Newyorkamera.com

Coming back from the Silver show, I arrived at the R station and noticed about a dozen people dressed like Santa on the uptown platform. When I got up on the street there were more Santas in front of the terminal. It was mystifying because there were so many and they seemed to be in a loose group. I asked one of the Santas and he said that the next boat would have about a hundred Santas on it.  I went upstairs and waited. 

In the waiting room there were more Christmas characters. 

There were a LOT more than a hundred getting off of the boat, I took a video of the boat unloading and put it up on YouTube. I’ll try to embed it here but if it doesn’t come up go to this

link and see it on YouTube. 

After they disembarked, I took these two shots of the upper and lower lobbies of the terminal. 

It wasn’t until I got home and on the web that I found out that the SantaCon is an annual event and there are videos of various events from a number of years on YouTube.

It was only yesterday that the NY Times wrote an article about a show in a Columbia University Gallery. “Delight in Design” is a show of silver tableware from India made during the Raj. Didn’t think I was going to go but I decided last night that I would make the effort. It was the last day and it was something I needed to see. The Wallach Gallery opened at 1:00 this afternoon and I made it up to 116th street and found the gallery by about 1:30. I was fortunate to find the curator, Vidya Dehejia was there talking with one of her friends and taking him through the show. Following along, I got a lot of interesting insights about the culture in India at the time of the British occupation. A few other people joined the impromptu tour and had questions of their own which enriched our knowledge of the times and people around the silver in the show. Here’s a photo of Vidya.

A number of people showed up having read the Times article (Last Chance) and all of them were as surprised as I was that we hadn’t heard about it, it’s been open since the middle of September. This is the first piece that greeted us as we entered the galleries. It is made with spectacularly deep repoussè work, on closer examination I saw a number of holes where the metal may have been worked too hard or it may have worn through over the ages, but none of the flaws took away from the drama of the piece. 

What I wanted to examine here is the insides of the vessels, here’s a shot of another slightly smaller bowl with a shot of the inside which shows how deep the repoussè work is.

  Here are a few shots of the gallery and a case or two.

The rocking chair in this case is a wine bottle holder. There’s a circular hole in the seat so that the bottle can rest on the rungs. 

Here are a few details of pieces I like. The first piece is their PR centerpiece in the Kashmir style, it is remarkably sculptural with a pierced base. This double shot was put together from the gallery web site. I took the shots of the accompanying plate, decorated with the same pattern, showing front and back and another shot of the inside of the large bowl.

A bowl decorated with animals representing the days of the week, I’ll have to read the catalog to get more information. 

I like this image of an elephant and Tiger, it’s on a tankard that’s covered with animals surrounded by foliage and flowers.  

 There are many more pieces I liked (especially the little pepper pots) but this is enough for this post, you can see the whole show by clicking on this word

Delight

which will take you to the Wallach Gallery page for this exhibition. There are slide shows that take you through the regional styles of decoration and show almost all the pieces in the galleries.  

There’s also a great catalog available. One of the other visitors said you can find it on Amazon too.  It’s $65 in hard cover. 

Here’s a shot of the tall cup being worked for a second time after applying the silver rim.   This rim didn’t go on as easily as the first one, I was using a smaller gauge sterling wire and it was harder to fit and keep in place during the soldering process. After the first phase of chasing, I trimmed the edge and added the rim. I also bought a sand bag to hold the cup while working on it. Here it is, on the new sandbag being worked for the second time on December 7th. 

Here they are today, sides and bottoms. The camera lens distorts the shapes a bit when I shoot this close,  makes them look like they are leaning out from the center of the photo and widens the tops. 

I liked going over the pieces the second time, it gave me a chance to make some small corrections and sharpen the figures. I’m thinking about having them plated, the copper is warm to look at but I don’t think that I want to drink out of it. 

While in the city last Monday, I passed through a part of the West Village that I hadn’t seen for a long time. There was an awful mess on the sidewalks under a few trees by the Cabrini Pool near Hudson Street. The smell told me it was from fruit of Ginko Trees.  Usually only the male trees are planted in the city because they don’t bear fruit. Hadn’t realized what a problem it could be until I saw what three trees could do to a short stretch of sidewalk. Here’s a better view of the abundant fruit still hanging in branches overhead.

We were watching the late local news, something I usually refer to as the local mayhem and we saw that there was snow falling in Chelsea. I thought that it had looked a little strange outside from the bathroom window but didn’t investigate until I saw the news. Here are some shots of the front and one of the deck. Not much, but it probably won’t be on the ground when we wake tomorrow morning.

I have spent the past two weeks working on painting 135 sheets of paste paper, I will finish the last 5 sheets tomorrow. It’s been a long haul that has kept me from keeping a normal schedule. The biggest shock was that the materials I thought were standard, have been changed after a century or more of stability. The Venus bronze powder that was produced in Flemington, N J wasn’t available at Pearl or NY Central Art Supply. Internet searching and telephoning got me to nice people at US Bronze who told me that they had sold off the Venus Bronze powder division Last Month! They gave me the number of the new owners, deep in the midwest. Talking to them was easy, but the price had more than doubled. The next shock was that the material could not be sent by air. It seems that OSHA has made bronze powder a hazardous material. It would have to get to me by UPS Ground, a delay of at least 2 days in a schedule of painting papers that was already 2 weeks too short. It gave me a couple of days of rest and and time to chase some of the copper that I’ve been raising in class at FIT. But before I get to that, I have to write about the other material that has changed.

I used to buy variegated metal leaf which I broke up, sifted and put the various sized flakes into jars, these flakes are used to gild paste papers. It was simple, the variegation was either red, green or black.  When I went to buy new material, I was surprised to find that the old style was no longer available. In its place stands a plethora of variegated, PATTERNED metal leaf. Stripes, grids, fields of stars, and marbled effects with names like Sunset, Sunrise, Flower and  Mandarin have made searching for the color I needed  exasperating.  But it turns out that since I am breaking the leaf up into flakes, I only had to get close to the color I needed, the effects were nearly the same as the sample I had produced from the old style leaf. Then there was sticker shock, what used to cost $3.75 up to $7.50 a book is now $19.50 to $39.00(!) a book depending on the pattern and whether it is German or Italian.  I’m beginning to think our US currency is worth nothing. Enough of this, the problems have been resolved and the paper order will be finished and delivered Monday.

This is the smallest cup, it is filled with pitch, the chasing has begun for a design that goes all the way around it.  It isn’t finished here or in the next shots.

Here’s a shot of the four projects I am raising.  This was taken in class a week ago last Thursday after I had trimmed the ragged edge off of the smallest tumbler.  Gennady said that I should add a wider rim to the cup so I began to file the edge in class while other pieces were in the pickle after being annealed.  

Duringt the forced rest while waiting for the bronze powder to arrive, I made a silver wire rim and soldered it to the chased cup. This shot shows the cup with most of the design worked in, since then I have refilled it with pitch and cleaned up the design. It was necessary to do that because the act of soldering the lip on to the cup had the effect of annealing the piece, making the metal soft again, it needed to be hardened again for durability. 

After working on the small cup I started on the medium cup that had been expanded with the Snarling Iron.  I made the rim and base hard in class. Here are some progress shots showing the design sketched in and the beginning of the work on the first panel. I decided to make something with animals instead of a geometric pattern. Chasing the first piece was a pleasant experience but it was difficult to maintain geometric precision and chase clean, straight lines. I think, too, that the animals will be more engaging, repeating them 5 times around the piece will teach me a lot about tools and strength of hammer strike, the differences in their expression should be charming rather than distracting. 

Since these photos have been taken, I have completed two and a half more of the animal panels and reworked on the scroll border to clean it up a bit. It looks like I will anneal again and have to go back and re work the design to toughen the metal. It will get a new rim too.

I accompanied Diana, one of my neighbors, and her friend Kathy when they drove out to the Bronx to see the Chrysanthemum Show at the New York Botanical gardens Sunday after Halloween. This will be more like a photo scrap book, I’ll add some more commentary a little later, just don’t have the time now to write a whole story.

Diana and Kathy in one of the display gardens out side the Haupt Conservatory.  

The first thing we saw was this huge bamboo sculpture.  

The Kiku ( Chrysanthemum) Show was out side in the conservatory courtyards around the ponds. The specialized growing technique plants were  in protected out door spaces around the pond.

There are 229 flowers in this pyramid, all on one plant. You’ll see in the photo of the flower box that comes after this one.

Kathy took this shot of me with one of the many maples that were on display with the chrysanthemums.

This is an aristolochia or Dutchman’s Pipe.  This one is richly colored and has a very sculptural shape to the flowers,  which were falling off of the vine, littering the conservatory floor. 

I’ll start with a photo I took at the Edison Mall Pet store last week end. We were there to buy some shoes but I like to stop into the pet store see the puppies and thought we might find another toy for Henry, he seems to need something on which to teethe. In the back of the store I saw these gerbils sleeping together in their little hut.

In class last Thursday I managed to get two rounds in on the silver wine cup. Here it is after the second round. Top diameter 140mm.

After the third round. Top diameter 136mm. I should have been able to close it more than 4mm.

I set the base and when Gennady looked at it he said he was disturbed to see new marks inside the bottom, there should be only old marks, he intimated that those should be fading. I said that I only just set the bottom, he said that I was changing position while doing it which is fundamentally wrong, I should be striking in one spot on the stake while rotating the base and then everything would be a smooth curve with no marks. He was right, I had changed position several times trying to adjust my strikes on the stake. I’ll straighten it out next time I set the base. Here’s the cup with the 4th round started, class ended before I could complete the round. 

While the annealed silver was in the pickle, I asked Gennady to show me how to use a snarling iron on one of my copper cups. I want to do some chasing and he said that I needed to raise the surface because the chasing would contract the vessel so that it would hold less.

The snarling iron works from the inside of a vessel. This is the set up with the snarling iron clamped into a vise. The cup is held with the ball end inside it and the iron is struck with a heavy hammer near the vise which causes the ball to vibrate, hammering the cup from its inside.

He demonstrated, I couldn’t see how much pressure was being applied to the cup at the end of the iron. Fortunately it was easy to see and figure out just where to drop the hammer, too close to the vise and there is little vibration, further away it gets wild, the sweet spot seems to be just about 3 inches from the bend in the vise. Unfortunately it took about a half hour to figure out how firmly to hold the cup against the ball end. I started by holding it as firmly as I would if I was striking it against a stake. Wrong idea, the cup was really difficult to control and began to look as if it had a case of mumps. It turns out that the hold should be light, position is the important thing. I am trying to raise the whole surface, except for borders at the base and lip. With a light hold on the cup, each drop of the hammer vibrates the iron and the surface is pushed out, the cup is slightly rotated and the hammer dropped again to raise another spot next to the one just raised. That’s the theory, the practice is much more difficult. One has to hold the cup at a specific point in space while raising and dropping the hammer in an awkward position; because the iron is striking from the inside one sees only the effect, not the attack, constant vigilance and a steady hand are required. This is what I was able to do, next week I will try to even it up a bit, I was told we would ‘regulate the surface’ in the next step. . .

The days are getting shorter and the trip home, even as the hour has not changed, seems to be later in the day. Thursday I was treated to a spectacular sunset as I rode the ferry back to Staten Island.  When the sun was low and red it becomes a glittering coral city, the Empire State Building is clad with ribbons of reflective metal that show up in this light.  

Here’s a view of the whole skyline in the pre storm sky, and then a panorama from New Jersey to Brooklyn  with the statue of Liberty that I put together from several separate shots. 

Today I began to raise a silver wine goblet. Classes were not held last week because of the Jewish Holidays so I wasn’t able to start it until today. Here’s a photo of the disk that I purchased about 2 weeks ago. It’s 6 inches in diameter, that’s 153mm. I say that because from here on in I will always refer to the size in metric terms.

I was a little uneasy about annealing the silver because, being an alloy, it is more temperamental than the copper I have been working with which can take all sorts of over heating and not be compromised like sterling can. Gennady watched me anneal and got me started with the base. Raising is a longer process and the very first steps are passed through quickly, and only once, after that it is a lot of hammer swinging to gradually close and shape the vessel. Starting from a flat disk is difficult because there is no shape to hammer against, only a circle scratched around the center mark. The hammer has tio strike on one side of the line against the edge of a stake to make a dent in the metal, you strike again and again lengthening the dent along the outside of the circular scratch until you come full circle and the dent forms a base of the goblet to be. The disk now looks something like a sombrero with a very low crown. The next step is to crimp the sombrero’s brim. A special stake that is shaped something like a boat with the bow cut off is set into the stake holder and a special mallet with a tapered hear is used to hammer the flat parts of the disk into the stake’s groove like a loose accordion fold, this raises the disk edges and begins to decrease its diameter. This photo was taken after I had begun to raise the pleated disk into a bowl shape. You can see a little of the crimping remains above the raised portion, vessels are always hammered from the base to the lip. The out side first and then the inside.

Here it is after the first round of raising. The diameter went from 153mm to 148mm. The height of the bowl went from nothing to about 30mm. The base is 50mm.

The bowl was annealed and pickled and I began a second round. Class ended before I could complete it, I may be able to do that this tomorrow if my pipe in the basement vise matches the stake I’m using at school.

Here’s a photo of the stakes.The blue one on the right is for raising and shaping, the other one is the crimping stake which has two grooved tops.

On the ferry ride home we were treated to the sight of the Queen Mary 2 in the Hudson River side of the harbor. We all wondered why it was out of place, it’s usually berthed in the East River Brooklyn Terminal on the other side of Governor’s Island. A guy said that this was the farewell voyage, and the ship was being shown off and being given a send off celebration. Apparently it has been purchased by Dubai and it will become a hotel. I guess never to sail the seas again. As we pulled away from the scene there was a fire boat with all its hoses running like a great water flower in the harbor near the Queen Mary 2 while helicopters flew in attendance over head and smaller escort boats motored around its hull. Here are a few shots, one from the slip as we were leaving and another with the Goldman Sachs Building on the Jersey side of the harbor in the background.

Here’s another kitten movie. I finally figured out how to embed the videos full scale into a page, not into WordPress yet but maybe that will happen eventually.

We took Henry for his first inoculations yesterday. I was upset to find him feverish and without appetite this morning. He also seemed to in pain when we touched him. I figured to must be a reaction to the shots but called the vet to be sure, she said that it was a normal reaction and to call if he didn’t get back to normal behavior in a day or so.  I spoke to my friend John on the boat going into the city this morning, He’s vet’s assistant, he told me that it’s state policy that rabies vaccinations not be given before the kitten is 12 to 14 weeks old. Before that the mother’s milk immunology fights with the vaccine and it isn’t effective. The distemper shot was okay, Henry is about 11 weeks old now and his reaction is normal. I’m happy to report that Henry got up when I got back around 3:00, ate and has been playing normally this evening. This movie was shot last week. 

Henry has a new bag.

Have just finished three new pieces of jewelry. The first is a khaki colored turquoise bracelet with pearls. I made it a couple of weeks ago but wasn’t happy with the clasp which was one of my twisted toggle variations. It took part Saturday to make the new clasp and loop which also shortens the bracelet to 7 5/8″ long, it was almost 8″. I showed it to Molly at Metalliferous, she said it was “Earth Princess Meets L A “, a title I will keep.

 The next piece is a pendant, I made it to test a new type of joining, a tube and a ring type of link between the two pieces. I will show it with a wire instead of a chain.

The last piece was put together with a stock sterling cuff that I bought at Metalliferous a long time ago and hadn’t decided what to do with it. These stones came together  when I started to put colors together for contrast instead of trying to find matches, I like the colorful effect and think I may keep this one for myself ( it is a little dainty, so maybe not). It’s about a half inch wide at the widest part by the blue stone.