Unfinished Business

After a couple of weeks of casual crafting my desk begins to resemble somewhat of an artsy war zone. Tubes of acrylic paint litter its wooden surface like bullet casings, clay tools lie abandoned beside the mutilated bodies of unsuccessfully formed creatures – the scraps of their flesh mounded high on my glass chopping board, gathering lint and dust. It’s usually around this time that I call it.
“Enough is enough,” I declare, trying to rescue paintbrushes caked in glaze.
The clean-up effort doesn’t normally take too long – the disorder is categorized and moved into its respective boxes, ready for the next call to arms.

It was during one such clean-up operation when I found them, huddled together amidst the rubble; my forgotten projects. My unfinished business. How many times had I banished them to the corner of my work surface? How many times had I taunted them by storing them on the “to-be-baked” tray?
Enough is enough.

There were three of them this time. A Chihuahua with an empty eye socket and missing body, a wingless, legless chicken with badly sculpted beak – and a limbless sealion staring sadly out of hollow eyes. The Chihuahua was heavy with dust, the clay hard from weeks of sitting unworked. The sculpt actually wasn’t bad – the eyes a little unsymmetrical maybe – but nothing worth this fate.

I sat down with my camera to document the damage, like a plastic surgeon deciding what could be salvaged. I didn’t have the energy to work on a body – I had already spent nearly two days sculpting that tiny face only to abandon it before I fixed the left eye into its socket. I was not about to spend another two days working on a body I would almost certainly dislike.

I mused over the usefulness of a floating Chihuahua head while rolling an eye in the palm of my hand, when I happened to scan over an as yet untidied bag of wooden buttons. I held the head up against a button, balancing the two above my knuckles.

It was perfect. I eagerly cut away excess Chihuahua neck to improve the fit and chucked it in the oven. I felt suddenly excited and amused – like I was the only one to understand a joke told to a room of intellectuals. I honestly can’t explain what I find so hilarious about my Chihuahua ring. Maybe it’s the contrast between what I intended to make when I started sculpting it, and what it ended up being. Maye it’s the salvaging of my forgotten project into something quite unforgettable. Or maybe it is what is it – a hilariously ridiculous Chihuahua ring. I’m sure not many people have (or would want) one like it.

And as for the other two… the chicken made it as far as a fixed-up sculpt and an initial layer of paint before I lost interest again. The sealion never even made it to the oven. They sit patiently on the outskirts of my chopping board, awaiting another moment of playful insanity – and when it comes, I’ll be sure to let you know.

 

 

Creativity Calls: The Pursuits of a Bad Artist

I had originally intended to call this blog “Creativity Calls” (which I discovered has already been taken), using the tagline “The pursuits of a bad artist”.

I think about that tag line whenever I have a day like today. I’m not naturally talented; nothing about sculpting or painting or drawing or anything really comes very easily to me. Yet I have also not worked long enough at it, not tirelessly tried to better myself as an artist, not found the time in my scientist’s schedule to nurture an artistic soul. Creativity is different for everyone, but for me it’s a kind of desperation. A plea for something to focus my restless mind on, for something quiet. It works best when I’m trying to copy something – drawing from reference photos, or painting coat colours onto clay animals. There’s a visible measure of my skill then – I can hold side by side the genuine article and my attempt to capture it and appropriately quantify my success.

But trying to replicate the image in my head – trying to paint or to sculpt from abstract ideas, always leaves me frustrated and unfulfilled. It was a rabbit shaped beanimal that bought out the depressive in me this time. I had a reference photo of a baby lop-eared bunny beside my naked beanimal, and I glanced at it often while mixing up shades of yellow acrylic. I just wanted enough realism in the coat pattern, but ultimately intended to paint a Spring themed bunny, inspired by the boldness of the daffodils; too eager to sleep any longer – pushing through the last of the winter with such a confident contrast to the still leafless trees.

There is no physical picture of the finished bunny to compare to, and so it can be hard for people to understand my disdain. The frustration can be quite lonely when you’re the only one who appreciates just how much the second rate brush strokes have butchered that image of a beautiful daffodil bunny into a jaundiced rabbit with skew eyes. And having strayed just too far from the reference photo of the lop-ear, I can only assume that to the outside observer, my creation is simply the pursuit of a sub-par artist.

It can sometimes be hard to bring myself back to sculpting after such an under-expression of my creativity. It can feel quite helpless, like that quiet I craved is drowning. I often imagine this to be a sort of ‘writer’s block’, borne not out of a lack of inspiration, but a lack of skill to express it; a helplessness.

The analyst in me knows that this is solvable, and knows that it just might take years of practise. Of pushing myself outside that comfort of reference photo comparison, pushing myself to find and accept my own artistic style, and to keep working on it – always working on it. But in the meantime, the creativity, the desperation, keeps calling.

Welcome, Beanimals!

The Beanimals were something I doodled well over a year ago. I don’t remember how I thought them up, but they’ve been sitting there on the back shelf of my imagination for quite a while now.

Originally I intended them to look more like actual beans; a kidney bean fox, a butter bean bear or perhaps a pinto bean hamster. But ultimately, despite my vegetarianism, there is only so much enthusiasm I can muster for actual beans. And so when I began moulding the Super Sculpey between my fingers, it was bean shaped animals that emerged, rather than animal shaped beans.

They’re both incredibly easy and deceptively tricky to make. Their consistent bean shaped body and tiny little stump legs means I’m already half way there after five minutes of working the clay, an instant encouragement to finish their forms. The tricky part comes in shaping the face, adding enough of an animal’s distinguishing features so that no Beanimal could be mistaken for another.

I like to play a game with my boyfriend where I have him guess what animal the Beanimal is prior to receiving its paint job. He doesn’t always get it right – an instant discouragement in light of the additional hour I take sculpting their faces. In fairness, when we play this game the Beanimals are lacking their eyes, noses and markings – and it is usually only me who has spent the last hour staring at stock images of the same animal, mentally editing features until only the most distinctive remain in the stylised clay.
“Isn’t it obvious?” I often sigh in defeat, “that these are the over-emphasized cheek bones of a panda?!”

It’s important to remind myself at such times that he had only recently discovered skinny pigs as a legitimate creature, and had struggled to accept the concept that they were in fact just hairless guinea pigs. I’ll get better anyway right? The more of these little beans I churn out, the easier our guessing game should hopefully get.

I have big plans for the Beanimals. I’m trying to build up a stock of them. They’re my experimental range – the test subjects for my entrepreneurial journey, and I’m excited to share their development with you.

 

Stockless Syndrome

I’m telling you all this, because then it makes it real. I’m publishing it on the internet for all the world to see, because then I will at least have someone to be accountable to.

I want to do a craft fair.

Apologies for what was inevitably the most anticlimactic admission you’ve ever wasted half a second of your life reading, but I’m serious this time. Every so often I get the notion in my head that I’ll sell things I’ve made – I’ll open up Monomers next month, I often think, just got to make stock first. But the stock never gets made in sufficient quantity to fill the imaginary quota I set in my head, which is ridiculous for an internet shop – I mean how much do I think I’m going to be able to sell?!

A craft fair though, that does require some real, visible stock – more than five 2 cm tall items to display on a 6 ft table would be preferable. I don’t envision I will sell very much, or anything, in fact there’s part of me that doesn’t care about physically selling things at all. It’s the making, always the making that I want to do. I’ve had the odd casual browse for local craft fairs, and am a little apprehensive. I make small, silly things, which although might take me an age to craft, are ultimately worth very little. I will sell most of my items for probably less than a fiver. Which means I’d have to sell a lot more than I’ve so far made to break even just on the cost of the stall alone. Let’s face it – I’m going to make a loss. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it, maybe I should instead be looking at this as some kind of metaphorical gain – in experience, in achieving a stock making goal…in something right? It just makes so much more sense to try and sell online, but still this aversion to meeting an unspecified, unsee-able stock goal, this inexplicable barrier.

But I’ve told you all now. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and hey – this blog is going to run dry pretty soon unless my boyfriend destroys anymore of my heart and soul with the heel of his foot (see the Squashed Gerbil Incident). So, already sounding like my usual excuses – I’m going to spend some time ‘making stock’. I figure that anything I can’t sell at a fair will at least have already broken through this weird mental block of mine – will be pre-approved to put up on Monomers and sell online.

I’ll keep reporting back here to confirm whether I’m sticking to my resolution for a change. That’s the first challenge; have something to display. Then I’ll sign up to craft fair and get my act together. I’ll blog it even, I’ll be accountable. And maybe this will help others like me, with Stockless Syndrome. It’s hard to know where to start, but maybe having you all there (as if anyone is actually reading this) will help.

The Squashed Gerbil Incident

 

One week’s work.

It was nowhere near perfect, I know that – but there’s something kind of special about your first attempt, something you can keep with you forever, something you can return to, to remind yourself how far you’ve come and why you began that particular artistic journey in the first place. Something that you can forgive the imperfections of – hey, it’s just your first try, you’ll get better.

I work far from home and spend a chunk of my evenings driving back. I had been finding it very hard to make time for polymer clay, or anything that wasn’t cooking dinner, showering, feeding the gerbils, going to bed and then pressing repeat. I was especially proud of my efforts on this one therefore, like I had defied the odds of my mundane modern life, broken through the repetition to make something, actually achieve something – and hey, something that looked at least 75% like the thing it was supposed to.

I was so close to finishing as well. The form was done – I was considering baking it, or should I texture the clay to look like fur first? Better take some pictures now, I thought, in case I end up ruining it.

I share an ill-lit ground floor flat with my boyfriend, who might have a genuine medical problem when it comes to the part of the brain that manages spatial awareness.
“Don’t knock this,” I warned him, as I fixed the tail to its butt and cordoned off the lightest nook of the lounge to take some pictures for posterity.

Usually I don’t feel much in the way of esteem for anything I make, but this was actually not that bad. I’d display it maybe – save it from the cardboard box all my other pieces have been resigned to. I posted a couple of pictures of my progress on Instagram, asking anyone in the online crafting community who would listen what their opinion was re- texturing.

I’ll do something else for a bit, I thought, look at it with fresh eyes – so I picked up the phone to call home. My boyfriend was busy at his laptop in the kitchen, a normal Tuesday night scene, no cause for alarm.

But somewhere over the next twenty minutes of me talking on the phone he got up and walked over to the gerbils’ tank.  They have a large-size ‘living world green eco habitat’; all perspex sides and a heavy wooden lid. The little buggers’ favourite call for attention is to start chewing the wooden lid. They know, I’m sure, that someone will be over shortly with the offer of a distraction – tasty or otherwise. We keep a makeshift mesh panel on top in the unlikely, (but just likely enough), event that someone manages to gnaw all the way through and decides to test how far the drop is from the roof of their tank to the floor. Its pieces of an old bird cage my mom bought once to keep an injured blackbird in for recovery, crudely held together with florist’s wire. He lifted the mesh panels off and lay them aside. I watched, but distracted, I was on the phone, this was a normal Tuesday night scene – no cause for ala-

“BE CAREFUL” I suddenly snapped as I watched him stumble backward with the heavy wooden lid in his arms, swinging it behind him as if he actually had no concept of its solidity and how that would impact on surrounding objects. At first I thought he was going to put it down on my project, but when I looked down things were much, much worse.

“I can’t believe you’ve done this.”
I started sobbing. Just sobbing – still mid- conversation with my mom, actually crying my eyes out at the events unfolding before me. 

“What? WHAT?” It was my mom.
His foot was still poised like a ballerina, Super Sculpey clinging onto his heel like a flesh coloured dog turd. I couldn’t look at his face, but I imagined it to be wearing the same mixture of surprise and disgust you would expect from someone who had actually just smeared a dog turd into the cracks of the weathered skin on the underside of their foot.
I was still sobbing like a crazy person. I think it was the shock.

Rest in peace (or more specifically ‘pieces’) my first attempt at a gerbil. You were taken from me too soon – before you’d even been baked or painted. I will not have you there to refer back to when inevitably, out of frustration, I smoosh future attempts to recreate you (ironically actually recreating you)…or at least, I won’t have you there as I intended you to be…

I glued the tail back on, but its only remaining leg was beyond saving. I also waited until I was feeling a little less… ‘macabre’ before painting…