Break Week 18
A mere two weeks of not being in school are left, and then it’s back to work. I look forward to that. My brain is grinding on some vague ideas for 3D wall art that I hope to work with in one or another of my classes. Assuming that is possible within the curriculum the instructors have planned, of course. I’ll see how that goes.
In the meantime, I am still in full on Summer mode, doing not nearly enough and wasting time. But that’s OK. I know what happens that first week in September: advanced ceramics takes over my life.
Now, that being said, I have done a couple of things in the past week that you might find interesting. Well, maybe slightly interesting? OK, no, probably not, but they are all I have this week, so…
First off, here’s the entirety of my art output:
What you see there is a stack of the canvases I painted in my intro painting class that have been covered with gesso. That’s right, all of my intro painting class works are now gone. Unrecoverable. I actually feel good about that. None of those paintings were any good, and now I can re-use the main materials.
Also, at the bottom of that stack are two weird things I’ve setup where I put grout on cloth, then put that over a canvas frame. The result is a rough surface with cracks and even an interesting gap in one case. Those are also covered with gesso and are ready to be painted on.
Painting… yeah, I have no clue why I am doing that either. But the plan is to try some exercises in the coming two weeks if I can, and see what I can do. I specifically want to work with pallet knives (which appeal to me much more than brushes for unknown reasons) and to try paint application in various ways, to see if I can figure out something that I like and that works for me. In these exercises I will be less concerned about subject matter and composition, and more about the technicalities of working with paint itself, or at least that’s the idea at the moment.
Reality, however, may intervene in these plans.
As you might recall, I was doing some volunteer work in the shop at school, and that resumes on Monday. There’s a lot to get done if the shop is to be ready to go in two weeks, and I currently expect to be on campus for 10 full weekdays before school starts. That leaves very little time for painting at home, so all that canvas preparation may have been for naught in the short term. Time will tell.
The other interesting (to me) event of the last week was a long walk I took one day. I left the house and walked to the Cleveland Dam, which is part of the infrastructure that provides water to the metro Vancouver area. And from the dam I walked up to the base of Grouse Mountain, where I could see the gondola that people ride to the top of said mountain if they don’t want to take a serious hike. I took a number of photos around the dam area and one of the gondolas at Grouse Mountain:
Remember you should be able to click on any of those pictures for a larger view, and note the workers at the base of the dam. There is some kind of maintenance going on there.
Also, for the curious, there is a suspension bridge over the Capilano River a ways below the dam. It’s called — oddly enough, the Capilano Suspension Bridge. You can’t see it from the dam, but it’s there, and it is a very busy tourist attraction.
Anyway, the total walk I took that was not quite 7 miles, and there’s a fair bit of uphill walking between our home and the base of Grouse Mountain, so I arrived pretty tired. I can’t imagine going on to try the hike to the top (which gains 853 metres, or 2800 feet in elevation from bottom to top) after walking to it. I was perfectly happy to find a Starbucks there and get something cold to drink instead.
That’s the gist of it. Next week may be less interesting, or more, depending on what happens in the shop. But I will be busy, regardless, and I’ll be back to share whatever was going on.