The final assembly of the piece for sculpture class.

 These four pictures are some of the first dry assembly variations after the frame had been assembled. I was experimenting with the placement looking for that visual equilibrium.

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 This is after the first coat of varnish has dried on the background.

...drying completely assembled.

 The proposed site.

 

So I had a firing yesterday.  Here is a video of it starting to go.

 

And here is a video of me feeding it after dark.

And the results.

Jesus, a dog, and seven plastered skulls walk into a blog...

The first image is the first six tiles I smoke fired.  A one in a million firing to work so well for an unplanned image.  The second image is of my faithful model Cleo.  I used a subtractive charcoal process with white conte.  Very dirty work.  The last image was found on http://www.archaeology.org.  I was watching "How art made the world" (bbc) and it got me thinking about our relationship with death and the role of art in that relationship.  The artists would clean the skull and cover it with plaster to represent the dead.  They would put shells in where the eyes were and keep it in their living space.

The first post

So this is a start to something.  I thought I would throw this image from the BBC doc "the Secret of Drawing" part 3.  the image was painted by Cynthia Weldon (née Pell), while in a mental hospital a few days before she killed herself by cutting her own throat in the bathtub.  It was painted in the 1970's.