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So here is my table in its new home. It is bought and paid for but I always consider my art stuff mine, lent out for other's to enjoy, much like a diamond that you can never own but only become a part of its history.  It was a fun challenge and interesting project but I don't think I will go into the table business.  It was just one of those accidents in life where the customer wanted a five foot table and I just happened to have a five foot steel ring.  Fortuitous for both of us!
   I like the fluted steel columns as legs and would like to see what a smaller table might look like supported by a single column.  So, I will be thinking about that.
   A lot of what I do is just accidental, serendipitous, finding things I wasn't looking for and then making something of them that I hadn't thought about.  I meet people that way too, an accidental encounter and then something clicks and something happens.  Open to ideas and chance encounters.  "Why can't we all just get along?"  I think about Rodney King!  My mind will do that.  Jump from the solidness of steel to the philosophical and poetic in a heartbeat.

230 Brushes!

I am not really a painter, I am a welder. A welder who plays with paint.  I have never had the proper tools to be a painting artist. I paint with house brushes, whatever I can find.  Moving paint around with bits of steel from the shop floor.  I mostly paint on steel or sheets of copper because that is what I can find in my shop.  I paint on inappropriate surfaces.
   Yesterday I went garage sailing out of boredom and felt like a bumble bee flittering from flower to flower,
one sale after the other, hunting for nothing in particular.  Just looking.

 paints and brushes from garage sale

   Mostly it was just junk.  Years of accumulation, some broken and some still in boxes, never opened. I have never really understood garage sales.  Everything, a whole life, put out on tables for the public to peruse, grapple over and barter with, a rummage sale.  Junk for sale and pieces of history, stuff that once was important to you.
  I stumbled upon a great find, serendipity, finding something you were not looking for.  Who could know what mysterious forces would drive me there?  To a garage sale with no sign.  Not even open.  Still organizing table after table, to be officially open to the public not until tomorrow!  I was two days early.
   Lucky me, you won't believe what I found.  A big box of brushes!  230 of them, some never used and all well cared for.
Exotic and plain brushes.  Imported brushes with fine handles.
Skillfully made from the hair of wild animals and modern brushes from from nylon zoos.  Some really old brushes.  The lady selling her stuff was 82 years old and some of the brushes belonged to her mother!

 Just a handful of the pile I found!

   And there must have been a hundred tubes of paint!  Not so old, soft and pliable still with well sealed caps.  And palette knives and tools of the trade I have yet to discover.
   Did I mention the canvas?  A starving artist's dream!  Three feet wide and almost 150 feet long, an entire roll of canvas weighing over 150 pounds.  I could barely get it into my truck.

 Bucket of paint brushes!

   And then I found the bucket.  It is a tool bucket and I already own two or three of them but they are for tools, pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches, chisels, that sort of thing.  Little compartments to organize.  For now it is perfect for my brushes.  They are upright and safe.
   Well, you must be curious as to what this costs?
$100. for everything.  Now the only excuse will be me.

My art site is HERE.

Accidental Art

Much of life is accidental, could have gone either way or not at all. On my other blog I tell of stealing a ring from the Lake Gods and that is perhaps the first time I had a sense of power.

Artists are always doing this, defining things; we capture and confine, duplicate and interpret.

It is not enough to see and just be. We want to create and become a part of it all. We want to put our art into things and us into the art. We are after something.

Not all of it is by design. The first dripped paint was an accident. I make do with what I have

in my metal shop. I like scrounging, finding different uses for common objects. I love shapes and patterns if they are not too repetitive. I like to create the unseeable, not thought of things.

I may accidently find something but when I put it into my art it is on purpose.

Painting into Lonely Hours

I don't do that! I do like the early morning hours, that quiet just before dawn. I like to see the sun rise, be the first to hear the birds

sing and see the promise of the new day, but I am not an isolated artist hunting for salvation or meaning in a paint brush. I paint for fun. I find laughter in the colors and because I paint mostly on metal, I seek to discover the will of the paint. It doesn't stay where put as on canvas; it moves about, blends or not, obliterates itself, or quite strikenly becomes something completely

different from what I had imagined. It is alive.

My other Blog is HERE.

Serendipity

is one of my favorite words. It is viewing the world and instigating your search with your eyes wide open. Not to be confused with being easily distracted or settling for less, it is the discovery of something you were not looking for. Life should not be a preordained straight line from birth to death. We are able to visit the side road amusements, to travel trails uncharted,
expanding our horizons in this quest for whatever it might be but we so seldom do it!
I think we get tricked into the things we do. I don't know why anyone would ever want to go on a cruize ship? These are not "Love Boats" nor the passenger ships of the last century with their open decks and just cables between you and the ocean. These are floating cities with glass between you and the water, packed in like sardines, just you and six thousand others! and with television sets in the cabins! "Tours" are the same, guided and safe and predictable, offering us a taste of we don't even know what and allowing us to chat amongst ourselves, viewing the world from the inside out. We have lost our sense of adventure and see life in thirty minute episodes complete with commercials! Serendipity requires the ability to jump ship.