Work In Progress

When I started my big cloud in August last year, I didn’t know it would take over my life. In October I thought I’d be finished in November. In November I thought Christmas would see it completed. Now, as March starts, the light at the end of the tunnel is growing. And gee, it’s looking […]

I thought when I’d switched from working in marble to using epoxy, I’d left behind the bloodied fingertips. I was wrong. Yesterday, a telltale red-brown stain sullied the glorious whiteness of my newly-sanded epoxy cloud. Blood was there, because skin wasn’t. After half a day of not using gloves, my 36-grit sandpaper had done its […]

If there’s one thing I’ve larned about clouds, it’s this: you can’t nail the custards down. They just keep movin’ over the sky, shiftin’ shape like werewolves on Halloween. And danged if my own cloud ain’t goin’ the same way. Six week ago, I thought I had the shape nailed down tight. The first coat […]

Gosh, is it over a month since I posted a progress update on the making of Cloud Column?  I’m still toiling away. It may look like slow progress, because it is. For the last three weeks it’s been at the ‘filler on, filler off’ stage. Unlike Daniel-san in The Karate Kid, this has brought me […]

After the shared excitement of working alongside other sculptors in the SVA studios in Manhattan, I was apprehensive about resuming work, alone, in my home studio back in Oz. But it’s going okay. I think that’s because I’ve been able to restart work on a piece I didn’t get finished before I headed for the […]

The ‘Stuffed Figures’ series (see previous post) really kicked my work along. I experimented using some fur on one of them, and it worked okay. Then I thought, why not try covering one with fur instead of the hessian? This didn’t work – too heavy-handed – but it set me thinking about other ways to […]

One advantage of being away from home base is that an artist can try something different, free of the expectations that the work will follow on from his or her ‘usual style’. For me, the four months in the US late in 2011 provided this freedom. In fact, it almost guaranteed I’d do something different, […]

Several things struck me about the the differences between the American and Australian approaches to fine art education. Firstly, in the US there’s more emphasis on the craft of being an artist – on being able to make art, not just conceptualise it. Second, there’s also more emphasis on turning up, working hard, and doing […]