masks he or she wanted to carve. Our choices are “Spirit of Driftwood”, which is a very simple mask with one difficult compound curve or one of the set of “Good Man/Bad Man” masks, which is considerably more complex. (If I can find images of each to scan, I will.) Bob and Joe encouraged people with little or no experience in carving to start with the “Spirit of Driftwood”, but of course I couldn’t. I had to start with the complicated one. I actually think it’ll be okay because the primary difference between the two is the complexity of the forms, not the complexity of the carving itself.

This week I started a class in Inpuiaq mask carving being offered by the Alaska Native Heritage Center here in Anchorage.