“You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.”

American artist, Robert Rauschenberg, died today at the age of 82. I don’t often mention my favorite artists or the ones who have influenced my own work in any way, but Mr. Rauschenberg has always been at the top of a very short list. I am saddened by his passing.

You can see some of his works here and here.

Rauschenberg on YouTube, discussing art and his erasing of DeKooning works:

Just posted this at Metafilter, so of course, I have to share it here too.

“What the autistic 12-year-old can’t express verbally or in social interaction he can show through his carefully cut out geometric shapes assembled into characters in a paper collage.”

They say the cobbler’s children have no shoes. Engineer’s wives apparently don’t have well-built trellises for their snap beans either, not because the engineer is too busy designing and building trellises for other people, but because the engineer is too busy laughing at his wife’s feeble attempts to build something. It’s pretty common knowledge that I am an artist and not a builder, so I failed to be amused by his amusement.

An hour and a half of my life spent making a trellis, and the end result is, I must admit myself, hilariously feeble and must be the most ridiculous trellis on the planet. I think I even heard the snap beans laughing at me.

Go ahead. Laugh. Everyone else has … even me. It’s a pathetic excuse for a trellis, but it’s just going to have to do.

So I don’t lose these links at Delicious, where I send links and never see them again … plans for making home wind turbines for energy production.

Build a Model Turbine: Ride the Wind!

A Home Power Plant - Wind Power Generator

One of the things that has been keeping me busy and not posting and ranting as much as usual is that I am working on a story. I’ve been working on it in my head for a while, and now I am finally beginning to put it down in text. In a strange turn of events for me, it’s going to be light science fiction. It’s really rough at the moment, but so far, I am happy with it.

I do have a question for the fiction readers out there. What is your favorite story point of view? Do you like things to be written from a single character’s point of view? Or do you prefer third person, a narrator that knows everything about everyone (or at least one character)? Or something different? I prefer writing in third person omniscient, and that’s also the point of view I seem to prefer reading (though some of my most favorite books are in first person oddly). I was just wondering. Right now, I haven’t exactly settled on a point of view. It could go a variety of ways … I think.

Anyway, that’s one of the things I have been up to: writing. Maybe something will come of it this time.

I already knew Lin could sleep through anything, but I thought for sure the whine of polymer clay and eggshell being ground down by a somewhat noisy tool might have at least annoyed his brain into something close to consciousness. Nope.

This silly project is nearing completion. I lost quite a bit of interest in it when the egg cracked, but not wanting to give up on it completely, I found a clever way to hide the crack. I hid the crack behind an engraving of a crack. Yup. That’s called creative ingenuity and going with what life hands you.

This … thing … certainly isn’t high art, by any means, but it was fun to work on and I learned a good bit about polymer clay and eggshells and using a Dremel tool with them. Tomorrow I think I will give it one last close inspection under some good light, Mod Podge the eggshell part, spray-coat it with some matte fixative, and call it finished. It will then promptly get placed on some shelf somewhere, and in a month or two you will hear me griping about how the cats knocked it down and utterly destroyed it … or that I was looking at it and dropped it, ending in the same result.

It didn’t turn out the way I planned. The next one will be better.

Photos soon!

The problem with using eggs as art materials is at any moment, one oops, and you have broken egg shell. It’s not a complete loss yet. It’s only cracked, but it wasn’t supposed to be cracked, and now I am going to have to rethink what I was doing. The whole thing is just an experiment anyway. I have another egg waiting in the wings. Why there’s a whole dozen sitting in my fridge! Though I do have to tell you that blowing out super-sized farm eggs is not as easy as blowing out your standard grocery store variety. The pay-off is that the oops that created a crack didn’t end in a tragedy. Those shells are tough.

All the same, art day went well, and my nap was nice. I can’t complain about the day (too much).

Do you ever get angry at someone, just out of the blue, maybe something you were angry about ages ago just pops right back up to the surface, even though you thought you were (mostly) over it? That just happened to me. I hate when that happens.

In other Casa de Orb news, I drained the rechargeable Dremel, so I have to wait for it to charge back up to finish what I was doing. Bah. I’d have used the plug in Dremel, but it’s much larger and heavier, and what I am working on is rather small and light, not to mention my hands are that strong, and I need to be able to hold the tool in one hand and the object in the other. That’s impossible for me with the big one. Just wish the battery on the small one lasted longer!

In light of the fact I am angry and grumpy out of the blue (well, not entirely out of the blue), instead of doing that tedious paper cutting work for the canvas, I’m going to go take a nap. Maybe I’ll shake off this foul mood. I hope so, because I have to see the person in question later today, and it wouldn’t do to be grumpy and snap at them … even if, technically, I do have every right to still be angry. Grrrr.

Oh, and we were going to have pork roast tonight, but the thing has been in the fridge for two days, and it’s still mostly a block of ice. I should post a photo of this monstrous slab of pig flesh. It is, for the record, the largest roast I have ever had in my possession. I don’t know how many pounds it is, but it’s just HUGE … huge and still very frozen. I’ve had it sitting out on the cutting block since super early this morning, and barely the outer 1/4 inch is beginning to feel like fresh meat. We won’t be having roast tonight. I’m going to put it back in the fridge. Hopefully we will get to have roast tomorrow night (and many nights thereafter, considering the size of this beast). I was really looking forward to some pork roast with potatoes and carrots.

I don’t know what I am going to make for dinner. Maybe I’ll have a flash of inspiration while napping.

Today will be a day of art! I’ve say here long enough ranting and stewing about things and reading the news. The Dremel tool was located last night, in the house no less. I must have walked right by it a dozen times while looking for it. It was hiding on Lin’s side of the den. So I am going to get to work on that polymer clay project, and then after doing a little housework this afternoon, I plan to work on the tedious part of the canvas I keep putting off. It’s never going to get done, if I don’t just do it!

But first, it’s Thursday morning, so it’s time to call my mom. I’ve discovered that calling her on Thursday morning guarantees a pleasant conversation and a short one, because she goes grocery shopping early on Thursdays.

Later I need to make a post about Lin and his attitude concerning his tools. The boy does NOT like to share.