What do you really know about me? Here is something; I like to walk on the beach with my eyes shut. My feet can feel the water on one side, and the dry sand on the other, and the firm wet sand between. I can go a long way like this, feeling my way along, trusting, resting my eyes, (the hungry eyes). I’ll peek after a few minutes, just to check where I am, but I’m always fine where I am. It is so restful to do this. One day this week I walked ten miles down the beach at Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, but not with my eyes shut the whole time. Wouldn’t it be great someday to do that?

While paddling with my friend K., I had this thought: Great lives are not the same as the lives of the great. The lives of the great follow a plan, tell a story and reach a goal. Great lives are made of beautiful moments of experience, without direction or conclusion. In that way, they are not novels or biographies, but are better told as small stories of wonderful moments spent of an afternoon, or a single day’s joy in glorious Nature, a brightness of shared companionship, simple contentedness, or personal achievement, known only to one’s self. Great lives are like a collection of photographs which capture the memories of the profound experiences of living itself.

Me, thinking “what to make next?”

The finish is the finish – I paint on 5 wet coats all over with a foam brush, keeping it wet the whole time, the wood just soaking it up, until I began to see it slightly puddle- up on the sides. The end grain can soak up everything. Then I wipe down the wood with a cloth before it gets sticky, so it doesn’t dry shiny and wet looking. This warmed up the color and took away the dry look of the raw wood. I let it dry for a week, looking at it, thinking.

I used some ultra-secret 3000 grit sandpaper that comes on a thin foam backing, kind of like a mega-fine 3M pad (thanks Garry), to buff down the fine hairs and grain raised by the application of the first coat, especially around the equator of the piece where the grain is flat and difficult to chisel as sharply and cleanly as on the end grain at the top and bottom. The trick is not to dull the sharp edges of the chisel marks which are so nice, and this special sanding pad can do it much better that I could do on the practice piece with regular 2000 grit paper. This gave those areas a much “harder” surface, without the vaguely distracting fuzz of the loose hairs, which as hard as they are to see, still create a lack of visual sharpness.

I applied a second coat, this one thinned about 10% with mineral spirits and wiped on lightly with a cotton cloth – an old t shirt. This is all mostly automatic since of course I’d done some testing before. It is worth all that rehearsal so as not to be a nervous wreck when doing the real work. I like adventure, but I suppose I like most adventure which leads to success.

This morning I heard and saw geese flying north.

I had a dream I was waiting at the bus stop, when a miraculous blue bird flew by. About the size of a crow and light blue, slightly iridescent. It came around and landed on my left shoulder, leaned in, and wrapped its azure  wings around my head, covered my eyes and held me there. People saw it and called out to each other, “Look!”. I stood still, safe behind those soft smooth feathers, for a long time. The bus came. I had to get on. The bird changed into a cat and I put it inside my coat.

I take it means I should disregard the World,  close the eyes and look within myself. What I find there I should take to heart and protect. The bird is my muse, the bus is the World, my coat is my heart.

Inspired by tattoo and comic book artists, and designer toys, I wanted to make a sculpture I could self-market at a reasonable price. Here is my Twisty sculpture – Hand cast in resin (urethane) plastic in several colors, each is unique. To see more, goto http://artblabla.wordpress.com/

Yellow Twisty

YELLOW TWISTY

Translucent Amber-Yellow

One foot has a red mark

8 inches

$75.00