Looking for Cool

Old clay: Mateo.
10/30/2015
Art class assignment.

Double Trouble

I've been teaching doppelgangers in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, so why not one of my own?
Matt and Mateo.

You know, my mother once told me she had seen my double earlier in the day.
I was rather affronted.
I mean, my mother, me, a double?
She should have known better, don't you think?

Summer Profile Pics

Loving Kealakekua Bay!

Floating.  Hawaiian waters: no neoprene!

Total lack of self-consciousness.  

NorCal Neoprene: armored against the cold.

Mendocino.

Studio time:
Matt & Mateo.

Archery lessons in the Gold Country.

Face your inner fish?
Foggy free diving on the Sonoma Coast; I brought a friend.
Two pursuits converge with a smile.

Face in the Mirror

I once went on a camping trip to Fish Lake and didn't shave for a week, which meant I didn't look at my face in a mirror for a week.  We were in the woods, so no shop windows to check my hair, no car windows to glance at my reflection.  Sure, I could have looked at my face in the surface of the lake, just as Eve did after God had created her--and she saw an absolutely beautiful creature, so beautiful that Adam was a real let-down when she first saw him--but I didn't think to look at my face in the water while fishing.  I don't think I would have had an Eve-like experience anyway.

Instead, I was surprised when I got home at the end of the week, staggered into the bathroom, exhausted from a long day hiking, swimming, and fishing and from an 8 or 9 hour drive, and stood in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, reaching for my toothbrush and toothpaste.  (And yes, I'd been brushing all week long; don't get distracted from my story.)  So, a week away from a mirror and when I looked I saw a stranger.  I saw myself as I guess I really am.   I saw the wideness of my jawbones, the narrowness of my chin, the skinny roundness of my nose, the shaggy eyebrows, the bright blue eyes.  I saw all that and the rest from a different perspective, a perspective not governed by my own ideas of myself, not governed by the way I'd always thought of my face (unremarkable, but mine).  

I looked in that mirror, and I saw myself, but only for a moment, a flash of sight, and then there was just me, just Matt, looking back at me, a slightly quizzical look on my face as if that reflected self were amused by all that had passed so swiftly through my brain.  'Thinking too much again,' Mirror-Matt said, 'It's just you and me here.'  

I looked frankly at myself in that mirror, and I laughed.

--entry found in an old notebook back in 2014

(lightly edited)

Profile Pics

Foreground; Background

Easy Rider

Mateo: Three Faces (Naked, Hoplite, Diver)

Mateo in Morning Light.

As with living humans, that light can show nakedly the signs and emblems of age.

I think I did a fair job of capturing some of me at fifty, though in other ways this piece is a younger me and/or not me quite at all.  (If that's confusing, that's the Gemini coming through.)

Piece sculpted in a Self-Portrait Class: Summer 2011.

I've posted shots of this figure in the past on this blog.  

Hit the "Mateo" label-link below to see the other shots and commentary, if you'd like.

Mateo as Hoplite / Greek Warrior.

I use the helmet as a visual aid, seriously and/or humorously, when teaching Homer's epics or any of the Greek tragedies.

Mateo: Free Diver.

That's an old mask from the '80s.  Note the side ports for greater range of vision while diving.

This particular mask I picked up and gave to my father to encourage him to swim laps.  He didn't like the feel of standard swim goggles, so I suggested such a mask.  When he didn't pick one up for himself, I made a gift of this one.  I don't think he ever used it more than once or twice, at best.

Mateo: sculpture mix; denim glazing, poured over and mostly wiped off.

For the record, I'm not crazy about the end results here, but making this piece -- the largest single clay piece I've ever made -- has taught me much, not least about envisioning outcomes and artistic control.   The pallor is slightly disturbing, and the shininess of the blue seems just a bit too much.  I am not sure what I had expected or imagined when I glazed the piece.  And yet, Mateo strikes me as a very undersea  fellow, as a merfolk stand-in, which seems quite suitable too.

Anticipation

Portrait of the Artist as a Gemini

Alter Ego and Friends: Poetry and Clay

ALTER EGO

The boy from Uplyme with his smile

Who stands on cliff-tops staring down:

One stares as well. The sea is barren.

And the beach. But still he stares.

Branches of sloe and bullace

Cloud his dark, his idiot eyes.

Always he wears the vacant smile

Of happy mongoloids and kings.

One day he turned and spoke to me.

I'm John, he said. I like it here.

--John Fowles

Inishboffin on a Sunday morning.

Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.

One by one we were being handed down

Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied

Scaresomely every time. We sat tight

On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,

Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking

Except the boatman, as the gunwales sank

And seemed they might ship water any minute.

The sea was very calm but even so,

When the engine kicked and our ferryman

Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,

I panicked at the shiftiness and heft

Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us--

That quick response and buoyancy and swim--

Kept me in agony. All the time

As we went sailing evenly across

The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,

It was as if I looked from another boat

Sailing through air, far up, and could see

How riskily we fared into the morning,

And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.

--Seamus Heaney, from "Seeing Things"

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow

And wished that others held the same opinion;

They took it up when my days grew more mellow,

And other minds acknowledged my dominion.

Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow

Leaf', and imagination droops her pinion;

And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk

Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,

'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,

'Tis that our nature cannot always bring

Itself to apathy, for we must steep

Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,

Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep.

Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;

A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.

--Lord Byron, from the fourth Canto of his Don Juan

Mateo: sculpture mix; selective denim glazing; scarf. Summer 2011.

The poetry was selected in the usual fashion, intuitively, as an unlikely set of verses that still seemed to fit together somehow. Or, the poetry was chosen by fitness, for contrast, and as proxy or emulation. I've referred to Heaney's anxieties while afloat here, and I'll repeat that I do not share such nervousness. I admire his writing, and Fowles', and Byron's, of course.

Playing With Clay: Duck-Fish and Company

The duck-fish.

"Mateo" is out of the kiln, but he's not finished. I need to reglaze . . . or take him up north and place him in a tide pool for Poseidon.

More pieces glazed, but waiting for the kiln.

"The Two Orchard Thieves"

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, --what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man received money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition.

--Melville's Ismael, Moby Dick: Chapter 1 Loomings.

Adam and Eve?

The hair on the figure to the right made that connection for me.

That's my Mateo on the left, waiting for the next round in the kiln.

Kiln-Ready: Mateo

Mateo is headed into the kiln this Wednesday. I can count at least fifty flaws, but I'm going to bake him, if nothing else than as a glaze test.

After he comes through the fire, I'll have to consider the specific glazing. Not sure, yet.

Alter Ego

Once "Mateo" dries, I can put him into the kiln. After bisquing, I'll have to make decisions about glazing. Not sure which vibe to go for, just yet.

Probably something amphibious or aquatic.

The piece has lots of flaws, but then so do I.

(His head isn't big enough, quite --at least, the back of it-- and my head's probably too big. Or, it has been. Just one example . . . .)

"Mateo" Is Taking Shape

"Self-Portrait in Clay" class at the ASUC Art Studio.

I see about twelve flaws, without trying, so I'll look away for now.

Tomorrow, I'll approach the piece in a constructive mood.

Still in-progress, by the way.

Or, maybe I'm done, flaws and all.

P.S. As a boy, my mother often called me "Mateo," and that was my name in the three years of Spanish classes.

And, if this is any kind of a self-portrait, it's of and from a younger self.

Looking at Fifty

I swear that this work-in-progress must weigh about fifty pounds. That's how it felt when I attempted to lift the sculpture up and onto a shelf about head-high.

This piece is not entirely a self-portrait, and it's not entirely not one either.

I've made at least half a dozen "heads": Odysseus, Julius Caesar, Nefertiti, the Merman, the Frogman, and a nameless one or two.

And, I've made half a dozen "shoulders." This will be the first time I've actually attached a head to a set of shoulders. I'm not entirely sure why I've waited this long.

The "headless" pieces caught my attention for a few years, and there's one that seems the perfect self-portrait for age 47. I've posted photos of that one, I'm sure.

Earlier today, my oldest brother reminded me of something Marco Polo said that seems well worth remembering: "The bold don't live forever, but the timid don't live at all."

That saying will be what I hear from now on as the kids play at the local pool: Marco . . . POLO, Marco . . . POLO, Marco . . . POLO. Or, timid . . . BOLD, timid . . . BOLD, timid . . . BOLD. Something like that, anyway.