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It’s been a busy week, Adi, and Al left last Sunday,

the rhododendrons are blooming so I guess Spring is in full swing. 

I spent part of the beginning week making items out of rice grains, sesame seeds and string for the casting class. We are supposed to make a mold of something that would not be able to survive the vulcanizer for m mold making with RTV compound, which is making a silicon mold that Vulcanizes at Room Temperature (RTV).  On the way into the city Wednesday the ferry captain made an announcement that there was a submarine in the harbor and we could see it on the Statue of Liberty  side of the boat. 

Here’s a short movie shot through the window with sounds of passengers on the ferry. I’m still having trouble getting media into this page, if you click the link below you will get another window and the movie will play. Just click your back button to come back to the blog. 

Submarine in the Harbor

Toward the end of the week the Ipheon, which has become invasive, escaping the flower bed and appearing in the lawn and on the in pathways in the front yard was peaking around an early rhododendron. 

In the back yard the primulas have started, early azalea buds are beginning to show color.

Along the front walk our first tree peony has opened, a chinese hybrid named Green Dragon in a Pink Pool.

Yesterday I had pleasant and full day teaching a Portfolio Workshop at the Center for Book Arts. The participants made 2 portfolios, one person left early and missed getting into the class photo. Left to right, Jane, Nilsa, Michael, Cesar, Susan from Vermont and Pamela, visiting from New Zealand. 

The Wordpress disaster seems to be a little over.  I have deleted the tinymice file from my server and I looked in the uploads folder and I saw that all the photos I had uploaded again and again last night were there. They were not going into the post, so there must be an interface problem. I deleted about 40 copies of various photos from my server uploads folder to only leave the original photos. Exporting them to my desk top proved that they were not ghosts on the server. Then I looked in the media library and saw thumbnails of the photos, this is the first one I was able to get into the post.

These are a set of samples of tableware that was made from one of my designs. They are finally in the market place. I am working toward getting some more samples and making some sales. They turned out well and I would like to see some more color ways.  

Here’s a close up of the red set. The white design is a pearlescent interpretation of some of my stamped pattern work.

 Last week Colman and I went into the city to attend the MJSA Expo at the Javitts Center. We are looking for people to help us cast and finish the flatware and napkin rings. We made a few contacts that may prove helpful when I finally finish the first two napkin rings and begin on my spoons and knives to go along with the fork I’ve already made.  While we were there it was hard to ignore the enormous piles of stones and beads, this is after all, a jewelers supply show. I managed to get some silicone mold material for my last casting class project. We were looking at a vast collection of cabochons presented by the Village Silversmith out of Massachusetts. These were the most unusual things I saw at the show, 5 million year old sand dollar fossils, small enough to be used for rings and bracelets. There were a lot of inexpensive examples that had their full sculpture and dull colored shells as their surface, these, I think are examples of what you can find when you remove the shell and expose the minerals that replaced the animal inside. Some of the shell remains as a star on the surface. The silversmith called these the “fancy colored” and charged a lot more for them. They’re about a half inch and more in diameter. I picked up a number of quartz cabochons and Colman found a nice star sapphire at another vendor’s display.

On the way back home the ferry used one of the slips closer to the west side of the terminal so that we disembarked at a side of the terminal that has enormous windows that look out on to the harbor.  I took this shot.

This is what the window looks like in the passageway.

While we were taking pictures our neighbor Diana appeared and we left the terminal together. 

Yesterday I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. It has been an unmitigated disaster. I am no longer able to upload photos or media. 

 The interface seem to require me to save the work each time I want to look at the code as I enter the post. The new interface, while being in a more handy place, is more labor intensive requiring more steps to load a single photo. 

I have spent over 5 hours altering the .htacess file a number of ways, emptying the cache on Safari and Firefox, restarting them, altering files buried deep in the WP directories as per the instructions of  others on the WP site and in a google search list, all based on the experiences of others with this problem; they seem to get different error messages.  This is the one I got:

 Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_constrain_dimensions() in/home2/newyorka/public_html/wp-admin/includes/image.php on line 173

In the beginning I  followed the three step upgrade, It did not say to change all of the files as well as the admin and includes directories.  

This morning as I am trying again I uploaded the other new files that were outside of folders. I have been reading that I should not upgrade the content folder because I would lose all the old posts. so I have left that one untouched. Maybe there’s something there that should be changed? After uploading the other files  I get a different scenario when I tried to upload a photo. Now it looks like it is happening but it isn’t.  I get this kind of box where the photo should be and there is no file to fill it. 

Hopefully there is some one out there who can help, nothing has worked so far. 

Adi arrived on Staten Island Tuesday afternoon, Colman and I were still in our usual schedule for most of the rest of the week. Colman went to his monthly Orchid meeting Tuesday night and  I headed into the city to prepare for and attend my classes on Wednesday.  On the way to New York Central I usually stop by the Windows on Broadway to see a new installation.  This time the windows were filled with what I thought at first were knit and crocheted versions of cactus. As I looked at the sculptures more I realized that they were parts and inhabitants of a coral reef. You can find out more about the exhibition by clicking this link. http://www.nyu.edu/pages/galleries/bw/index.html

 Our friend Al joined Adi as a  house guest Thursday. Friday they went into the city with Colman to spend the day at the Met. I had to work in the studio to make another ten padded silk pyramids.  I was finished by 2 in the afternoon and made plans to join them in the city,  by that time Anja had made reservations at a restaurant in the Lower East Side and arranged for Austin, Taybin and Cat to join us.   

 I walked across town from broadway and met a friend, Mike, who invited me up to her loft on the Bowery to see a machine she wanted to give me. After a pleasant visit I headed toward the restaurant, the sun was low in the western sky and was lighting the metal decoration on the Empire State building.  I hadn’t been this far down and east for a long time, the view of the skyline was different from what I usually see.  Seeing at these pictures taken on the Bowery, looking north, we see several landmarks while the camera lens shrinks distances. 

The greenish tower left of the  Empire State Building is a residential Tower recently built on what was a parking lot at Astor Place  on 9th Street.  The orangy buildings with pyramids on top of them are the Zeckendorf towers  that are east of Union Square on 14th Street.  The gold capped spire right behind them is the Met Life Tower by Madison Park at 24th Street and the Empire State Building is on 34th street.  

 Here’s a telephoto view, this digital camera is a miracle of technology. 

 A little north of Prince Street I turned east on Stanton Street heading for the restaurant. The moon had risen in the lingering sunset,  pale and luminous in the sky.

 As we were leaving the restaurant I tried for a few photos, without the flash I got this impressionistic shot of Anja and Austin as he was leaving,  Colman is just entering the frame on the right. 

 Taybin and Cat, I don’t like to use the flash but this turned out okay. 

 Adi in a flash. 

 Al and Adi went to hear some music with the kids, Colman and I walked back toward Broadway to catch a train to South Ferry.  It’s remarkable how much the neighborhood has changed since were living there. These hats, in a shop window, mystify me from design and cultural points of view.  I wonder what they cost.

 Saturday was beautiful,  Al and Adi wanted to go to Chelsea to look at art. We saw a lot of bad or insignificant painting  in wonderful spaces, it was making me angry because I know there is better work out there and it all seems to be a game that lesser artists and illustrators play very well leaving better, less represented artists behind. I’ m  astounded that small canvasses which amount to little more than design exercises,  though interestingly colored,  by a relatively unknown painter can sell for $30,000 each.  A gallery had about 40 of these paintings on paper, a few on canvas, in two beautifully lit rooms; all but about 5 were either sold or reserved. 

One gallery was strung up with hundreds of blond wood frames, in each frame a  sketch or abstract doodle in pencil, sometimes incorporating white out(?) or splotchy ink,  not one of them interesting from either a drawing or textural point of view.   The paper, plain or lined, or yellow, ripped off of a tablet you might buy in an office supply store.  Some of it in a condition that would say to a casual observer that it had been retrieved and un-crumpled from a trash basket. Is our culture supposed to treasure this flotsam? 

In another gallery we found a chandelier sculpture by a Chinese artist;  a grand undertaking to construct.  It was challenging to photograph ( there’s composite below) but I can’t see this in anyone’s living room,  are artists making things solely for museums to collect? Does anyone else have space and the maintenance crew necessary to accommodate this kind of sculpture?     

 I was about to give up hope when I saw an orange painting at the end of a narrow hallway entrance across the street. Even from a distance of 30 yards or so, I could tell that this was a real work. We went in and finally there was painting.  These are by Tony Magar,  I think they are really good. Seeing these refreshed me and let me breathe again.  There is color, there is spontaneity, there is life.  These are canvasses one can live with and treasure.  You can find out more about the exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery by clicking this link.http://www.mikeweissgallery.com/html/exhibitions.asp

It was getting late in the afternoon, our feet were tired and we were getting hungry. We ate at Pepe Giallo on 10th avenue not far from the Mike Weiss Gallery.  I had a great risotto with crabmeat, cocoanut milk and asparagus. Al ordered a mixed antipasto plate and we ordered a bottle of wine.  The antipasto plate had a wonderfully fragrant prosciutto along with a couple cheeses and mache.

Overhead, the lights were shaded with brown paper bags.  

Last Monday we delivered the pyramids to Ellen so that she and her girls could finish them by adding the printed interiors and voice boxes.  I picked up my castings for my necklace project at Roni and headed home.  Over the previous weekend I had assembled a link and decided that what I had drawn didn’t work as well as I thought it would.  Had to change the design by adding little jump rings to each casting and then I devised a new joining link that would allow me to suspend a trio of pearls between the cast members of the chain. Here are s few of the joined pieces at one stage of the assembly.   

Later in the week, while walking back to 34th street from a wonderful bead shop on 39th ( where I purchased pearls for the necklace), I passed this triangular park next to Macy’s where 6th Avenue crosses Broadway. It was a perfect Spring day, the park was filled with people enjoying warm air and sunshine. The scent of narcissus and hyacinths filled the air as I walked through the park crowded with people eating, sipping cool drinks and working on their laptops. 

I finished assembling the necklace in the casting class on Thursday, Friday I began to choose pearls and prepare them for attachment to the necklace.  

 On the way home Thursday, I took a few shots ( to make this composite photo) from the balcony of the Ferry terminal in Manhattan.  The plaza is coming together and soon we will have a subway station that will take all of the number 1  and should also have an underground passage to the R, from what I see here we may even get an elevator to those depths from the street outside the terminal.  

Wednesday night, I had carried a number of pieces into Gemology so Michael could help me price some of my work.  These cuff links are a recent project, I got a little more than I bargained for in the way of critique of the pieces, but I found it all helpful. He says I generally price lower than I could and that is fine, there will time to raise prices if/as these pieces sell. I’ll put these cufflinks and the following pendant into my Etsy Store later tonight.   

This pendant can be worn as a brooch (horizontally). It has a pin back on it as well as the bail.  I had intended to use this stone in the cuttle fish bone casting but none of those came out well enough for me to use with it.  There is some Keum Boo gilding on the nuggets below the turquoise. It’s a heavy piece, it weighs .6 of an ounce without the stone and chain. 

 Her is the necklace finally assembled.  I may yet give it some more polish,  I didn’t want it to be really shiny but I’m not happy yet with the way the silver looks. 

 The parade of flowers continues in the yard. Early rhododendrons have bloomed, the ipheon is starting, buds are growing on the tree peonies and the magnolias have started too. My neighbors, the Kains, have a magnificent star magnolia in their front yard, it’s in full bloom now.

Here’s their front yard seen from the walk in front of our house with the whole bush visible.  

 Here’s Colman  with one of the early rhododendrons. 

We have been very busy, Spring is arriving and I’ve barely had time to notice.  It’s only been as I leave the house on the way to the city to shop or for class. Here are a few shots of the yard as it was last week.  Mostly of the front yard where a lot of bulbs have been brightening the overcast and drizzly days we have had enough of  recently. 

And in the back the Ice Follies continue to bloom. 

 Inside the studio we had a big project making silk covered invitations that were padded and would fold up into a pyramid shape.  The first step was to attach the boards to the padding and cut them out.  The padding is about 6 feet wide, the boards were covered with a pressure sensitive material and die cut before they arrived in the studio. 

 Before covering them, I had to put in a “floor” to stabilize the hinges and then we added tassels, Colman is helping me in this photo. 

 This project took over both rooms of the studio, there’s a pan of the studio once the tassels were all in place.  On the left  you can see where I am working on my next project for the casting class along with some other pieces of silver.  In the front room I was about to start cutting the covering material. In the shot it’s still wrapped in a black plastic bag. This was the last day of March.

 By the second of April our blue and white chionodoxa started to bloom,  I didn’t realize until this year that the pink variety was blooming about ten days earlier,  and all around the yard  the scilla was starting  to show its blue flowers. 

 On a trip into the city to deliver my waxes to the caster, I saw this guy with his pair of  dogs.  I  have been  taking and collecting these photos for a few years.  There’s a real collection of  New Yorkers and their pairs of dogs on my Newyorksnapshot.com web site.  These puppies don’t match perfectly  but it was still a part of the phenomena. 

 On 47th street there’s a change taking place.  It seems there is a movement to get all of the diamond merchants into a tower instead of the interesting sprawl they now have along the street. The tower has already started.  Old buildings were knocked down and the foundation hole has been started,  this was taken on April 2, 2008,  about a week or so after I was aware that  digging had begun.  The hole had gone from a rubble strewn street level to about 3 stories below street level. The Komatsu machines are huge jack hammers breaking the rock into portable boulders.

Diamond Dig Movie

 By the 6th of April we had  covered the pyramids with silk and they were ready to have the hinges covered on their interiors.