Putting on a Polish

On the bottom row are the 3 bronze sculptures I have been working on in the last wax casting class at CAC. They are polished up, patinated and to all purposes they are finished. They are about 2 inches long, and fit very comfortably in the hand. A friend said they feel like worry stones or hand candy. Perhaps I'll carry them around in my pocket, and when someone asks what I do I can hand them one and say "This, only bigger."

In my last posting I mentioned the risk of losing all your hard work during that .05 seconds of pouring bronze. Well, the first 2 items on the second row are a good example. I mislabeled the flasks, so when I poured this flask I didn't have enough bronze to fully cast the sculptures. GRRR

The black shapes are paper cut outs of the sculptures yet to be poured. We have one more class this session. We'll be spending the whole time casting. Our teacher, Rebecca Swann is a highly skilled jewelerist and a well of knowledge.

Playing With Hot Molten Metal

In last weeks lost wax casting class at the Creative Arts Center I invested 3 small wax sculptures. This week it's time to pour hot molten metal!

The wax sculptures have been melted out of the investment leaving behind a hollow space inside the very, very hot flask.

Now it's time to  slip on flame proof gloves and welding goggles, pull out the torch, and melt some bronze. This takes about 5 minutes.

Once the molten bronze starts to swirl around in the crucible it's time to pour. Note the orange stream of bronze going into the flask. Hot, Hot, Hot.

It's in there, and it should have filled ALL the hollow areas... Let us pray... In lost wax casting you can work hours and hours on the wax sculpture, just to loose everything in that .05 seconds of poring.

And here they are! 3 small almost perfect bronze sculptures!!! There are a few nubs and surface burps that will be removed when I take off the casting sprues. Then, well then we move on to polishing. This is not a quick process.

Lost Wax Casting: Sprues of Hope

It's called sprueing; attaching wax sticks (the red stuff) to the wax sculptures (the purple stuff), then mounting the sculptures onto a mold base(the black stuff). Next the steel tubes you see in the background, slide into the bases and are filled with investment (high temperature plaster). The wax will be burned out leaving a hollow area that the metal, in this case bronze will be poured into.

Technically, I think I followed all the rules of lost wax casting, but during the pouring all you can do is hope for the best. I'll be pouring/casting next week, so stay tuned to find out if they turn out to be beautiful sculptures or monstrous blobs?!

You can follow this project as well as all the other stuff going on in and around the studio by subscribing at Brad Ford Smith Blog.

Small Scale Sculptures

I started a Lost Wax Casting class at the Creative Arts Center last Thursday. As you can see Stanley, the art critic is letting me know which of my wax sculptures needs more work. Eventually the wax sculptures will be cast in bronze and become part of a wall mounted installation.

Sparkles the Bling Bling Birthday Cow

About 18 years ago there was a city wide public sculpture project in Chicago where all the artists were given life sized fiberglass cows to do artistic things to. As you can imagine they did just about anything you can imagine to those cows. It was a very big success.

The city of Dallas followed suite a few years later, except they used a fiberglass Pegasus. Personally I think the Pegasi supplied to the artists were over designed, with to much pre-built in creator, so most of the Pegasi I saw were not very good. Some of them can still be seen around town 10 years later. I was actually asked to do a conservation assessment on one. It was such a bad mix of badly mixed mediums that I pronounced it lame and suggested they shoot it.

Anyway, I started thinking about all of this because I spent today making a 2394 rhinestone incrusted bovine as a birthday present for a dear friend. She's having one of those landmark birthdays, the kind that includes a big California blow out built around a cowgirl theme.

I was kind of surprised to find that when my socially sophisticated friend moved to LA, she started cultivating her very, very slight association with cow culture into a Texas Cowgirl gone LA mystic.

Happy Birthday Cowgirl! Don't take your spurs off until the saloons close up and your horse falls asleep.

Behind The People Behind The Video Camera

One of the benefits of blogging for Art and Seek is the access it affords to people, places, and events. That's also one of the reasons I first got into doing art conservation. I get to handle and explore artwork that gives me a special understand of how the artist works. Of course with the blogging I don't get quite so physical.

One of the first events around the Dallas Art Fair was a press interview with the artist Jim Lambie, who is presently showing at the Goss-Michael Foundation. You may recall his colorful tape installation at the DMA a few years back.

The folks from Art This Week were there as well. And that is really what this post is about. Art This Week has been producing video interviews of artists and curators sense May 2009. Their latest interview with Jim was their 100th video posting!!! Congratulations ATW!

Unfortunately this honor falls on an interview with Jim, who is no Clark Gable when it comes to sophisticated silver screen personas.

Lauren Kennedy interviewed Jim, while Caroline Belanger snapped some pics, and Richard Serrano filmed the action. Hard to believe Richard shoots all the videos on a camera the size of a deck of playing cards. I don't know much about ATW. They appear to be a young, bootstrap organization that doesn't let the limitations of equipment and funding prevent them from pumping out one video after another, 8 in the just the last 30 days. Admittedly, the end product may not be up to the evening news standards, yet. But who knows, given some time and some cash, and Jerome Weeks may have some serious cultural coverage competition. Then it's onto tackle Art 21.

I've added them to my Links Page because ATW has a DIY attitude that is just what the Dallas art scene needs to see more of.

Posting About The Art Fairs In Dallas On Art and Seek

This is a quick post. Still have more art to see before it's all gone. I've been posting about the Dallas Art Fair and the Suite Art Fair on Art and Seek.net. Here's the link to all those pages, plus my older posts on art go by.

 I'll be blogging more about the art fairs on my blog soon.