Friday, February 24, 2017

Box of bolts and live sculpting

Yesterday i became the 16th recipient of the bucket of bolts  (started by IG : @bucket_of_bolts).  A very cool...  thing whereupon a metal sculptor receives a box of weldable scrap,  uses that scrap to make a sculpture,  adds his creation to that ever growing log of work and then fills up a new box with scrap and sends it along to another artist and so on and so forth.  So I'm pretty excited about working with this stuff and doing something interesting with it.  Maybe even an animation will come out of it...

  But that's all happening next week,  this weekend marks another first for me,  live sculpting ...  Well not exactly a first.  Allow me to explain: having been doing this so long field work and sculpting on the go is part of my life,  but i don't usually do it at big events.  Sometimes I'll do a quick demo like we did at the library the last few years,  and one time in a particularly interesting case at a thing called family day  when i was in  israel two years ago... [cue flashback] That came about as a kind of last minute invite to take part in a family fun day oriented around kids and activities.  We ended up letting the kids design little sculptures and even weld some of them (with my direct guidance and usually my holding the nozzle of the welder and saying "squeeze")  the event was fun,  but we weren't really prepared for a mob of children all rushing to create their own piece of art while i tried in the most basic of Hebrew (really really basic)  to tell them to go slower as they weld.  Suffice to say it was not live sculpting at its finest.

  Now I'm heading down to make a specific sculpture (an anthropomorphic snowman riding an ATV *see attached photo )  at the lake George winter carnival and i think it's going to be a lot more fun (at least for me).  I've got a truck loaded with scrap and equipment.  A brand new pop up shade tent,  a shield i picked up in cali and some fresh welding screens...  My dad and my wife are joining me and will probably do some sculpting themselves.  So stay tuned for what i hope will be some pretty sweet results.

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