Memorial for Myrtle

Nancy Hansen came to me with a little sketch on a piece of scratch paper. This is the finished memorial to her mother. This memorial is hollow, to allow Nancy to plant flowers inside it this spring.

The Glamour of Art Making

While working in the foundry this week my bridge crane collapsed, missing crushing my arm by an inch. The thing is I could have predicted this happening because I had never really finished welding the thing together 8 years ago, but heck, it worked OK all that time. So my glamourus work was rebuilding this big heavy tool the last two days.

There was some art work going on as well. The piece I'm working on is "Angeles Everywhere if You Know How to Look". Here are a couple of my angles helping me roll 3/16" steel plate. Stan and Dean seem to show up just when I need the help.

Response to the Financial Follies

An advantage someone like me has while listening to the news is to do something about it immediately. The bad news kept coming on the radio and I was getting more depressed each day. Finally I grabbed my trusty stack of cardboard and created the "Tycoon" series. The "One Armed Bandits" almost became the "Big Three" but I felt that was getting a little too specific. This way you can decide if these cardboard execs are bankers, politicians or what have you.

The Begining

Hello there, This is my attempt to reach out to my friends and fellow searchers for meaning. I have been an artist all my life and am just now beginning to understand what this compulsion to make art is all about for me. I have a notion others are in this same search for themselves and I would like to share with them our musings.

Recently I have been working on art related to death. This theme found me, as it seems all my work has (more on this idea later). I have started making funeral urns and have made a couple grave markers as well. Nothing in my long career of making objects has given me more pleasure and sense of purpose than working with clients on urns for their loved ones and themselves. I’m trying to figure out why and also trying to figure out if this is a reasonable direction to pursue.

While researching funeral urns, contemporary urns at least, there seems to be many really bad choices. Most of these choices are inexpensive, mass produced imports with some sort of engraving option. Not an artful or meaningful choice for many. A few artists are on the web specializing in urns but again I’m not seeing anything that really fills a desire to express meaning in a personal, meaningful way. Is this a niche that needs attention? Is it morbid to find meaning and even joy in contemplating death?

My friend Jack Becker has written a new book exploring some of these questions, A Few Last Words: Your Guide To The Art Of Self Memorializing, available on Amazon. This is an irreverent look at writing your own eulogy and came along when several commissions came to me for creating urns for customers. Anyway when things like this happen to me (coincidence?) I now try to be proactive and search out just what it is the art gods are pointing me to now.