Could've Been Christmas Eve...

In fact, it IS!

Have I mentioned that I am a BIG James McMurtry fan? Those that know me personally have some idea. Ha!

The State Room here in SLC (FYI, one of the best places EVER to see live music, especially in this town) just announced that James would be doing a solo show on Friday, February 22 of next year (5 months to the day since the last show at The State Room, pictured above). Very exciting. I've never had the pleasure of seeing his solo show (not so easy to just pop in to the Continental Club on a late Tuesday night... yet another reason to envy Austinites...) and hope to hear some of his older material that he rarely plays with the full band.

Most of my life and much of my art is fueled by the music of the man that Stephen King said just "may be the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation." A bit laconic in person, he is anything but in his lyrics and guitar playing! Genius.

Get your tickets HERE... you can thank me later. Maybe I'll see you there...

A quick and blurry iPhone shot of James signing things
 in the lobby of The State Room, September 22, 2012

Nuggets from the Analog Blog™ — #1

For several years I ran what I called my Analog Blog out of a steel box between the sidewalk and my back fence. I would load the box with 20 copies or so of something I had recently found inspiring or entertaining on the web. Usually it was a manifesto or something that could easily be shared on one page.

Apparently I gathered a small following, since I would often meet strangers in the neighborhood and they would say something like, "Oh, you live in THAT house. I really enjoy your artwork and that little 'TAKE ONE' box you have." I can't even count the number of times I'd be doing yard work or hanging in a lawn chair by my backyard pond/fountain and I'd hear the metallic screetch of the un-oiled piano hinge on the back of the box creaking open, someone taking a copy and then the gentle thunk of the lid closing as they walked away.

Sadly, some neighborhood kids (apparently) started finding pleasure in taking all of my copies and throwing them on the ground in a pile or individually across the area. As a result of this, and a few potentially embarrassing things that people would leave in the box like condoms (still new and unused thankfully!), I finally removed the box after several years. But it was a good run and a cool project while it lasted. Since I now have a "real" blog, I thought it might be fun to share a few tidbits from that earlier, analog version. Here's the first one, Keri Smith's "How to Feel Miserable as an Artist," first placed in the Take One Box on March 8, 2008:

Literary Inspiration #2

"But Axelrod's basic message never left him during those long hours on the chindi. Life is short. Even with the treatments, be aware that a couple of centuries is a desperately brief time in the the grand scale. You get a few visits from the comet (he meant Halley's), and nothing more. Embrace your life, find what it is that you love, and pursue it with all your soul. For if you do not, when you come to die, you will find that you have not lived."

—Jack McDevitt, chindi

"Adventure, as it skirts the unknown, can at times bring forth art."

There are many sculptors, past and present, who inspire me on a number of levels. I'm particularly drawn to those that work in steel or iron like me, of course. David Smith, Richard Serra, Anthony Caro, Mark di Suvero, Cordell Taylor, Sophia Pitakis, Bernar Venet, Beverly Pepper, Dave Malone, Melvin Edwards, Neil Hadlock, Alexander Calder, John Bisbee, Jin Man Jo, and on and on.

But this post is about Eduardo Chillida...

I didn't discover him or his incredible body of work until about 2001. But I made up for lost time, collecting all of the books and articles I could find. I haven't yet made a pilgrimage to San Sebastian, Spain to his museum but it's still on my list. Hopefully it will endure the current economic downturn. It would be a great loss to sculpture if it were to remain closed.

Anyway, here's a quote from Chillida that I've always found compelling and inspiring, especially the last line:

From Space with its brother Time,
under the pressing heaviness of gravity
feeling material as if it were a slower space
I ponder with amazement over my ignorance.
I work to know. I value learning over knowledge.
I believe I must venture into making what I know not;
Seek to visualize where I do not see;
Strive to recognize what I cannot discern;
Attempt to identify within the realm of the unknown.
Along the unfolding of these processes,
which resemble those of creation in science,
many hardships arise.
We have the hands of yesterday
but we lack those of tomorrow.
I have a conception of the work before I undertake it,
but I do not know,
nor do I want to know at the moment of creation,
how will it be.
I possess many facts about the work in which I am living,
but will not allow this knowledge
to inhibit my freedom nor the breath of the present.
I believe works conceived a priori are born dead.
Adventure, as it skirts the unknown,
can at times
bring forth art.

[bold text mine...]

Sadly (and much too early), Eduardo passed on at age 78 in August of 2002. I had just discovered him and then he was gone. I will never meet him now but would've liked to. He continues to inspire me...

Urban Vintage

Just want to give a shout-out to my buddy Josh at Urban Vintage in Salt Lake City. He has a keen eye for pieces that will ROCK YOUR WORLD! A real breath of fresh air in the vintage scene here in my opinion (and I've already spent way too much cash there...).

The first time I walked in I thought I was on Abbot Kinney Blvd. in LA. An amazing collection of collectibles and the selection turns over constantly so there's always something new.

Urban Vintage is at 221 East 300 South (Broadway) and they're open from 11 am – 6 pm, Monday – Saturday. While you're in the Broadway zone, be sure to check out Ken Sanders Rare Books, my favorite local used and rare bookstore and The Green Ant, the best mid-century modern furniture in town.

And don't forget to drop in to Melissa Sanders' new shop, Red Queen Book Arts, while you're in the area. It's just around the corner from Ken's and a few doors west of The Green Ant on the north side of Broadway. Good, good stuff!

MAKE. GOOD. ART.

Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors and his recent commencement speech to the graduating class of the University of the Arts in Philly is one of the most inspirational talks I've seen in years.

Thanks, Neil...

In fact, I was so inspired that I created a custom steel and glass frame to hold the message of "MAKE. GOOD. ART." that sits in my window so I see it every morning.

This is NOT my window...

This IS...

Literary Inspiration #1

From time to time I'm going to be quoting things from assorted novels that I find to be creatively inspirational. Who better to start the show than William Gibson?

His description of the AI-produced boxes in Count Zero is at the top of my list for inspirational passages in recent memory. More quotes from other authors will be coming from time to time...

From Count Zero, William Gibson, Arbor House, New York, 1986:

Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects. 

"Cornell," she said, her tears forgotten. "Cornell?" 

She turned to Virek.

"Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist."

 "There are more? More boxes?"

 "I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The  unnatural density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I ordinarily take little interest in.    

But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossible distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle, and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.

The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin but the thing's face was seared and blackened.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe

If, like me, you are remotely interested in numbers or sacred geometry, you simply MUST get Michael S. Schneider's A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, Harper Perennial, 1995.

I can also highly recommend the companion volumes called Constructing the Universe Activity Books for really getting into the mix.

An amazing collection of material and highly, highly recommended... You can check out his full website HERE.

The Mystery

There are certain words that inform and describe (sometimes) my work. Here are a few of them:

Multi-dimensional, embedded, emergent, secret, encrypted, fractal, symbolic, concealed, hyper-dense, occult, aleatoric, arcane, incunabulic, enfolded, alchemical, holographic, concresced, attractor, ecstatic, epiphanic, multi-layered, palimpsest-like, archaic, nested, novelty-ridden, enigmatic, ancient, accreted, patinated, hidden, sacred, unique, extropic, encapsulated, ineffable, unique… 

“Or words to that effect.” –TMcK

Self-portrait Shaka

A recent shot I took of my own reflection in an iron bowl at my favorite scrap yard. I took the shot during an EPIC collecting visit on September 1st with my friend Catherine.

In fact, here we are in another reflection shot on site. This is a large chromed steel drum on some kind of press or finishing machine.

My New Hero

A good friend forwarded this YouTube video to me yesterday. I LOVE this guy and I'm sure he's 100 times the welder I'll ever be. His energy, confidence and passion are PRICELESS! I wanted to share it with "all" of my loyal readers...

A Blast From My Past

Here's one from the deep archives. Climbing in the Indian Peaks Wilderness west of Boulder, CO in the summer of 1984 (trying a new route on Mt. Shoshone if I recall). The sleeveless Fear and Loathing t-shirt and the bandana headband were de rigueur for me while climbing in the mid 80s.

The photo was taken by my good buddy and climbing partner at the time, Keith Egan, whom I had moved with from Norman, OK to Boulder the year before.

Livin' the dream ;-)...

Rust

Those that know me and my art know how enamored I am with rust (or any iron oxide really...), at least part of the time. This is a shot of some rusty split washers doing their thing on a pieces of Arches cover. I've been making "rust prints" for many years that are basically transfers of rusting steel onto paper.

Recently I've been trying more controlled experiments with the test pieces being covered or uncovered, leaving them in contact for varying amounts of time and using different solutions to accelerate the rust formation. In the photos below you can see the set up. I tested all combinations using the same paper and the same washer so I could get somewhat comparable results, comparable in the sense of being able to limit that one variable so I could more easily see the aleatoric results.

I ran each piece with four different solutions: white cooking vinegar, Birchwood Technologies Presto Black, strong black tea and Birchwood Plum Brown. Interesting how the palette of each solution was consistent and hopefully somewhat repeatable.

Anyway, I continue to learn more and more about the interface between iron, water, oxygen and cellulose.

Starting the process...

Clockwise from top left: black tea, white vinegar, plum brown, presto black...

It Was a Clock Tower...

...now it's an ICON Tower (well, arguably it still has two clocks as opposed to the original four, but you get my drift). A few weeks ago I watched the construction crew put up two new BD icons that I had built. The clocks came down and the icons went up. The old clock tower is the tallest structure on the Black Diamond campus. I'm honored to have been asked to tackle this project and very happy with the outcome (and so are the pigeons, apparently...).

 


Above are a couple of shots of the install. The guys did a perfect job.

And a sadly blurry shot of the raw steel icon in my shop before the bolts were welded on and it was sent off for sandblasting and powder coating.

Every Driveway Needs a Tesseract (aka Hypercube)...

One of my favorite pieces around The Compound here in SLC is the hypercube I have hanging from a boom over my parking area. I'm particularly fond of the shadows that it casts against my shop in the early mornings.

Truncated Hexahedron (cube)

I recently made this 4-inch polyhedron out of 6 hand-cut octagons and 8 equilateral triangles. It's for a project that I hope to be able to share soon, but for now...

I love the beautiful simplicity of creating octagons from squares using simply a silver pencil, a straight edge and a compass. No actual measurements of any kind (other than getting a 4-inch square to begin with).

Typically I find myself making one or more of the five Platonic solids (although though this is not one, but a modified version of one) in various sizes and for a variety of reasons—sometimes closed like these below, but often open as well.

For example, I love the way my large-ish (approx. 3 ft dia.) open dodecahedron holds the snow...

Bringin' the Heat

Here's another shot my buddy Gary took last summer during his time in the shop. I don't often need to break out the torch but it's always high value when I do...

11-11-11

One year and 11 days ago I had my first solo show—HyperObjects: Shards of the Eschaton. The show was held at the Cordell Taylor Gallery here in Salt Lake City and opened on a Friday night with a wonderfully auspicious date. (Another 1,000 years and we can do it all over again!)

HERE are some great shots of my work as documented by Shawn Rossiter's 15 Bytes. Thanks for the great article, Shawn and team! (Follow the link at the bottom of the 15 Bytes page to see the full review of my show and the photos mentioned above...)

Anyway, it was great turnout for the opening night and the interest continued for the full month the show was up. Cordell is a local metal sculptor of tremendous talent and it was an honor to be invited by him to show in his gallery last year.

And here are a couple of photos of opening night:

This is my Artist's Statement for the HyperObject show:

HyperObjects

Shards of the Eschaton

In the mid 70s I began making small drawings that seemed to arise spontaneously. For me they are a communication that I have been documenting with pen and paper for over 35 years—a communication that wants to be shared in steel.

Notes regarding a series of 23 steel sculptures that I would call HyperObjects began to appear in April of 2001. These objects would be sourced from my drawings and inspired by key concepts of Terence McKenna, especially those concerned with the Eschaton at the end of time that he believed was drawing mankind and history toward cataracts of transcendental change. I chose the name HyperObjects because it reflected his terminology for this “transcendental object” as well as my own experience in birthing these drawings from some kind of imagined hyperspace. They emerge during moments of reflection or anytime I am in a suitable frame of mind that seems to help me precipitate their concrescence.

All of my work is essentially an effort to recreate the Mystery in material form. My HyperObjects Series is specifically an attempt to accrete a group of unique pieces whose qualities reflect the Mystery for me—multi-dimensional, embedded, arcane, enfolded, enigmatic, patinated, archaic, alchemical, sacred and emergent…

—Randall Hankins, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving

Giving thanks today for a number of things... like my recent introduction (thanks, Catherine) to the work of Alice Fox, for example. She is a UK artist who I think makes beautiful, evocative and compelling work. See more at www.alicefox.co.uk

The Grind

Here's a recent shot of me grinding on a project. The photo was taken and treated by my good friend Gary during a visit last summer. I do SO much work alone in my studio that it was fun to have someone take a few shots of me actually working instead of just me taking shots of the work after the fact.

Underway

Well, "off the ground" might be a bit of a stretch...

Self-portrait on Jenny Lake, Grand Tetons, August 2012

Here We Go!

Okay, the new blog is off the ground!