smile

 

Here is a quiet little moment with the tiny smile of an eight-year-old girl. I sure wish I had a model for this because I very much want to be good at sculpting children.

I’ve been working on this sculpture during our kitchen remodeling project. We finally finished laying tile on the kitchen floor and it’s gorgeous. That thing that irritates me so much about my husband…his grueling, torturous perfectionism, is also the thing that after the project is done I’m most proud of him for. My hands ache from handling the porcelain tiles and trying to scrub thinset off my fingertips, from scouring the tile again and again to remove the grout film.

I have a toaster oven and a microwave to prepare meals with. The fridge is in the ice-cold garage.  I have to be near starvation to risk exposure to the sub arctic temperatures.

You never know when you may be called upon at 5:40am from your warm, toasty bed to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  The jelly’s in the garage. NOOOooooo….

Life Size

Last time I visited my friend,  Ahmed Fadaam, he was working on this foam sculpture he will call “Media” at the UNC art lab. He took foam sheets like those pictured above, glued them together and placed them on a metal armature, and carved a beautiful life-sized running woman to represent run-away headlines in the news. Ahmed showed me how he used a heated wire to cut through the foam, then refined his surfaces with rasps and finally smoothed with sandpaper. In this image her arms have not yet been put into place, but he is much further along in the process now.

Eventually this sculpture will be covered in headlines cut from newspapers and I think it may be placed somewhere on the UNC campus when it is finished. He was kind enough to let me do a little carving on the back leg and a very tiny bit on the hair.

I hope you enjoy these images. I feel so fortunate to have Ahmed as a friend. I’ve learned a lot from him. He has shown me several materials including this one that he believes will help me push myself further as a sculptor. How do you thank someone so generous and kind, who helps make your dreams come true?