Over the river and through the woods

 Took the journey out to just east of Marshall, California to select a couple of pieces of wood for the next object to make.

 

For future readers, California had some record setting rains for the past couple weeks, my journey to see Sensei Shively, the wood guy was on one of the sunny days between downpours.  Hence the title of this post.  Water everywhere and downed trees.

I had emailed ahead to talk about the object I'm making so there were three piles of different woods for me to look over by the time I got there.

Some Black Acacia, Bay Laurel and California Sycamore.  All local, it's like tree to workshop to finished piece all from a hundred mile radius.

I chose the Sycamore.  Will be exciting, I've never worked with Sycamore before.  Will be like a new lover, finding out things, discovering how to approach and finesse and coax.  Give and get.

I can only resaw to a little over 16" (410mm) and rather than battling that initial hurdle, I had Shively's guy resaw one piece down for me.

Bringing the one piece down to the smallest of the bandsaws.

Mike is the man who ran the saw for the last wood I got from here.  He cut that in 2011 so he's been doing this for awhile here at Arborica.

I was a bit surprised to see Mike using a ruler to measure.  He said the machine was built in Poland (I think) and is in Metric and still prefers Imperial.

Since we're down to one small city car at this point, the wood must be delivered.  Coming tomorrow.

Bonus Pic!

Forgot to add this in the last post below.  A real live photo set!!!

Akira!

 

 

 MakerUnknown says don't do it, it's off brand, it's not who I am.  That's Art World stuff, not maker stuff.

But I say,  MakerUnknown, your personal philosophy on life allows for inconsistencies within that philosophy.  Sun will come up tomorrow just as always.

I'm titling the chair.  Putting a title on it and a price tag just like an artist does!

MU says, Ok, but if you do, we gotta make it performative art to title it.  We have to snub at the whole idea.  That'll put it back on brand.

Akira!

$999, 999. 99

Wood, leather, glue, ceramic finish, foam, linen thread, beeswax, spit and blood.

One pic here and then I'm sending you to somewhere else to see other photos.  More Here.

And He Saw that it was Just OK.

 Slowly starting the leather on the chairs.  Well, maybe just one chair.  The second one I'm somewhat ambivalent about finishing it up.  Still not sure about it.  Definitely there's been some lapses of technical quality of the work.  I guess that's ok.  It is what it is.

A barely ok photo of the side view.

The back stiffening piece.

With one coat of finish.

Yeah, so I put the finish on both of the chairs.  This is a new to me formula.  A ceramic very low sheen finish out of Japan.  Very easy to apply and I really how it looks.  Subtle, understated.

The only place in the U.S. of A. to buy it is here. Hassui Ceramic.

This is the Hassui on the arms of the first chair.

Leather.

Bonus pics

Did a roadtrip for Thanksgiving.  I took exactly four photos of the whole trip.

Autumn colors in Oregon.

 Caught in the Act

We need to talk about the chairs

 

It's been such a long time ago I've forgotten where I left off.

The most curved of the forms gave me a bit of a problem with the first two glue ups so I modified the process.  I wanted to present to the vacuum bag a pre-rolled so to speak.  Have the bundle already 95% bent around the form before putting it in the bag.  Probably overdid it but the process of doing something IS the reason I'm doing it.

I did a formal photo shoot of all sixteen bent shapes in the raw, how they came out of the form.

One from the shoot.

Trimmed and straighten the pieces, begin to block up final positions and mark the joints.

The seat and the back had to be glued together.

The concave portions I found best to work with a cabinet scraper first.

Sawing the long half joints.  Some of these were not my finest work by the way.

Here working out armrest and leg positions.

Looking at it with the armrests partially pushed into final position.  Before leg position has been finalized.

Wedging the through tenons on the arms.

And in a final last minute decision, I completely abandon how I've been sketching the leg attitude for months.  The legs splay out from the center.

 

This is where I will leave this until later.  The next chair will use the same bent pieces but I want to change up the next chair sculptural aspects a bit.  I’m thinking of rounding it more.  After that is taken to this point, the leather work will begin for both.

Upside Down

 

 

 

 

Before I get to Upside Down.  One thing that isn't upside down is the five year tradition of getting the tintypes done.

They and the process have a precious gravity to them.  You can feel age and what gravity does to age.

Made some frames.

Sometime ago I bent down to pick something off the sidewalk and looked up.  The world was upside down.  It startled me.  One, well, the visual thing but two, was for decades I looked at the world visually upside down.  I had forgotten.

The simple lens in a view camera turns what it sees upside down and reversed on the ground glass. At first the upside down view throws you off, you turn your head to try and right the image.  But at some point I realized that the upside down view was accepted by me as normal.  If I thought it about while viewing the ground glass, even for a fraction of a second, it would flip back to being upside down.

I hadn't pulled the view camera out for a couple years now so thought I'd look at things upside down again.

What's upside right now ain't no view of the world.  The world itself has flipped.  Lies become truth,  wet becomes dry,  cold is now hot.  Maybe it's the swing of the big pendulum.  Maybe it because of the inherent failings of humans.

Squaring up a seat portion of the chairs.

It was an interesting process.  I did this job once with the 8x10.  For the shot, we bought a used car, rented five cars with drivers and transported that down to an animal trainer's facilities in Salinas.  He had a elephant we rented the elephant to sit on the front portion of the used car in a parking lot with rented cars scattered in the lot.

So I shot that with the 8x10 clamped to the handrail of a cherrypicker with sun starting to set.  I don't know how I did that after trying to move it around in the studio these past few weeks.

It's packed away again.  Tried to give it away somewhat recently to Henry.  He sort of said no thanks.

Anyway......rambling.   Had a party here, T&N's Burner Crew.

My name in Ice!

The harvest of 3003 of the last of summer.

And the first rain. 

And roses from the front.

To finish up.  Early morning sun on the espresso machine.

And the world in the process either of righting itself or the other way round.  I can't tell from the photo.