Thursday, January 28th 2010

The day started early and cold. It was snowing, but because the roads weren’t yet holding much snow, we thought it would be all right leaving for New Jersey in the tail end of the rush hour.

Once we had crossed  on the Outerbridge Crossing the snow had stopped, as we got further on the Garden State Parkway it looked as if there hadn’t been any snow there at all. Colman and I were the second and third visitors to arrive.  This arrangement of plants greeted us as we entered the greenhouse.

Anthony Silva, Colman and Joe Silva.

A greenhouse cat found me and rode on my shoulders for the first walk through the main greenhouse. She felt like a kitten but they said she is about 12 years old.

I like this green orchid, the blooms form a ring around the pot edge making a wreath under a canopy of bold, broadly ribbed leaves.

There are a great number of green cymbidiums in bloom, this end of a bench that went around a corner and about a third of the length of the greenhouse.

This is a species paphiopedalum from Vietnam. The flower is in its last days but still has a remarkable presence above netted leaves.

This plant is in full bloom, a lot of flowers in one pot.  A close-up follows this photo.

This little dendrobium was hiding in the very back of the greenhouse with the cool masdevallias. It is a dendrobium,  in a 3″ pot, it’s my favorite of all the plants I have seen this trip. If we had a cool enough place to grow it we would have taken it. It was picked up by a couple that spoke with a German(?) accent.

Joe talking with some of the other visitors.

Our friend  Ron arrived as we were finishing up looking and buying plants.

A couple of visitors found this bulbifilum growing in a fern root basket on a high shelf.  This is another favorite.

Tuesday night we went into the city to see an Opera at the Met in Lincoln Center. The tickets were a wedding gift from my friend Abdul who lives in England.

We arrived early enough to get something to eat before curtain time.  I was struck by all the trees wrapped in lights on Broadway and Columbus Avenue. This is looking downtown toward Columbus Circle.

We discovered a new space just south of Lincoln Center, it is the David Rubenstein Atrium. I think it also serves as a place to buy tickets for  performances in Lincoln Center. There are two of these living plant wall pieces in the space that seems to run all the way through the building from Broadway to Columbus Avenue.

It is a pleasant space, interesting music is playing and the acoustics are comfortable without echoes. People were gathered here  reading, talking and using their computers. I suspect there’s WiFi here too. We ordered hot sandwiches and tea which was brought to us for an unhurried, light meal before going to the Met.

The ceiling is punctuated by these oval light wells. The mural on one of the walls seems to be made of sound absorbing felt, it is pierced by windows through which projectors were streaming moving words and images on a huge screen on the opposite wall.  We couldn’t see what it was other than to feel the change of light and color being reflected on us while we ate.  There is a lot of stage lighting hanging overhead, I can only assume that the space is occasionally host to musical or film events.

Approaching  Lincoln Center  from Broadway.

We saw Stiffelio, a not often produced opera by Verdi. It is a beautiful production, it was a real treat to hear live orchestra and voices without amplification.  Stiffelio will be broadcast on the web this Saturday at 1:00PM EST from the WQXR web site.

A parting shot of the Met Lobby as we left.

We had to walk up to 72nd street because construction has closed the downtown platforms for the  1 train, a walk of about 7 blocks.

This is the new Alice Tully Hall.  I was surprised. It is a suprisingly large, cantilevered building.  There’s a dance studio that  hangs below the main part of building with a huge window facing Broadway. The construction is glistening, it looks like magic.

Electrified trees trail up the median of Broadway and  up Columbus Avenue.  It gives this part of the city a festive air.

Yesterday I went into the city to make a delivery so that I would be able to accompany Colman to the Silva Open House I New Jersey. As I was leaving I walked down Fifth Avenue toward 23rd Street. It was a beautiful day, temperature in the 40’s, the air felt like Spring wearing a Winter coat.  It was about a quarter past four, twilight was beginning as the sun moved lower in the West.  The towers around  Madison Square were beautifully luminous against the sky.

Getting closer to 23rd Street I looked back and saw the Moon rising between two towers.

The pieces were annealed. I worked on the inside of the bowl (bottom part of this container) with the hook hammer, starting at the rim and working my way down to the base with closely spaced hammer strikes.  About a third of the way down I switched to a sand bag and continued working toward the base.

I began to close the top some more.  The hook hammer was used to harden  and round the dome from the inside,  then I used the raising hammer and stake to close it all the way to the rim.

When I finished. the rims of both the bowl and its cover were practically the same diameter, they balanced on each other.  I annealed them again.

I wanted  to  push the sides of the bowl out some more and close the rim so that it would fit inside the cover.  I used the surface gauge to mark the inside with three rings to guide my hammering. I set the base again to work harden the edge.

Then I began to hammer the middle part of the bowl from the inside on the sand bag.

In the left side of the  following photo  I have just started to raise and close the rim. When I finished raising and closing I gave the whole outside a light planishing  to smooth out the sounded surface. Then I began to work on the cover (top part).

I closed the top half of the top with my raising hammer on the T stake and I used the hook hammer to push a shoulder out from the inside starting in the depression on a stump, finishing on the sand bag.  The surface gauge was used to mark a height on the bowl and I used a pair of dividers to mark the rim of the top.  Both pieces were trimmed with shears.

More shaping and regulating has to be done because the symmetry is not regular.  I also want to solder sterling wire rims to both pieces before I can start the decorative chasing and repousse.

Here’s a comparison shot of the coupled piece at the beginning, middle and the end of this entry.  More to follow as this project continues.

Yesterday I began to work with 2 copper disks that I bought last Monday. I want to make a container with a separate top, roughly pear shape. I shaped the first disk that was 5″ in diameter the way Gennady showed me to start the teapot. I made three passes, two with my raising hammer and a third with a filed down ball peen hammer.  It was such a success that I started to take photos when I began with the larger 6″ disk. This is the small disk after the first set of hammering.

Here’s picture of one of my small stumps carved with the depression I am using for this first bit of shaping. The stump is about 8″in diameter.

Here’s the 6″ disk before I began to hammer the edges.

I don’t have a broad raising hammer like the one I used in  the FIT studio. The metal really crumpled under the narrow raising hammer. This is just the second or third time around the edge. 

Working in toward the center it gets more wrinkled.

This is what it looked like after hammering it a second time  from the rim to the center.

I used the ball peen hammer because the raising hammer left the surface rougher than it would have been if I had a broader raising hammer, there was still a lot of metal that was not work hardened. All of this happened before I needed to anneal, the ball peen hammer made it smoother and cleaned up the shape. This method gave me a practically instant depth of 36 mm and stretched the diameter 10 mm.

I annealed both pieces.  I took the large disk and hammered  a rough base from the inside. Then I put a steel pipe into my vise and began to raise the vessel by hammering on the outside.

Here it is with the sides hammered flat and up toward the rim, it gained a modest 6.5 mm in depth.

I  tried to stretch the small disk some more by raising it in the depression again.

Here are the pieces just before annealing.

I set the base on the large dish and began the third round of raising on the steel pipe.

I began the third round with the smaller disk on the round end of my stake set at an angle in my vise.  It was very hard to keep everything symmetrical without a set base.

When I finished it and it wasn’t too badly  off center.

After annealing I began the fourth round. Pencil lines were drawn on the the large bowl (bottom part) to help me control the pitch of the sides. I had gotten the symmetry a little skewed.

I found the center on the top part of my project, marked it with a punch and lightly scratched circles with a compass so I could see  where to strike and keep the dome rising and closing evenly.

The bottom after the fourth round.

The top nearing completion of the fourth round.  I had to switch to the flat side of my stake to stabilize the  metal while I worked on it, it moved too much on the rounded end.

Here they are together after the fourth round.

After annealing, I sharpened the base and planished the lower third of the bottom part before raising and closing the top section further.

It was a struggle getting this into an even form.

Fifth round complete.

I used my new hook hammer to reach inside and round out the top. It was too small for the stake which was distorting the dome.

Sixth round fiished on the top, it is still asymmetrical, it will take some more work to straighten it out or find another solution.

I had to be more aggressive with the bottom, it was time to raise the upper portion of the bowl into a parallel position.  The top edge really began to curl in the process.

The open ends of both pieces are about the same diameter now.  I want to close the top of the bowl a little more and  give the dome a bit of a neck. Shaping will be interesting.

Here’s a shot of the last three rounds, the pieces are stacked to show how they changed each round.

January 4th I was in the city to deliver a box to Ellen, it was a brilliant, very cold, bright day. I passed by Madison Square on the way back downtown. The new glass tower has been finished, joining the Met life and New York Life towers in the skyline around the square. I have photographed it as it was going up in previous entries. Eventually I will know its name.

I am continually amazed by what my simple Canon camera can do.  It’s just a 12x zoom,  if you could see the detail captured in the original shots instead of these cut-down-for-the-web versions you might be surprised. These were taken from the street level on the farthest side of Broadway at 24th street (where it crosses Fifth Avenue).  The leafless winter trees have made a dark veil through which we can see more of the buildings than we see in summer.

On Monday ( January 11) I went into the city to see some antique silver that was being auctioned that afternoon. Walking up Broadway  to the Radisson from 23rd street I passed by this store selling costume jewelry.  I wonder why I never see anyone wearing stuff like this.

The displays are decked out with more than a person would wear at one time or maybe they would wear the whole set. I can’t imagine that there are factories producing these things in multiples and that it all goes somewhere.

These pieces me feel that even my large brooches are quite modest.

I was taken by the decorative elements of the old hotel  remaining in the Radisson Martineque at Broadway and 32nd Street.  After seeing the silver show on the second floor I took the stairs down to the lobby. The mosaic floors gave me a feeling of what it was like in ‘Old New York’, perhaps a gentler time when architects worked more closely with craftsmen to make something that felt richly finished, polished and solid;  something that made you feel secure and cared for. The garland of leaves passes through the corners of the border in three different ways. 

The entrance has been renovated, the architects tried to preserve most of the mosaic decoration of this passage.  Here are a shot of the large border.

The vestibule has a large medallion with dolphins its center. Part of the medallion has been lost to a renovation sometime in the recent past.

The large border is partly covered by newer wood work, I like seeing the large scallop shell in acanthus leaves at the end  of the scroll. Probably what pleases me  most is the simple graphic nature of the design and too, if you know me, these are my colors.

I’ll leave you tonight with a composite shot of the staircase I took coming down from the auction showroom.  This construction speaks of an elegant past, lit now, with tiny halogen bulbs.

I delivered a box to Ellen around 2:00 this afternoon and then headed downtown to go to Pearl River to see about a journal that I thought would be there. When I got out of the R train on Broadway at Prince, the first thing I saw was the Armani AX store clad in its sexy scaffolding.

Across Prince street, the Victoria Secret Store was being changed to Pink.

Walking west on Prince I was seduced by exotic cupcakes in the windows of a booth that has had many owners in the last twenty years, the new tenant sells sandwiches, pastries and lots of seductive, stuffed cupcakes.

A couple close-ups of some beautifully made desserts with novel names. I wasn’t going to eat one on the street, these look special enough to require full attention while sitting in a comfortable chair with a good cup of coffee.  Maybe even a pastry fork and knife.

Further down Prince on the North side of the street  I passed these foot level windows that look down into  a restaurant. I remember when the basement space was first converted into a restaurant some twenty years ago.  It was always high style. I think the first restaurant was called  something like ‘Tea’.

I stopped in at the Apple Store which was very busy.  That building was our post office when we lived around the corner on Mercer Street. It has seen a couple of tenants before Apple redesigned it. Moving down Greene Street, I passed by the SOHO Building where the sidewalk has a huge brass and glass map laid into the sidewalk. The granite sculpture was new to me, there is a steel sculpture at the south end of the building too.

Design within Reach struck me as being retro,  50’s retro for sure. Those clocks are a design crime.

This golden ceramic Coffee set was in the window of Armani Casa. Handles and spouts are of interest  at the moment. The Jade topped box is nice too.

Sometimes walking through construction on the street feels like walking through an art installation.

The windows at Kiki de Montparnasse look like like they could be either a Christmas Tree or a New Year’s Party left over. The diode lights are much brighter in person than in the photo. There has been a great proliferation of the tiny bright lights all over Soho.

The Sicis mosaic showroom always looks like a stage set.  There’s a life size bathtub in the window that is shaped like a huge high heel shoe, couldn’t get an unobstructed shot of it.

This one of the biggest cleanest mirrors I’ve seen. The copper sink and Brass faucets mounted on it are immaculate too, the hardware seems to float in air with its siamese twin.

The Swarovski Store has a large Cafe on its Mercer Street side.  It’s a nicely laid out store, I didn’t go down stairs but I did take some time to look at the crystal offerings, I was surprised that a lot of the medium and larger pieces were more expensive than comparable semi precious, natural stones. This wall is dazzling, but when you pull crystals out of the drawers, it’s very hard to see the colors, it all goes dark in the area immediately in front of the display.  I walked through the store and exited on Broadway on my way to Pearl River. (Which  didn’t have the journal I was looking for in stock.)

I stopped into Pain Quotidien to pick up some brioche for breakfast  and continued along Broome Street looking for Sur L’Table.  I was in the wrong place.  There are some new buildings on Broome Street in the west. The sun was beginning to set and this new glass tower was lit dramatically in the pale winter sky. The new towers all have pieces cut out of their top edges and sometimes boxy additions that stick out of the main part of the building.

The lower building further  down Broome had interesting, neatly netted scaffolding on its roof.

I was standing on the corner of West Broadway.  The tree outside the Cupping Room was wrapped in lights. The ground floor store of the building across the street was once the center of a controversy, it sold bullet proof clothing as if it was regular wear.

The sunset seen from the ferry on the way home was spectacular.  Those are container port cranes  between the Statue of Liberty and the bow of the Bayonne Bridge.