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November 8, 2020
As some of you may know I’ve been talking about developing a new body of work for a few years now. I’ve even made attempts to start with some jewelry (though that momentum seems to have fizzled for the time being) and kinetic wall sculpture (which never got much beyond the stage of basic mechanics). For the past several weeks I’ve been trying again, this time with the project I’ve really wanted to do, but could never figure out how to make money doing. As I’ve mentally committed myself to stick with this I realize documenting the process might be of some worth or interest to share with others so I shall attempt to do it here.
First off let me say this whole thing feels very disorganized in my head. I’m struggling with how to approach it, what to do first, how to structure it, what do I want to get out of it, what do I want others to be getting out of it? Even this new section documenting it leaves me scratching my head as to how to present the information. Keeping it all in one long, ongoing page will likely get unwieldy before long. I’ve realized though that I just need to start something and adjust as I go along or else it may not ever get going. So I think I shall try structuring this section with this landing page being were I’ll write about the overall struggles. Then I’ll make subsections over on the right hand side you can click on for more about focused areas of the project.
As I write this I don’t even have an official title for the work. I’ve been generally calling it the “Domino Block Project” or the “Tip Over Block Project”. I think if I said it was a Domino Rally thing more people would know what I was talking about right away, but Domino Rally is actually a specific brand name for toys to do the same sort of thing. I had some of the Domino Rally toy sets as a kid back when this project really started for me, but I have no plans to utilize them in the modern reincarnation. Honestly as a kid I much preferred real dominos to the Domino Rally tip over blocks. The real dominos were much more stable and substantial making them far easier and more satisfying to play with.
You may have a general sense of what I’m looking to do at this point. Tip over blocks set up on edge where one falling over hits another causing it to fall, hitting another, and so one in a long chain reaction. This sort of thing has fascinated me for most of my life for some reason. I tried unsuccessfully to reincarnate the project in my later years in college. One thing I did observe in that attempt is that many people from all walks of life seemed to be fascinated with it too, at least in terms of watching them tip over. Most seemed to think I was a bit nuts spending all the time carefully setting them up. They might be right! 🙂
Others have certainly done this. You can go on YouTube and find many videos of “Domino Rallies”. While certainly intriguing, often entertaining, and sometimes highly popular with millions of views, my artistic self usually finds these other set ups lacking. They seem to be all about mass numbers of blocks going from one “trick” to the next which is all well and good. However, I want to do something that involves fewer numbers of blocks but a MUCH higher level of visual design and beauty.
This project isn’t fully envisioned in my minds eye just yet, but again I realize that won’t happen until I actually start doing it. I do have some sense of what I want though, or at least what I think can possibly be incorporated into it. I’d like to make this utilizing as much scrap material as I can. So the blocks themselves are made out of scrap bits of lumber from back in the days when I was making blank books with hardwood covers, or doing other woodworking. This would generate lots of little bits I hated to throw away. Well if it was large enough to get a block .5″ x 1″ x 2″ out of I would use it. So I already have thousands of hardwood blocks made, or at least cut that I’ve saved from my college days. (Many of them still need an oil finish applied.)
Being primarily a metalsmith for the past 2 decades I naturally intend to keep using these metalworking skills, as well as some of mountains of scrap copper sheet I have left from cutting out hundreds upon hundreds of disks for my vessels. I’m envisioning lots of gadgets crafted mostly from metal to transition the tip over action around corners, up and down levels, and through various obstacles. I can also see those kinetic sculpture ideas that recently failed to launch into a new body of work getting rolled into this one.
I can see lapidary work getting involved. In fact yesterday I had my tile saw out and was cutting up some rocks and stone tile remnants into parts I feel might be useful. There might even be some stone tip over blocks. Specifically I had a few scraps of white marble tile left over from doing my bathroom floor years ago that easily cut up into blocks. That got me thinking that I could probably find sources for similar left over bits that otherwise get tossed to make even more blocks. I’m not sure about that right now as I write this, but we shall see.
As a child I had a bunch of wooden play building blocks that I would use to create structures for my domino runs to go over, up, down, and around. I want something similar for the current project, but more tailored for use with the tip over blocks and able to be adapted to many sorts of configurations. I think I’ve got this part figured out now and it will likely be one of the first subsections over on the right hand side of the page.
I can see this project utilizing drawings, or maybe even paintings. I used to do a ton of drawing. It’s something I credit with helping me develop my artistic abilities generally in a much faster way than I would have if I had just been doing metalwork. However, I feel bad that I haven’t done any serious drawing in years now. The vessel work and life in general seemed to take over and push that part of me out. I want to bring it back.
So I’ve had a general idea of what I want to do. I’ve had this idea for years to be honest. It’s one I can’t ever seem to let go of, yet also couldn’t do. What’s been stopping me? Lots of things, many of which I believe are the unappreciated challenges artists often struggle with. This is part of what I feel like I should be sharing, the struggles and fears involved in creating a new body of work.
I feel like the biggest thing that has been holding be back is fear, or rather fears since I’m really scared of many different things. For the longest time I’ve been able to tell myself my economic fears around this are very rational and wise. As I noted above, and you may have realized already, I don’t really know how I can make money doing this project. It’s essentially an installation… no, that’s not right. It’s really more of a performance piece and I don’t know how to monetize this. The fearful voice inside my head has been telling me, “You CAN NOT do this until you are financially independent and fully retired because there is no money to be made here!!” I’ve been listening to this voice and telling it that it is wise. Maybe it really is wise, but I’m going to be telling it to be quiet for a while. Over on my blog website, theartisthomestead.com, I’ve written about many of the various financial management techniques I’ve been using. This has put me in a position where my savings/passive income streams are large enough in proportion to my very most income needs that I can safely take a year off from paid work. So this is what I intend to do. Covid-19 sort of helped me make this decision in that it has all but stopped sales of my work through galleries, and cancelled my workshops. So in taking time to do this now I’m not really risking much income loss, since income generation has been minimal already. (Does this sound like I’m trying to rationalize things to my fearful inner being screaming “YOU COULD LOSE IT ALL!!!!” Yeah, it sounds like that to me too.)
I wish money was the only fear involved in this, but it may actually be the least of my inner fears. I used to be good with all sorts of artistic media. Then I really focused and developed a mastery with my vessel work. I’ve had a whispering of fears in my mind for years now that people are becoming less interested in my vessels, coupled with stronger fears that I’ve lost all my abilities outside of the vessels. That doubting voice says, “You’re really just a one trick pony.” So I’ve tried pushing into new areas to prove this voice wrong and instead seem to confirm these fears when I find my former skills are certainly rusty. None the less I am committing myself to stick with this for a year or so. Even if I never find a way to generate any income from it seems like I will grow from forcing myself to relearn some old skills, developing some new skills, and hopefully even begin to master some of them.
I have more fears and much more to say about this project, but I find I’m running out of the mental bandwidth to keep composing thoughts into words. An idea occurred to me that perhaps a good way to structure some of this documentation is as a sort of diary or journal entry format. This way it can perhaps convey some of the chaos and disorder I’m struggling with as I work to create a polished understandable art experience. My approach to the project right now is to tackle a little bit one day at a time, hopefully tying things together and making connections as I go along. Doing this documenting as journal entries would be the same type approach, though I may not be making daily entries.
So I think I’ve accomplished my main goal for the day on this website documentation portion of the project. I’ve gotten it started. The empty canvas has the first marks which I can now build off of. There should be much more to come so please keep checking back if this at all interests you.
November 10, 2020
It’s late and I need to get to bed, but I wanted to share a short thought I had today. As I’m working on this project here in the beginning I am in a completely different head space from where I’ve been for years now with my vessel work. In my studio work making the vessels, because I’ve been doing them for so long it is no longer about what I refer to as the craft of making. By this I mean working out the tools and techniques I need to master to develop the vision. I have those techniques all figured out to the point where I don’t have to think about how I’m going to make the vessel. Rather I would just be focusing on what I was going to make, or the “art” part of it. Then it was just a matter of doing the labor.
With this tip over block project right now pretty much all I am doing is focusing on the craft part of it. I’m trying to work out the basics of the various elements I’ll need in terms of mechanics and then developing ways to make them efficiently. I’m spending a lot of brain power thinking about what tools to use, what sort of jigs I could make, what the basic materials are that I’ll use for the various elements, and how can I best go about physically making the objects. There is a tiny bit of the “art” in deciding what the look will be for what I’m thinking of as the basic core units but the real decorations and variations will come later. It might even end up that the strongest visual elements of the installations aren’t going to be the gadgets but rather purely decorative drawing and sculptural elements incorporated among them.
Where that leaves me right now as I work on this is with feelings of not getting enough done in terms of physical things made because so much time is spent developing the initial prototypes, making jigs, and coming up with systems to make multiples. Things are also not developed far enough for me to be happy with the aesthetics overall, thus I tend to be in a critical unsatisfied space most of the time. This in turn fuels my fears and feelings of failure. I need to keep reminding myself that it’s too early to make such judgements.
Still I like my work to hold up visually whether one is focused in on small details or pulled back taking in everything overall. What I’ve done right now doesn’t meet this desire yet. As I type this I also realize I haven’t yet done any finish work on a single gadget to see what it might look like with consistent surface finishes and patinas. I should probably do that soon. My vessels often don’t look all that great before the final finish work either.
January 11, 2021
So if you’ve been trying to follow along with this project development you’ll know I’ve been absolutely miserable in keeping up with this website documentation portion. I’ve got no great excuses. I just haven’t had the motivation. Motivation in general is something I’ve been struggling mightily with for many weeks now. I just haven’t been finding my way with this. I keep getting little glimmers of things I like, just enough to keep me going it seems, but usually the next day I’m thinking it’s all stupid and a waste of time.
I had a bit of a breakthrough a few weeks back. I had been planning this to be a floor based project, with grid beam structures created to bring the action up into the 3rd dimension more. I’ve spent a lot of time making the grid beam, and then more playing around with structures I could make. I was trying to get a sense of what I can do with it, how to design them to be visually appealing and fun to play on. I was hating them all, but trying to tell myself that once I’d developed more parts, like how to incorporate drawings or panels, these structures would look much better. That might have been true but it wasn’t getting there.
My breakthrough was to acknowledge how I’m most comfortable designing, and that is in layers. It’s less of a full 3-D sort of approach as it is a low relief type thing. With my vessels I certainly do consider how the lines and forms move all around the piece, but in the end I’m still just designing and chasing in a low relief pattern that loops back on itself as it goes fully around the vessel.
I had wanted to do some domino runs that went along grid beams mounted to the wall at some point in the project. What I realized was that if I focused on the wall as my base to work off instead of the floor everything got transformed, in my mind at least, into the layered sort of designing I’m more comfortable and familiar with.
There are other benefits to the project from this approach too. It seems to shift the feeling of the blocks falling over from a more destructive act to a more playful one. It makes what I’m doing with dominoes stand out a bit more from all the other domino artists since they by and large focus on floor tricks. It makes finding venues for larger installations a tad easier since suitable walls are much more common than suitable floors. My knees are also not happy with me crawling around on the floor like they used to be!
All that said, I’m still sitting here at the end of this day thinking, “Stupid stupid stupid. This is all looking like crap and a big waste of time.” I’m not sure if this is me seeing the truth, or if it’s my ego accustomed to my work being of a much higher caliber rebelling against the thought that I can’t pick up any art project and master it with no effort. I just don’t know. I had spent some time last week with my “normal” work, chasing a vessel. It was soothing, comforting, and satisfying to do. For the moment I plan to keep on with this domino block project, but I’m less certain I’ll be sticking with it for a full year. I need to find some confidence it’s getting somewhere for me sustain that level of effort.
Your work is beautiful and deserves a wide audience. You long ago passed the point of failure; you have achieved mastery. The rest is development and playful exploration. Enjoy your exploration of new avenues of expression.
Thanks so much Leah for your kind words. I have been remiss in keeping this documentation of the development updated. I still struggle with whether or not to continue with it, yet also keep picking away, making slow progress. I finally feel like I have a way to approach it I can wrap my brain around and will now hopefully start bringing in more of the artistry I was (vaguely) envisioning with this project.