Or a tactical retreat
Currently writing from the doldrums of winter. It’s 4°F ( 277°K) outside. It’s been an effort to keep the grotto hovering at 50° which now feels tropical while 40° is a welcome reality.
In my head it was still July until about a week before Christmas. July allows for 14 hour work days, 6-7 days a week. If I’m not paying attention and if the climate behaves in unique ways (like 80° days in early November) I will keep that habit straight into winter. When winter finally arrives I’m left with a series of frustrations and angsts as I fight the 8 hour sunlight and sub-freezing temperatures and god-forbid feet of snow. This gets me…every year.
Critical Mass is defined as “the minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction.” Or, since I’m not a just an atomic particle, the minimum amount of bandwidth to keep any gig going.
I think I allow myself to become completely depleted each season to force myself into the introspective and dark reflection that winter requires. Because I can't just go quietly into the night voluntarily. For those that don’t live in a place with seasons, you might have no idea what I’m talking about. But it terms of building, creating, or anything involving the outdoors, things come to a creeping halt for 4-ish weeks. At least. You can fight it all you want but it’ll yield nothing other than stress.
It was my daughter that forced me to pour myself a big bowl of chill-the-fuck-out this year. For us it was July, then it was Christmas. She asked we enjoy hot beverages, listen to music, watch old-timey movies, and carve wood. So, carve wood we did. It started with a wolf mask that looks more like my dog than a wolf. It was certainly nothing to write home about in terms of craft or execution but it did something completely necessary. It bridged where my head was to where my head currently is. Carving.
It’s very easy to ignore the body and its needs. Adulting doesn’t help. If the body is saying “I need a nap” there’s a reason. If it’s saying “I really need a piece of red meat” there’s a reason. Similarly, art and creating is the same thing. After an exhausting 9 months, my head and hands said “I just need to carve wood. I would really like to stop overthinking, over-designing, and over-building. I just want to carve and take a break.”
We then went on to find scrap laying around and make things like this magnetic knife holder. Is it a burning heart? A goat’s head? A Goblin face? Or butt cheeks? I don’t know. But it’s just another small bridge.
I had a few other small builds for workshop infrastructure that I needed to get out of the mind. One of those was a new saw till that fits better on the wall and allows space for more incoming saws. I chose narrow curved slab of mulberry that I milled 3 years ago. It was perfect because the pith of the slab needed to removed which lead to the perfect use of this slab.
Not sure what is happening yet with these ginkgo-shaped carvings. But I have an idea to frame a large 36x60” mirror with a 4” wide black walnut frame with these dancing shapes fluttering around. For now, I’ll just rough it all out and see what happens. I've a hundred ideas in my head for carving. I'd be foolish to not pull on this string. If anything, for my own mental and physical health. For me, right now, the important thing is the un-thoughtful process. I burn an incredible amount of calories just considering composition and design of a particular project. That is, the paid jobs. I'm starting to realize the rewarding results from the lack of over designing or overthinking a process. Clearly the knowledge is still there, tucked away. But without the burden of consideration the process becomes unencumbered by options or variety.
The collage below was an exercise I did about 15 years ago. I tore random pieces from magazines, photocopied them to black & white, and pasted them together in a random (seemingly) orientation under the pressure of a 15 minute timer. The result was something visually striking that compositionally works.
Or maybe it's just paper.
MTF