Project on indefinite hiatus

Hey there,

This art project is on hiatus.  I certainly didn't finish the project within my self imposed deadline.  I did, however, come up with some very interesting techniques for making my own paint. 

I'm now working on a new painting style (for me) called Gravity Painting.  You can check out the work on this blog:

Gravity Painting

Screw the Canvas!

So, I've been reading the book "The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting" by Daniel V. Thompson.  (Thanks for the Christmas present cousin Debbie!) It's a great read, and I highly recommend it. Anyway, I've never really liked painting on canvas.  It's a hard to do detail work with all those bumps.  Reading his book, I've found that the surface of choice back in the day was wood panels, primed & prepared with gesso and plaster and other stuff.  With glue made from cheese.  Thats just too cool!  Who knew that cheese and lime could make glue?!

I've been avoiding the whole making the canvas part of this project for a while.  I mean, canvas involves growing stuff, and rotting (er, I mean retting) and beating the crap out of it, then spinning it & weaving it etc. 

 

I don't know what it is, but I just don't like most fabric arts.  There was some really huge 'soft sculptures'  (let's be honest, they were stuffed plushies on steroids) at a modern art museum the first time I went to LA.  I was not impressed.  I just couldn't take it seriously.

Now wood is a different story.  To make a wood panel, I first will need to make some wicked cool metal tools.  That means I'll have to do pretty much everything except maybe the smelting.  Casting, forging, sharpening, trying to figure out if I really need to smelt tin to mix with copper to make bronze or if *ANYONE* on earth had tin back in 4004 BC.  That could be very cool.  

Cool, because this will involve fire, furnaces, hacking and cutting.  The artistic equivalent of shoveling the snow in the dead of winter while exiled in Siberia. I'm pretty sure I can work carving in there if I try hard enough.  Actually a lot of wood panels had carved inlays in the work.  So there.  I can.  

I'm much more excited about this now.  Anyone know the building codes of Seattle, and if permits are needed for kilns & furnaces and the like in one's backyard?

Time to get back on the horse

Well, after too much time spent on video games and surfing the web, my computer recently succumbed to a nasty Vundo trojan.  (I'm writing this on my wife's Mac). 

Sidenote:  I recommend against surfing the web for the lyrics to Cyndi Lauper's "She-Bop"  Bigger waste of time than I could have imagined.  If you do, do it on a Mac, or at least have all your software up to date.  Vundo is nasty and now I need to nuke & pave my machine!

So, for the last couple of days, I've stayed away from the computer at home.  When I got home tonight, I had some late Christmas presents from my cousin Debby  arrive.  In addition to a very cool Richard Cheese CD & Golf Journal, I got the book: The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V Thompson. Talk about great timing!  I've already read the Lapis Lazuli section, and am hoping to make it through Azurite shortly.  Finally I can put that expensive hunk of rock to good use!

Maybe I shouldn't have gotten those games...

Considering how much Art From Scratch work I've done recently, maybe I should have reconsidered buying the Orange Box as a reward for getting my webhosting mess in order.

Curse you Valve! Your games are too good! And I just bought Half Life for 98 cents last night and played it waaay too long!

By the way, my wife knows why it's called Half-Life. It's because that's how much time has been taken from my other activities.

He DID make his own tools... sort of

I rented "Alone in the Wilderness" from Scarecrow Video (The Powell's bookstore of video rentals... if you can't find it here, and they don't know how to get it, the tape cannot be found), and Dick made the handles for his tools. His reasoning was that it would be easier to pack into the area. This video is really worth watching. He wasn't a sport hunter, and wasn't a hippie. He hunted and grew his own food and respected the land. He reminded me a lot of my Grandpa Dow.

PBS Rocks

I was channel surfing today, and saw a piece on PBS about Richard Proenneke, a man who retired at 50 in 1967, built a cabin on a lake in Alaska (FROM SCRATCH), and lived there for 30 years.

I happened upon this program on local PBS affiliate KCTS about halfway through. So, I don't know if he built his tools from scratch. I doubt it. But I was amazed at how well he was able to use his tools. I was also surprised at how well he was able to make boards out of a log with just a handsaw. When I've tried sawing with the grain, the grain usually pulled me where it wanted to go, and the cut never looked very good.

You can find & buy the DVD at http://www.dickproenneke.com/

New Name! Same Great Taste

I’ve been telling myself for months that I need to get it together and combine my registrar and web host to one company, and to finally make use of a couple of domains that I registered over a year ago. It got to the point that I’ve promised myself a copy of Orange Box once I take care of all my web clutter. I finally did the first step last night, and now I’ve got four addresses pointing to this blog!
I’ve always wanted to call the project “Art From Scratch” but the .com version of the name was already taken (by Rachel… visit the site here ),
Now that the .net & .org versions have opened up I snatched ‘em as soon as I could!
It's shorter. It's easy to remember. I can write it down on a napkin a little faster!
So, you can get here from http://www.artfromscratch.net/ http://www.artfromscratch.org/


And even from these addresses:
http://www.paintfromscratch.com/ http://www.paintingfromscratch.com/

One of these days, I may actually make those addresses point to a page that has the blog as one tab of many. But that would require actual effort. Effort that could be spent on grinding more semiprecious rocks into pigment! So probably not anytime soon.

And now for Something Completely Different...

I was able to procure the last batch of titanium sold at the now defunct Boeing Surplus store for Theodore Grey, (creator of the Periodic Table Table, and one who has talked to me at length via email about this project). This incredibly historic titanium unfortunately looked really bland in its original sheet metal form. After talking to him at some length about how to best identify titanium (see his January 2008 column here) I decided to spruce up one of the samples with my friend’s TIG welder. I really like how it discolors! Thank God he had an auto darkening helmet! I don’t think I could have written as well as I did otherwise.









I had a couple of pieces left over after this, so we decided to make an abstract sculpture. This was the first time I welded this metal, and used this session to just get a better feel for it. Since there was no titanium welding rod in his shop, I just had fun melting pieces into each other.

Next entry on Monday July 28th!

Egil's Update

This photo was taken by our 3 year old. Thanks for not dropping the camera!



Here's the spread of material I brought to share



Here's a shot of the Sunday class.

As I briefly mentioned, last weekend we were in Eugene at Egil’s, a SCA event. I had a great time sharing what I’ve learned so far with other attendees. I’ve already gotten an email from someone who has attended my class with some suggestions on things to try. Thanks!

Here’s some of the notes that people gave me to further my studies:

Books to read (they just happen to be *ahem* on my Amazon wishlist now)
The Craftsman Handbook by Cennio Cenni – translated by Daniel Thompson.
Also by Daniel Thompson: The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting.

Places to visit:
Glass Buttes in Central Oregon near Riley.
Apparently there is a lot of obsidian there of which I could make some good tools.

Niaux Cave in the Pyrenees

A note to visit the Newgrange Megalithic Passage Tomb in Ireland.

Egil's Part I

Just a quick note, with more details to follow. My wife and I spent our Memorial Day weekend at Egil's 34, a SCA event (from their webpage: The SCA is an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts and skills of pre-17th-century Europe).

I had the opportunity to 'teach' two classes on making pigment from scratch. It was really more of a chance to share what we all have learned about how our ancestors made pigment. I certainly learned a lot from everyone, and a good time was had by all! Photos and resource links will be posted shortly (tons of books and ideas were passed around). Thanks again to everyone who attended!

Daughter More Prolific than I

It's midnight. The weekend was great, and it feels like spring is in the air again! We're done moving. I unpacked a lot of stuff in the garage and cleared a space for the art project to recommence. But so far, all I've really done is update the banner on my blog, which took waaaay too long, and I'm still not sure if I like the change(I lost my original file, and had to rebuild it *from scratch*, if you'll pardon the term.)

My Photoshop skills are really rusty. But my daughter's is growing! She's 2 3/4 and can pick out her own colors & draw with my Wacom tablet. It's amazing how good her stuff looks for her basically just scribbling. So in lieu of my work, here are two samples of hers.




Personal to Theo: I have your Titanium still, and promise I'll send it out soon, even if it's much more boring than the samples you already have (maybe I need to alter it first. Hmmm....)

Tandy Leather Visit

We recently moved back to Seattle. On one of my move-in errands, I noticed a Tandy Leather Factory store, and had to drop in. A number of years ago, all the stores had closed down, but they are now back in business. I chatted a bit with the manager, and we talked about the trade for a bit. I inherited my grandfather's leather tools, and there is a bit of nostalgia going into these stores.

I'm going to need some sort of soft leather hide (or maybe really strong oiled paper??) if I want to make bellows for any tooling forge. According to the manger, Modern leather is prepared using modern chemicals, most of which were probably not available in 4004 BC. But they did have a book on brain tanning, entitled Deerskins Into Buckskins.

I picked up a copy since I was there (I'll have to start reading it soon). It looks like it got a great review on Amazon!

Looks like I'm getting closer to having to kill an animal for this project. I'm not really looking forward to it, but if I used every bit of the animal, then it would be less of a waste. Hide for bellows, hip joint for mortar & pestle, hair for brushes...

Maybe if I make the bow & arrows, and have my Dad shoot a deer, as he can get tags...

3 hours to the new year

It's nine PM on the west coast, and we move back to the states tomorrow. I'm up in the hotel with a bit of a headache, waiting for the move to be over. Today I let in the cleaning crew into our old house, watched the Price is Right with Drew Carey & Beyond Planet of the Apes, came back & steam cleaned our old house's carpet, dropped off the cleaner, hit the driving range with my friends, got dinner at Boston Pizza, and waited for my daughter to go to sleep. I'll probably get to bed before midnight too.

What does this have to do with the art project? Not much, but the good news is once I'm back in my old house in the states, it will be easier to do things like make a kiln from scratch, fire pit, etc.

Happy new year!

Painting From Scratch: New Host, New Name

Last night I updated this blog, so it is now hosted on the BlogSpot servers, and takes advantage of the neat, new and nifty layout features. Long story short: I don't have to do as much coding to get the features I want, and updating is a lot faster.

Why the name change? There's already an www.artfromscratch.com is already taken. So I registered www.paintingfromscratch.com and www.paintfromscratch.com. They may eventually become the main page for this project, with a link to this very blog. In the meantime, this is the place where all the action is taking place!

All the pictures are now hosted on Picassa. If you just want to look at the pretty pictures, they are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/troy.mcfarland

Cheers,
_TMC

Art From Scratch Listmania Now on Amazon.com

Just a quick note this week: Rather than spend the last hour hammering out a new entry for this blog (about the new pigment experimentation I’ve been doing), I created a Listmania entry on Amazon about the books that I’ve been referencing for this project. Please check out “Books to Build a Civilization from Scratch (or at least a painting)”

More on pigments next week. (#^$&@ addictive time-sucking internet!)

One pigment I won't use...

Just a quick post this weekend, unfortunately. I discovered a painful but abundant way to create a new pigment completely from scratch. Let's just say that although the ochre color is consistent and was plentiful for me this weekend, I don't think anyone would have been able to handle the odor.

Hope to be feeling better next week,
Troy

Quick Update

I've been back from the visit to my parent's new property for a while, and have a whole lot to talk about! So much, in fact, that it's a lot more than one entry. So, for at least the next couple of months, expect a new blog posting weekly by Sunday night. In the meantime, I'll tide you over with links to places that I've visited that directly relate to this project.

K's Nursery
M Graham Paints
Squaxin Island Tribe Museum, Library and Research Center
Fibrefest International 2007 Convention
Wild Rose Fibres

More on each of these places later!

What's For Dinner?

Check out this transfer! I think it looks like a gopher with a peanut in his mouth. Alyssa thinks it looks like a deep sea fish with glowing lure thingy in front of his head. It was made by putting typing paper onto Alyssa’s finished plate of beets and balsamic vinaigrette. Not exactly 100% part of the art project, but thought it was worth a post.

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