Here are some of my better sketches and I will also put them on the sketchbooks page on the website, (a page that has been neglected lately). Some of these I think actually turned out OK. I am happy with the volume of sketching I accomplished over the last 365 days or so. Still not enough but better.
Not much else to say I guess about 2020
It takes me a while to do these larger pieces. This one I probably started over a year ago.
It is a pencil drawing on a piece of Masonite with many coats of gesso sanded smooth.
The drawing measures 18″ high by 24″ wide.
Like always, I am not sure if I accomplished anything of worth here, I was trying to figure out some sort of value scheme but in the end its just a drawing that took a lot of time.
One of my favorite themes is men working and taking a frozen moment and figuring out what I want to detail out more or less maybe helps me to see things that I wouldn’t normally see. Maybe in the big picture it helps me get to the truth of the matter.
But I guess making little lines is sort of a meditative process for me so in that sense it does serve some purpose.
Before and during the process of creating the above large drawing, I did numerous sketches to try and get a feel for value and gesture. You can see this project has been with me for some time:
About a week ago I became a Grandfather. October 23rd, 2020 at 7:45am Colorado time to be exact.
I don’t mean to make it sound like a personal accomplishment, it was mostly my daughter and her husbands doing. But I like to think I had some hand in the process, at least from a historical perspective.
I have not met the little guy yet, just seeing pictures…
An event like this can cause one to sit back for a moment and reflect on where we are and where we are going as a human species on this small blue-green planet floating in this vast universe. My initial thought is that this is a troubling time to be born, but then when is it not a troubling time? And when is it not a wonderful time to just stop and breathe and take in one more moment of this amazing gift we have been given?
We will continue to make our plans and go about our day to day lives and babies will be born and people will pass on.
Collectively we may not always make the best decisions but individually we have enormous potential to make ourselves the best version of our self possible and make the small circle around us a little bit better place.
Here is another human who will be faced with that challenge. It is one I personally fall far short of every day but of all the projects we take on in our busy lives, in my mind, it is the only one that matters. Developing the character, integrity, honesty that I know his parents will influence him with… And hopefully for the next ten or fifteen years he will have time to just be a kid, possibly setting an example for us to reach back and feel again for a moment that little kid in ourselves.
So good luck Calvin. Game on Little Dude.
Sometime in the later part of 2019 I was given the opportunity to build a large table with some slabs of Douglas Fir that had been milled from some beams that had been laying in a basement of a building since the late 1890s. These are the slabs on the day I brought them into me shop in Ely:
It was a very simple project only made difficult by the fact that it was very large. Gluing up the top was a fun project:
Here are some finished pictures:
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Here are some pictures of the structural insulated panels, (SIPS), going on to the timber frame:
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| They are not extremely heavy but most of them are a bit much for three guys to handle efficiently… a crane makes the process much easier. |
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| The wall panels are all in place here |
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| Swinging the roof panels over with the crane… |
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| …and setting them in place… |
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| The panels are all in place here, ready for sub-fascia and roofing… |
Feels like winter is setting in now with the change in the clocks… darkness starts setting in about 4:30… Today was another exceptionally nice day, high in the mid 40s, but we all know what is coming…
