Trying out some new ideas on one of my old assemblages
How does an assemblage artist work? Despite what some people seem to think, it’s not by throwing any old thing up there and saying, “That’ll do — and maybe I’ll get extra points for using recycled materials.” We do have a lot of materials — you could think of them as being like a painter's tubes of paint, but with more of them — and like any artist we do a lot of daubing before we like the color and the weight and the volume and the hue (to name just a few elements) of what we have put up there.
The more elements there are, of course, the more energy we have to spend making sure that they all go together — and build upon each other so that in the end the piece is more than merely a juxtapositon of interesting elements. “Cute” isn’t an option, and as I said, “good enough” isn’t either. Those hunks of wood and iron and colored plastic — whatever has gone into the piece — have got to sing together, and hopefully in their interaction create something that has never been seen before.
After years of doing assemblage — and having just bought a new camera — I decided that the time was right to give outsiders a peek into my studio and get an idea of the endless experimentation that goes into creating a piece. While stopping to take pictures all the time can’t help but get in the way of the creative process, I’ve found that it also has some value for me, as it gives me a pictorial record of the ideas that I’ve tried and the decisions I’ve made. The pictures don’t pretend to be professional quality, but they are straight from the studio. I hope that you find the results as interesting as I have.
The more elements there are, of course, the more energy we have to spend making sure that they all go together — and build upon each other so that in the end the piece is more than merely a juxtapositon of interesting elements. “Cute” isn’t an option, and as I said, “good enough” isn’t either. Those hunks of wood and iron and colored plastic — whatever has gone into the piece — have got to sing together, and hopefully in their interaction create something that has never been seen before.
After years of doing assemblage — and having just bought a new camera — I decided that the time was right to give outsiders a peek into my studio and get an idea of the endless experimentation that goes into creating a piece. While stopping to take pictures all the time can’t help but get in the way of the creative process, I’ve found that it also has some value for me, as it gives me a pictorial record of the ideas that I’ve tried and the decisions I’ve made. The pictures don’t pretend to be professional quality, but they are straight from the studio. I hope that you find the results as interesting as I have.
Where It Started
 The downstairs room in my old studio building. |
I started working on "Floor Lamp" back in 2006, when I had a studio in two ramshackle garages at the top of Live Oak in Fairfax. The ancient wood-framed building was cantilevered out over the edge of the hill, and after it was build someone had enclosed the space below, as people will do, until there was a sunny, rentable room there as well. That's most of what's in this picture. The doors for the garages up on top face the other way. I cleaned up the two garages, sheetrocked and painted, and installed a connecting glass door. On sunny days I could throw open the north-facing garage doors, and the rooms were filled with light. That’s where the first picture in this series was taken. Eventually the lower space became available. I painted the floor, filled in a few holes where vines were snaking in to enjoy the warmth and sunlight, and stored some of my work there. When I left the place, a musician friend, Neiel Cavin, lived downstairs for awhile. There was a tiny sink, piggybacked onto the piping for the one in my space above — and for the rest of the necessities, he improvised. Pretty well, too. |
| The Original "Floor Lamp" | |
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The basic bones of this assemblage are a couple of pieces of driftwood that I picked up in Tiburon, at the edge of San Francisco Bay. The base is a fragment of highway construction signage, and the upright, still bearing traces of a beautiful aqua paint, was probably part of a dock in Sausalito. Of course, it could have just as easily been in Singapore. The most noticable element is a rusty motorcycle hub, with shreds of the spokes still attached, that I also picked up on the beach. I’ve forgotten whatever trial and error involved in the creation of the initial incarnation of this piece — there’s always some — but, unlike many of my pieces it came together fairly quickly, and I didn’t really reconsider it until a couple of years later. It wasn’t until I realized that it was due for some serious reinterpretation that I decided to keep track of the changes that the piece has gone through. This isn’t always even possible; often a piece will sit around, feeling not quite finished, until some part of it recommends itself for some new piece that’s been gestating. A few very interesting pieces have disappeared in this fashion, to make way for new works that have sprung from some part of them. So her we have the original incarnation, with little in the way of provenance, and a detailed exposition of the steps that brought it to its new configuration. |
| A Few Steps in its Evolution |
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I like the motorcycle hub a lot, but it's time to consider other options. The rusty spokes catch on your clothes when you get too close, and it tends to make the lamp tip over. The shiny head of a stove bold doesn't look bad in the hole I was using to mount the hub.
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I still kind of like the idea of mounting another round object where the hub had been, and I like the color of the orange pulley. Later on I put some better feet on the base, so the weight was not necessarily a problem. I had added that putty-colored ring when I was trying this out in another piece, and it works very well. | I like the pulley, but it kind of overpowers the rest of the piece. And it's heavy. That tin shade I was using came from a ghost town in the Mojave Desert. I thought it had found a home here -- I like the way it looks with the wood -- but now I'm not sure. Let's just put a simple round globe up there so we can re-evaluate things. |
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| Maybe I should forget about having a light up there at all. This discus doesn’t have enough bulk to stand up to the rest of the piece, though, and it’s positioned high enough that not everyone would be able to see its beautiful juxtaposition of blond hardwood and tarnished steel. It ends up being used in a piece described in another upcoming essay. | I still like the idea of a light, though. This is the top of a heater body, used upside down. I like the way the solid grey metal body swells up out of the wood, with just a hint of aqua paint to contrast with the shiny grey, For all its strength, though, it might not be quite big enough to stand up to the lamp as a whole. There's a light bulb on in there. | This modernistic shade is big enough -- and garish enough -- to stand up to the rest of the piece. That stainless-steel base keeps it from slipping down over the upright.I’m gettting tired of that shiny stove-bolt head, though; it’s not strong enough. A reflector's always an easy thing to try; I have them in red, yellow, green, and blue. |
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| That modern shade looked good, but it made the wood look kind of shabby. And it’s not shabby — it’s an elegant survivor, and solid as the day is long. Not a speck of dry rot in the thing! That rusty greenish thing is another piece from a heater -- a spacer of some kind. It certainly doesn't try to make the post look shabby! | That reflector needs a little jazzing up. My daughter, who does jewelry herself, just gave me this little chrome plate, which I mounted on a short bolt that fits nice and tight in the hole where the carriage bolt used to go. I'm not sure if that bulb and the rusty spacer are enough, but it feels like things are coming together here. | I like this red pot a lot; it's been kicking around for awhile. It used to have a wick coming out the top -- they'd set them out at night on the edge of the road during construction. I don’t want to lose the feel of a cord hanging down, but this lamp doesn’t have to be electrified. And I’ve been wanting to use that air hose from a Model T for a long time. |
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| I was at the FolkArt Gallery in San Rafael, looking at some very fine African stuff made with scrap plastic, and I realized that I still have to work on being that loose and joyful with little scraps of color. I don’t know what this yellow thing was part of originally, but it looks like the silver strip down the left side is meant to reflect light. | I very much like the way the little silver plate stands out from the wood; it’s attached to the head of a shiny 1/2” bolt purchased new to fit this spot. The way the cord emerges from the back of the wood is very purposeful, but if we look at the other end of the cord we can see it’s just pretending. But it all looks good. | Here's a closeup of the base, where I added some big knobs and held them on with chrome acorn nuts. The original feet were solid 1” grey stick-on rubber feet that were new surplus from some computer manufacturer. Solid enough for most applications, but they didn’t stabilize the lamp enough. |
| Its Current State | |
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Here's what "Floor Lamp" looks like in October, 2009. It’s clear that while most of the elements that made the piece worth keeping are still there, they are being expressed by somewhat different — and generally more subtle — gestures. The electric cord has been replaced with a pressurized air line from a tire-inflation attachment for an old Model T, and the top element is a "smudge pot" of the sort that used to be used to mark construction zones out on the highway at night. I've thought about cutting out the bottom of the pot (which faces up now) to allow a light bulb inside, but I haven't done that yet. The base has some legs made of hefty 2" knobs that make the whole thing more stable. Everything on this piece looks better in person, of course; there's a lot more color and brightness. What does this say? It says that if you're tired of conventional ideas of beauty and are truly open to other ideas, here's something that explores some new angles. I should point out that this kind of documentation of an artistic work in progress isn’t something that is done lightly — and if it’s done very often, it can interfere with the artistic process. When you’re “in the zone,” the last thing you want to do is stop and fool with a camera — or even think logically about the steps you’re taking and the materials you’re combining. To think about them would be to acknowledge them, and to do that is to come perilously close to judging them. When I’m working that’s something I try to avoid. Of course, there’s plenty of aesthetic evaluation on the artist's part going on from second to second, but any thoughts about how a piece might look when it’s finished (whenever in the far future that might be) or whether it might find approval outside my studio would be deathly to the creative process — mine, at least. Copyright 2009 by Arthur Comings |
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