Wolf Shadow Artisan Sale

So far so good!

Attitude is Everything

   I have hired hundreds of people over the course of my career.  In the construction industry there are only two good times to hunt for work, the first thing in the morning before work begins and at the end of the day when you realize that an extra hand could have been useful.  All of the other hours are a distraction and I have planned my day based on what I have.
   The worst resumes were those with twenty year's experience and no tools of the trade.  If you don't take care of yourself I know you won't take care of me.  A good painter is picky and has his own brushes.  Every Skill Saw is a little different and a good carpenter is used to his own.
   Looking back, my favorite employees were the one's who insisted that I hire them.  They wouldn't take "no" for an answer and would show up repeatedly at my shop, often before I did, always asking if they were needed today.  Some would offer to work one day for free, again that attitude, "try me out, I know you will like me"!
   Attitude is everything on a construction site and I suspect a lot of other work environments.  Really, I am after a "can do" attitude but also a "will do" attitude.  Someone not afraid to get dirty and not limitted by a job description and can do it all with a smile.  I can teach anything but you have to be willing to learn.
  
My Business Site is HERE

Now Is The Time

When you first learn to weld and you know the basics


 Morning Walk



you have an overwhelming desire to create something nice.

I encourage those I help to learn this skill to save their

first creations.  A year later, if they continue to practice,

they can look back on this experience and laugh.

  

 I still have a lot to learn, a lot of brushes that have never seen
paint, even paint not opened that has never seen a brush!
I am tired of landscapes already and realize they were just an exercise.  It could take me years to paint the perfect tree, a cloud that you could really see through or water that really looked wet.
Any landscape leaves the viewer with an attitude that they could do it better or certainly seen it better done.

I have learned shadows, light and dark, depth and focus.  I like some detail but not too much.  I like mystery to a painting.  Painting should be poetry.

So this is my "project piece" the one I will save and look back on it a year from now.  The intention is to get better and laugh!

More Early Stuff is here.

Assignments

...is what I give myself.  I am still in the fun stages of learning to paint and don't really know what I am doing.
I have no teacher, no mentor looking over my shoulder and guiding me along the way.  No helpful hints.
I am not really painting anything, just learning what a particular brush will do and what I am capable of doing with it.  My painting is getting heavy from the layer upon layer, thick with ideas, changes as something catches my eye and needs attention.  Nothing is deleted.  Every idea, each misstep along the way is there under layers of paint, one stroke covering another.
   I have forgotten nothing in my life.  Experience and reaction all along the way, each episode, like layers of paint are embossed onto the canvas of my brain.
   I am playing with shapes and colors and shadows, clouds that become fog, trees that lose their definition in a forest.  I think of the painting of a painter painting the painting of a painter painting a painting...of a painter painting a painting and I wonder whether I am trying to say anything?

   The process is different from welding and it is very much the same.  You stay at it until you get good at it or you abandon it altogether.  That is pretty simple and straight forward.

Jerry Carlin/poetry

Someone googled that, "Jerry Carlin/poetry" so I did too!  oh, it takes you here and there to bits of me, but no poems, no published volumes.  It doesn't even take you to my youth when I did write poetry.  One of the first rules of writing is to keep in mind your audience and I only wrote poetry for one.

   Writing is not difficult.  It is telling a story, setting a scene, creating a curiosity, a little mystery and a heroine.  It is a descriptive painting in words and can be told  layer by layer, each brush stroke singular and purposeful, shadows telling time.  Stories can be told after the fact, like restoring a Renaissance Painting, removing layers, chips of old paint to discover the original.

   I have time now, a luxury accumulated by accident, words come as a mist, swirl like snowflakes and disappear on the water's edge.  Difficult as catching kisses but I am going to try.

   It was easier to write in my youth when I had an audience, even if just one.  Easier to write when I didn't know the future and it was all make believe, imagination and dandelion wishes, flowers in a garden with no foot steps.

    All words now seem like travel writing, descriptions and places of where I have been and I wonder whether Shakespeare wrote love stories from memory?

   I might write poetry and I might not.  The truth is I do not know what I will write.  There is no story boiling within me and that makes it an exercise, doesn't it?

   You would think that at my age I would have discovered a truth worth telling but maybe the answer is "over easy", "medium well", not rare or well done at all, no extremes, careful planing on a course well set.

God that would be boring and so predictable and so not me at all.

   So, maybe I will find something, "start with the now" and go backwards or do what I have always done, jump ahead and fly!  Scenery, timing, shadows, water and moonlight, budding flowers and dancing butterflies, songs carried by the wind, a heroine, the temperature, what is happening everywhere and in a particular place and why we do things at all?

   It is all poetry, every bit of it, every syllable, every initial carved on a tree, every sunrise the first one and may be the last one. Every breath taken is poetry and I am honored to be googled together: Jerry Carlin and Poetry.

 My garden and other stuff is HERE

More on Poetry

    You only get your first girlfriend once.  Mine twisted me upside down, flipped me backwards and stood me on my head.  I knew about poetry a little bit but she was pretty overwhelming, for a time my only every world.  I remember in college writing a million poems to her.  Slow mail days, I would receive one from her and write her six.  I was eager then too.  Those were the days when I wrote: poems and gibberish, short stories, love voodoo mist kinds of things.  Mostly then as I do now, trying to figure everything out, place meaning where there might be none.  It is strange the kinds of things we remember from our youth.  I can tell you of the day I met her.  I can quote conversation we had.  I remember ordering apple slices and wedges of cheese in a restaraunt and she was a Princess from another country at my side.
   I have saved the strangest things, bits and pieces from my youth.  I have all the old poetry, mine and hers
and reread them from time to time.  It is not with a longing or missing her, I understand that life goes on and we are far different people now, but I sometimes miss that boy that I was.
   I can't for the life in me remember exactly what happened and I have tried a hundred times to rediscover it.
I am pretty sure I didn't know it then.  Somehow we failed and lost a slippery hold, that happens.  She took with her my desire to write.  Now, almost forty-five years later I am digging amongst the ashes, piling cinder upon cinder in an attempt to create a fire.  If I can find that boy again, maybe now I can carry his hand and lead him to where he needs to be.  Aren't we all doing that in a way?  or trying to do it? or should do it but maybe we are not?
   Most of what I used to write is just plain garbage, like a fire gone amok, emotions tripped over contradicting descriptions, but I kept them as a journal, for one day I knew that I would like to know what I was.  Here is a poem I wrote 45 years ago:

The Painter

Capturing a moment in a gentle mist,
a simple canvas, lightly touched
pale blues and darker reds and
ivory colored lace
her skirt carried by the breeze.

Into lonely hours I paint continually
my hands and brush both heavy.
a moment more and face and hands
grow lily pink,
reflecting a caress of moon
along the strands of hair.

In her eyes, a little dark,
a blotch of blue waits for tomorrow
to complete the lake or pond,
as sleep is sinking, fills into my
bone, that I may dream and
she tease me out of thought.

                   April,'67 jac

Well, it is a poem and I won't explain it.  It could be anything you would like it to be, a chameleon poem.
You can find me HERE also

Two in One Day! or How I Taught Pamo to Poem!

What do you think? Am I?  Could be!

There is a certain nakedness about poetry that people are fearful of, too much fat or not pretty enough. That is the first concept you have to dump.  I suspect that writing poetry is not unlike selling motorcycles.  "Will it really go that fast?"  You are thinking yes it will, off a cliff maybe! and wondering why this fat middle aged dude even wants a bike in the first place!  You are not selling motorcycles, you are selling images, imaginations, fantasy.  "Oh yeah baby, you will look great and she will purr like a kitten!"
    Poetry isn't so much of writing about experiences as it is using your experience as a filter to explain the extrordinary or even the mundane of life.  Just like a motorcycle sale, you have 15 seconds in which to do it!  Words become carefully manipulated, crafted, honed, sharp and to the point.  You can't take back an uncomfortable kiss.  We have all had these; it is not necessary to describe your own, I can image mine.
That is the job of a poet, to create an image, and because mine might be different than yours it becomes dynamic and encourages conversation!  Then you can relax because you know that the motorcycle will sell itself!
So, my wonderful friend, Pamo, yes you would be a great neighbor! and you have given me a topic and I
attempt to stay with it this week, so more on this tomorrow!
My Other Blog is HERE:

Ladies' Club?

I have been told that this blogging world is a ladies' club, that we are interested in "niceties" and tea, luncheons and grandchildren.  I don't believe it is that limited, a place where the women talk in the kitchen and men are drinking their brandy by the fire, talking "serious stuff", concerns of the day, political things and "men talk."
   I don't belong to any "political blogs", only this one and I follow my followers and occasionally reach out and drag another into this discussion.  I don't think of women as the kitchen staff, unread, without an opinion,
and tied to the stove, only allowed to talk of cooking, sewing and children.
   We all enter a conversation from some vantage point.  We can read the very same book but we never leave our experience.  Our point of view filters what we see and this is what makes life interesting.  If we all got the same thing from the same experience, well then life would be pretty dull.  The best conversations are not with people who agree with every thought we have.  Sometimes, in disagreement, we can even discover that our experience was limiting, somehow blocking what everyone else could see clearly!  The idea behind a discussion is to allow another your experience because in this life you only have time to digest your own.
   I choose this blog to express my views because mostly I am an artist and it is this artist's view that I bring to the table.  If we ever me an extraterrestrial, who would you want to represent us? A math genius or scientist?  A politician? Maybe a poet?  How about a mother?  Well, that's my point exactly.  Women have a unique view into this history of mankind and it is not limited to sewing!  In fact, sewing has been a terrific inspiration!  Do you realize that it was women with their sewing, working with cloth, designs on pottery and their own spiritual quest that created Abstract Art?  Yes, it is true.
    I enter the conversation as an artist and a cook.  I think some of the best art in the world is meant to be eaten.  Surrounded by good smells and designs on the pottery.  There is a conversation here that has been largely ignored, given over to the men by the fireplace having their drinks.
    Sometimes conversations become political and it is safer to make bread, wear a burka, remain without an opinion, change the subject, be fearful of the secret police, worry about what people may think, leave that to the husband, or think we are powerless.  Or, even worse, think that is has nothing to do with us!
    I have a point of view.  I am reasonably well read and I am a welder.  I am fairly conservative, really I am!
Except for three years as a school teacher I have been self-employed all my life.  I am a businessman.  Most of my life I have had employees, as many as fifteen people working for me.  Over the years I have been to every single one of their homes, seen their children grow, eaten their food, seen them cry, helped them find laughter, encouraged them in their journeys.  The better they became, the better we worked as a team.
    I have a point of view.  I have two daughters.  In some ways the world is better for them and in some ways it is worse.  They are independent young women and I am so very proud of them.  They are "out of the kitchen", not barefoot and pregnant; they can vote, are free to express their opinion.  Both are world travellers, educated way beyond me and even have "good jobs".  They can have conversations in any room in the house.
    Yes, I could go to a political forum and probably argue my little heart out but that is not really who I am.
I am an artist, a welder, a gardener (Spring is coming and I will be talking about my garden soon!), a businessman, husband, father, friend, and I am comfortable in the kitchen and, on occasion, like to drag you into the fireplace room!
My Other Blog is HERE.

No Fear!

 These are 5' tall, made in my backyard studio
and weigh about 150 pounds.

 Once you start playing with metal you soon realize that there
are no limits, no restrictions on what can be done.

     I think that is the trick to great art, new styles to copy and artists to remember. I developed an interest in welding out of necessity.  About 15 years ago I invented "stoneposts", my company name and the slate covered, concrete interrior light posts that are now found in five Western States and all over my town.  My customers were wanting ornamental iron work attached to these posts, gates and fencing and vines. The metal workers in my town worked on cars and trailers and could only produce a fence panel with vertical bars 4 inches apart. My posts need something more than that, more of something and I didn't even know what!
     I bought a lot of books.  Not "how to books," I could figure that out myself. Just design books showing what has been done throughout the centuries, all over the world.  I learned that design and art in steel was an essential element in the strength of the piece.  Beautiful strength and I was left with wondering why are we making "car lot fencing" when something great is available?
     Once you figure out the how to of welding it is addictive and probably not unlike any other art form.

 One piece of red!

And, like any other art form, the first step is you have to really want to do it.  It is like a fire under the skin.

Have no fear.  Yes, you can do anything with steel
but so many people are afraid to do anything different!  That is the downside of our "standardized" civilization.  We want what the neighbor's have and are reluctant to try something different.


You can see more of my work HERE.

Hang Art

I don't have the hang of these new Blog features, and maybe this photo will not come out as intended.  Anyway, I think it is ironic that I call this blog "Hang Art" and here are my big gates ready to be hung! They are done and out of the shop and today they will be installed. They weigh about 250 pounds each and should last longer than I will.  That is the guarantee anyway. On Monday I will post the installed picture for your approval.  Never seen one like this before, have you?  Me neither, except in a dream, that is why I built it. It is not particularly expensive.  I have built much smaller gates for a lot more money.  It is actually a simple gate but finds its distinction in the copper panels and the center stainless steel panel.  It is well built with complete welds and structural steel throughout.  I think it will get noticed and that is how I find work, word of mouth, the best advertising there is! 

My Other Blog is HERE.