so my lizard and i have been spending some quality time together
lately. long affectionate stares,
upward dog sessions, we even shared the toilet paper once. i figured it was only appropriate that
we immediately get on a first name basis.
steve has a knack for naming (his cats are blacky and stripey), and
seeing as i came here to learn everything
from him, i went with my gut, and named my lizard cling. we are becoming fast friends. he may be tiny, but he sure gets around
my little cabin. when i’m in the
studio, he loves to hang out above my bed, front feet on the ledge of my
window, peering out. eagerly
watching for my arrival, i’m sure.
this morning when the sun woke me up, he was about 3 inches from my
face, sitting atop my book!
the weather this week made me so excited for the desert
fall, when i can light the woodstove at night and cozy up in the cabin (and up
the ante for cling & i on our romantic evenings). believe it or not, it does get cold in the desert! we had a rude awakening this week –
after 100 degree days over the weekend, a giant storm blew in foreboding clouds and a cold front off
the coast, and it’s been down to 30 at night. what we lack in rain, we make up in wind. it was so bad on wednesday that half
the desert blew into our studio and we had to spend the entire morning thursday
cleaning up shop. steve’s kinetics
were seeing a life they never knew they had!
despite that interruption, we’ve been doing a lot of
finishing this week. the three
pieces i mentioned in my last post are finally coming together. but the process has been the best part.
first of all, i had my first patina experience. steve has pretty rigid feelings about
the finish on his pieces. as with
his house, the notion is always to design a piece so it gets better with age. that generally means no heavy polishing
or shining, except in the case of stainless steel, where it doesn’t run the
risk of rusting, and the point is to be a stark contrast to the other metals,
or to rock, or what have you. even
still, we only clean up the stainless enough so you remove the heat patina
induced at the welding joints, and so the piece looks uniform (many times he is
working with recycled materials so they are dirty to varying degrees). occasionally here or there he has tried
out some natural-looking patinas and been pleased. but the goal is always to authentically reflect the
material. so steel is the one
exception where he frequently applies a patina, to induce the rusting
quickly. it looks absolutely wild
at first, and mellows into a beautiful reddish orange hue over time and
weather.
remember the 9 ft tall base i welded, and subsequently
spent 4 hours grinding to a shiny surface whilst dominating a book on
tape? that was to even out the
surface and make it rough, so the steel would accept the patina. the piece is a kinetic (one of my
all-time favorites of steve’s, i can’t stop looking at it in the studio), and
in classic steve-style, the base is a tall, clean geometric form, designed to
be a warm and evenly rusted steel.
mounted on it are two large and gleaming stainless pieces that are
wind-activated to swing and rotate in different directions. in still weather, they ultimately park
in a very carefully chosen orientation.
after all the welding, measuring, and balancing is finished, the last
step is applying the patina to the base before mounting all the pieces. this is a painfully simple but
ridiculously gratifying process.
we first made a mixture of cupric sulfate (people buy it as a root
killer for trees), which steve wide-brushed and drizzled all over the piece in
a purposely-messy manner, while i lightly heated the metal using the
oxy-acetylene torch (heat helps the chemical reaction happen). this turned the shiniest silver into a
beautiful barn red copper color, with so many incredible variations happening
that i had to actively suppress my wowww-ing in order to not sound like an
idiot in front of steve, and to focus on the torch in my hand.
next, came the exciting part. with steve i am learning that the word exciting actually
means dangerous. it’s becoming
easier and easier to see through his gentle demeanor to his
race-car-engine-building past. don’t
be deceived by his retro pink 1975 patagonia fleece or his loyal love for
birds. he’s a manly man, and a
damn tough one. you can see just
by looking at his hands. he’ll
just as soon shoot feral cats from his bedroom window (but this only to protect
blacky, of course). actually, it’s
better than that. he cocks the gun
before he goes to sleep, puts it next
to his pillow, and shoots right through the screen when he hears it in the
middle of the night, because any other wasted movements would scare the cat
before he had the chance to kill it!
(ruth is shaking her head the entire time he’s very-seriously explaining
this rationale). truth is, he learned that the hard way,
by narrowly missing the cat the first time. it drug itself, bleeding profusely, across the courtyard,
through the studio, and up the hill out onto their dirt road. the next morning he snuck out with ruth
while she was watering the cacti, and tried rinsing away the blood tracks so no
one would know! the neighbor
approaches, tracing the tracks towards the riemans’ house, and steve quickly
says, “yup! must’ve been a coyote
got’m! heads up - looks like he
was headed your way!”
anyway, the exciting part is now applying the favorite
combination of ammonia and bleach.
steve has me fill two squirt bottles up, one from a gallon of bleach
(which reads: CAUTION!! DO NOT USE
IN THE PRESENCE OF LIQUID AMMONIA), and the other from a gallon of ammonia
(which reads: CAUTION!! DO NOT USE
IN THE PRESENCE OF BLEACH). steve
chuckles, as he takes one in each hand (at least wearing gloves this time) and showers
them simultaneously over the entire metal surface, saying “whenever i see
something that says, ‘do NOT do X,’ then what i immediately run and do, is just
that!” we then take a giant old
sheet of painter’s plastic and wrap the entire thing in it, tucking it around
in no particular manner, and carefully carry the 9 foot metal body bag to the
corner of the studio to sit overnight.
i spent friday morning buffing the other two components
to this piece. they are stainless
steel composites, at least 5 feet long, which are mounted on two different
bearings atop the 9ft base.
buffing is essentially glorified dentistry, performed with a power tool on
giant metal jaws, attempting to clean the myriad of heat-induced patinas from all
the welded joints and knobs and nooks. with my safety-glassed eyes hunched 4
inches from the piece, contorting my limbs however necessary to reach each
cranny, this happens to be the one studio job where i feel like a successful
dr. welsh.
just before lunch friday, the moment of truth
arrived. we took the body bag and
the two buffed stainless kinetic pieces outside to the windiest spot on the
property, and assembled the whole thing atop a thin flat stone pedestal steve
has drilled for it. unwrapping the
plastic around the steel base revealed the most incredible rusted colors. not only is it exploding with burnt
orange and red browns, but there’s just about every color of the rainbow subtly
showing through… blacks and purples and copper greens, splattered and wrinkled
and pouring all over the surface. it
could not be a more perfect contrast to the bright stainless pieces that are
mounted atop it. we stood back 20
feet and watched the wind bring it to life, and i’m not kidding, i got
goosebumps. steve is silent for 3
minutes and then chuckles and says, “well…. sure looks a lot smaller when you
get it outside, doesn’t it?!
little puny thing…” we both
laugh.
the other main piece we’ve been working on has finally
been finished as well! this is a small
wall-hanging kinetic made out of stainless steel that i feel especially
attached to. not only is it a
piece i’ve done the majority of on my own, but it’s been a long and wild
learning process for both steve and i.
we made the round composite with the vision of it sitting atop a
3-dimensional steel horizon line of some sort. i spent hours drawing up designs, making models out of
cardboard, and actually welding together those parts, and we were continually
unsatisfied. even steve came up
with TWO brilliant 2am work session ideas that we put into action (involving
hours of measuring, machine shop-ing, and assembly) and then nixed right at the
last minute.
man, it was frustrating.
but it has taught me more about the artistic process
than almost anything, and inspired a slew of incredible discussions between
steve and i. as he loves to say,
“an artist is always a little bit unhappy”. and it’s totally true.
anyone can bring a piece to 80% or 85%. but getting that perfect finish to push the piece over the
top and make it really come together in a powerful way is truly difficult. so much hinges upon the presentation of a piece. you can make a beautiful part, but ruin
it with a careless presentation.
and vice versa. you can
take a kleenex, “even a crumpled up, used, shred
of kleenex,” says steve, but with the right presentation you can suck someone
in and convince them that what they’re looking at is the most important thing
in the room. we could have stopped
any number of places along the way, and i guarantee we’d have a piece that
everyone would have liked, and someone would have bought. but you have to go with your gut, even
though it involves working (sometimes far) backward, digging in, and dissecting,
on every level, why you are unsatisfied, what specifically is lacking, and how
to possibly fill that need. it’s
abstract problem solving, it’s mysteries and discoveries where the currency is
human sensation and emotion, and it’s that type of thinking that makes my brain
swell and surge.
needless to say, we now have a small wall hanging piece
that we are both excited about, and will be for sale at the studio tours oct
22-23.
speaking of which, forgot to tell you all about
that. every october, the famed art
community here along highway 62 opens it’s galleries and artist’s studios to
the public. they are known as the
highway 62 art tours (www.hwy62arttours.com) and
are legendary, partly because the artists who have chosen to make the desert
their home are a tremendously inspiring and unique group. the tours take place over two
successive weekends, where you can travel well over 30 miles from studio to
studio, and there is a ton of live music, performance art, and other
entertainment. steve is hosting on
the first weekend (22-23rd), and so we’ll be here at the studio
from 9am to 5pm all day saturday and sunday, schmoozing with visitors and
hopefully selling lots of pieces.
both the two pieces we finished this week will be up, as will the other
one we’ve nearly completed, which was technically our first tiny piece
together. i’m also secretly really
excited to sneak away to some of the other artists studios to visit myself.
part of what i truly admire in steve is that he mostly
creates just for himself, only in the sense that he’s not inspired or driven by
whether he’ll sell a piece or not.
people think that’s crazy. but
he’s motivated by (and he says this as he taps his chest with the tips of his
fingers) something really moving him from
within. he wants to believe, and
does believe, that even one person can make a difference. his way of making a difference or an
impact on human lives is through his art.
but that’s freaking tough.
especially as a visual artist.
for him, his pieces are sewn 6 layers deep with meaning and message, but
not everyone else sees that. how
do you move people in a powerful-enough way to really hit their heart, affect
them, inspire change? part of the
message, at least, has to come through humor. it’s the easiest way to relate to everyone, and negativity
gets you nowhere. steve says he’s
toyed with some more blatant, or more in-your-face pieces. he did a series of paintings on the
exxon valdez spill that were pretty aggressive, but they just didn’t feel like
him. we could throw a mini bulldozer
on one end of the balanced kinetic, and 3 tiny birds on the other, but then
where is the line between art and illustration? illustration answers questions, art asks them. you just don’t know…
the other night i took a hike at sunset and at moon rise,
up ryan mountain, the highest peak in joshua tree. because it’s far out in the middle of the 800,000 acre national
park, and was after a long day in the studio, i didn’t quite make it early
enough to hit the top before dark.
but i watched the colors light up the rock formations all across the
park as i gained altitude, and when the cool air was finally jet black, i
turned on my headlamp and hiked down.
i cooked some soup on a giant boulder with no one around, and stared at
the stars, still in disbelief that this is my backyard. spending hours a day with steve, living
amidst his sculptures, and being surrounded by this absolutely overwhelming
landscape makes me conscious every day that we are so human, so tiny, so unwise
for how we praise ourselves and our things, compared to how we treat each other
and this world. and in the wake of
steve jobs’ death, it’s a humbling reminder that there is no reason to settle, no
reason to listen to anyone but your inner self, and no excuse not to seek out
pursuit of something you truly, truly love.
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