Faded Paint

So I've been pretty obsessed with this song lately.  Jon Foreman (lead of Switchfoot) descibes the rapid flourishing of the pharmaceutical companies as indicative of their claim, and our belief, that drugs bring abundant and true life, -on the market drugs and off the market drugs.  I agree with him.  This era, among other things, is the chemical era. The chemicals intially appear to help but eventually they enslave and cripple.  I don't know when we started to believe that life shouldn't be painful or hard or depressing -at times, but whenever that was, we figured out chemicals could soften it, or mask it, or whatever.  Once we've softened or masked it we don't need to work as hard at figuring out the reason for the pain or struggle.  We can get rid of the problem by numbing ourselves to it.  Alcohol used to be the old numbing agent, but that has become easy for people to identify as a problem.  The chemicals our good doctors prescribe...

KAMROOZ ARAM  Supreme Elevation II, 2009, Oil on canvas, 182.9 x 274.3 cm This is a painting I really like.  It is by Kamrooz Aram.

My friend Pat Perry is a talented, hard working artist. His art and his blog are worthwhile stops. Check out his most recent video, I think you'll enjoy it. I will be posting a wrap up video from ArtPrize here soon too. Timelapse Painting Yeah from Pat Perry on Vimeo .

I have to be at work by 9:30 but there's just enough time to sip a little coffee and turn a few pages of a book. Just picked up this new book by Ed Dobson . I like it so far. Mostly because it's interesting but also because its a little weird. I've come to appreciate weird. Normal is...well...normal. Ed sat with me for maybe half an hour on a park bench in front of where my sculpture is showing and he talked to me like we had been friends for a long time. He liked my sculpture which made me like him even more. With his ALS, long beard, and red white and blue track suit on, he looked like a homeless man. That made me like him more too. Anyway, the book came out yesterday, I'll let you know what I think. Or you can read it too and tell me.

What a beautiful morning. -Or at least it was. Where did all the fog come from? Hey, with all this talk of ArtPrize, my friend Pat Perry is in ArtPrize too and his entry is super sweet. Check out his blog for some images and updates. I don't know if you "subscribe" to blogs or not but not that long ago I figured out to use Google Reader (it isn't very hard) and I love it. Basically I "subscribe" to any blog OR webpage I want to stay up to date on and it auto-loads all of them on one page for you to keep track of. No having to remember to check someones blog, or a band's website for tour news or album releases. Just subscribe to the sites and your reader will post the update when it happens. Most of you probably already know all of this, but I threw it out there just in case you were like me a few months ago and had no idea at the technological convieniences available to me.

So here's number in the ArtPrize production videos. Hope you enjoy!

Here's the newest installment of our ArtPrize Production Video. I hope you enjoy it. More will be coming soon.

We had to put our 11 & 1/2 year old Bernese Mountain Dog, Annina, to sleep today. She was an amazing dog. We loved her. She had two beautiful litters of puppies. She was stubborn and strong-willed, but that made her the confindent girl she was. She was faithful and loving. Gentle and Kind. We miss you and love you Good Girl. All this has me thinking. One of the hardest truths I'm struggling with is not death right now. It is the changing of life. Death is tough, -maybe the toughest thing about life. But it is something we think about often, at least I do. I'm having a hard time with the changing eras of life. Something I don't spend too much time thinking about. Annina dying today kind of signified the end of an era for Molly and I. We were young and married. We were full of ambition and optimistic dreams. We lived in a little house down by a stream. And we had Pepper and Annina. We didn't have human kids, we had puppy kids. They were what we ...

Here is a little update on the ArtPrize project. We finally got all of the rocks brazed together in groups so they can be attached to the board later after they're colored. Today Thomas worked on the stand that will hold the piece and I stated coloring the rocks with various chemicals and treatments to get some vibrant colors out of them. The stand Thomas is building is amazing! I will post some pictures of it soon. He is building a stand that kind of hands the sculpture out in front without you really seeing the stand too much at all. He is crazy detailed about getting it perfect. The Lord definitely gave me the right person for the job. The rock coloring is going well. I am really excited by the way they turning out. Sorry I don't have any picture to put on here yet. One thing I want to take a moment to say is how thankful I am for all of the help I have received from others so far. My dad, Brad Savickas, Scott Ouzts, Josh Koziej all have helped with the productio...

Here's the latest video documenting the production of my sculpture for ArtPrize . I posted it here because unfortunately I used a copywrited Mute Math track for the background audio and they turned the audio off on Youtube. I think if you view it from my channe l on Youtube though and you can still hear the audio, it really is much better with it. The track is The Nerve from Mute Math's brand new album Armistice which is great. Last night, while working on the sculpture, I got a good burn from the acetylene torch. It turns out 800 degrees is pretty hot afterall. Tonight we will be continuing to attach the rocks together in groups of 20-40 so they can be attached to the backgroup in several large chunks. We are also going to be making the waterline on the three big rocks that need to appear that they are sticking out of the water. We're going to do this by actually putting them in a kiddie pool, filling up with water and making a line on the rocks where the water co...

So tomorrow at 5am I'll be kicking off a mad week of work on this artprize project. I hope the furry of manpower does not negatively effect the quality of the final product. By the end of this week we should be done or almost done with it. Pray for Thomas and I if you think about it, we'll be putting in like 16 hour days mon-tue & thu- fri. -then my brother in law's wedding saturday which all of the rest of my family is in. I'll try to pop in here and update but if not, you know why.

After night comes the light dawn is here dawn is here it’s a new day it’s a new day everything will change things will never be the same we will never be the same As I sit here this beautiful Saturday morning the sun breaks through the trees at a sharp angle from left to right. Fewer leaves are being disturbed by the subtle breeze than those that are not. The upside down copy of the trees on the lake surface is competing with the original for "best in show." As I sit here I have been blessed to remember something. We can come to this spot, and by this spot I mean any one of an infinite number of places amongst creation, with the heaviest of burdens or weightiest of occupations, and be blessed with a truth that the created world is insistent on reminding us. -That HE is forever making all this new. The cycle of day and night. -Fall Winter Spring and Summer. -Death and resurrection . -Old put away and new sprung open. Everywhere it's built-in, -can you see it? It...

So here I am returning to this place of forgotten intentions. I figured since I was working on this ArtPrize project I would start my blog back up and not only document its progress day to day but throw in some random thoughts about life from time to time. I will do my best to make it worth your while but definitely no promises there. I still plan to do a weekly YouTube video on the production of the ArtPrize sculpture that you can find here .So... regarding the sculpture: FINALLY all of the rocks are are formed! I cut, hammered, and welded the last one today. I'm sure once we start attaching them to the board we will have to alter or redo some of them, but for now no more making rocks. phew! Now... well now is the next fun phase of grinding all of the excess welding material off all of the rocks. That's 10-20 welds per rock x about 300 rocks. I ground rocks for about 10 hours today. Thomas Ouzts is the metal fabricator that is helping on the project (I could n...