31 October 2008

Visit to the Cantor Center



On the day before All Hallows' Even, I spent the afternoon with a friend at Stanford's Cantor Center for the Arts. We viewed the exhibit of Diebenkorn drawings and paintings of Santa Cruz Island. Santa Cruz Island is one of the Channel Islands off the coast of CA.


Also on exhibit were contemporary glass pieces, inspired by older Italian, Greek and other pieces.

In very comfortable craftsmen style chairs upstairs in the museum, we watched some great cloud action above the campus.



Afterwards, we headed over to the nearby Allied Arts Guild to view the work of some local artists. These flowers caught our eye.



26 October 2008

Fave New Book

I'm loving the book "The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals" by Richard Hughes and Michael Rowe. (Click on the title to see the book.)

Since I'm more of a "thanks for the suggested starting point" type of person, for the most part I'm using the endless patina recipes in the book as a very nice place to start. Here are a couple of the things I've learned....


When you boil sorrel in water to obtain the oxalic acid, and use the water with some of the now sad looking sorrel, you'll see the copper in this type of blue mess after about a week:

Stay tuned for more photos of what the pieces look like after they've been cleaned off.

Find the Sailboat



Sunny Cove, Santa Cruz, CA

Hungry for Hawaiian?


25 October 2008

Passion Flower


22 October 2008

Three Pomegranates



I'm pretty pleased with the pomegranates that rose out of the 22 gauge copper sheet brought to my first Chasing and Repousse' workshop! Davide Biggazzi is an excellent instructor, and yes - he did a small bit of the work on this piece. Nothing like working directly on the piece to show the technique when moving along in the steps of the process.... 



Starting with this outline from Davide, I punched and punched the dots around the tracing paper to transfer the image to the copper sheet.



We worked the back of the piece (repousse'), then switched to the front of the piece to refine the design (chasing). A couple minor touchups were then made on the back and front (by Davide) once the piece had been removed from the pitch bowl.

02 October 2008

Nice! -and- Patinas

Emanuela Duca has some very nice pieces of jewelry on her site. Clicking the title of this post will take you to her site.

Back to work! For the upcoming SFBASCG meeting in Los Gatos, I'm preparing a patina demo on brass, copper, and silver. I enjoyed experimenting with different materials last year when I gave a patination demo for the Metal Arts Association of Silicon Valley. 

Results of last years demo are shown below. The tobacco patina was interesting because the coarse and fine tobacco resulted in very different patinas. The friend that went with me to the smoke shop to purchase pipe tobacco for the demo was just asking me about the tobacoo patina the other day. She finds it amusing and interesting. Aren't we artists odd?!