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This Handcrafted Life

~ decorative painting, low-tech photography and paper craft

This Handcrafted Life

Monthly Archives: November 2013

Are You Where You Think You Are?

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by ThisHandcraftedLife in black and white, cityscape, iPhone apps, landscape, Photography, Travel

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

fort tryon park, hudson heights, manhattan, new york city, photography, travel, washington heights

Where do you live? Do you feel that you know your town or city well? Really well? Can you find your way through the short cuts, do you know the nooks and crannies? I thought I knew where I lived. But did I?

Here’s a place I discovered this year. Where do you think we are? This beautiful overlook faces a long, wide river.

HH:Overlook2

This winding path is perfect for an afternoon walk.

HH:Winding2

Look how lush it is here, even in the fall.

HH:Cliff

Where is this forest?

HH:Ivy

And this street, flanked by a tall wall of rock?

HH:Street

Hmm, what’s this I see? It seems to be a subway entrance punched into the rock.

HH:Subway

Yep, we’re in Manhattan.

This is my new neighborhood, Hudson Heights, and we just took a stroll through Fort Tryon Park, which is right outside my front door. Here’s a post I wrote last spring, on my first recon mission to the neighborhood to check it out as a possible place to live.

HH:Hill

When most of us think of New York City, we think of skyscrapers and crowds of people and concrete and noise. What I didn’t discover until recently is that New York City has a flip side: 38,000 acres of parkland, leading the country in parkland as a percentage of city area at 19.5% of the city’s land.

HH:Overlook3

Northern Manhattan, where I’m now living, has more than 500 acres of parkland between 155th Street and 220th Street, made up of 5 major parks and 9 miles of shoreline, including Manhattan’s last stand of virgin forest and the last remnant of the tidal marshes that once surrounded the island. Last Saturday morning as I woke up, I heard a red-tailed hawk screeching. I looked out the window and there he was, circling my apartment building with a friend.

It’s fun to be surprised.

HH:SunnyPath

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Painting in the Paleozoic

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by ThisHandcraftedLife in Decorative Painting, painted stone, Painting before and after

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

art, decorative painting, faux finish, faux marble, geology, limestone, marble, travertine

Here’s a little job I took care of last week: playing magician again, making things disappear.

It’s funny how, once a client finds out something is possible, they’d like it done everywhere. In this case, it was my ability to paint light caps to blend into the background that landed me in the bathroom.

This is a beautiful bathroom almost entirely clad in a gorgeous travertine, a form of limestone. Here’s a corner of the room, to show how the stone flows together. I love rooms like this: so well thought out, the stone perfectly cut, such precision, no room for error. You can see how the uninterrupted pattern moves up the walls to the crown molding, over soffits and around corners, revealing that the pieces are cut from a single slab before assembly. Stone covers the floor as well, including the interior of the shower stall, and juts out to create a countertop around the sink below the window. Stone installed in this way is usually about 3/4″ thick.

M:WindowWall

There’s one of my little light caps taped off above, inset into the stone-clad soffit. There were four lights in all, three set into the ceiling soffits and the fourth in the shower. I’m painting the fixture itself, so that it will appear that the light is shining from a hole in the stone.

This is a close-up of two sections of the travertine. It has a random design that’s almost blurry, all sorts of organic patterns blending together in shades of white, cream, brown and grey. So pretty.

M:Stone1

M:Stone2

I’m in the middle of reading a book called “On Looking: 11 Walks with Expert Eyes,” and in one chapter, the author circles a New York City block with Sidney Horenstein, a geologist from the Museum of Natural History.

OnLooking

He points out that when we think about geology, we think about what’s underfoot. But in a city, geology surrounds us. Starting on a large scale, with the stone used to construct the streets and buildings, then moving to the smaller scale of the stone and natural materials we use in the interiors of our homes. We are surrounded by stone that was millions of years in the making, each from a specific geographic area.

Have you noticed that some stones have patterns that resemble liquid? It’s because its particles were once suspended in liquid. Travertine is a sedimentary rock composed of calcium carbonate, formed when river and spring waters evaporated, usually near hot springs or in underwater caves or water tables. Limestone often contains seashells and remnants of ancient sea life. Depending on where the stone was quarried, it could be millions upon millions of years old.

Back to those light fixtures. Below is the first light, naked and way too noticeable. The fixture is about three inches square.

M:LightBare

First thing to do, sand it a bit to get a little tooth on the surface, then tape it off and prime it. I added a bit of raw umber and raw sienna to my white primer to head the color in the right direction.

M:Light0

With stone like this, I’m working from general to specific, so we go for the big patterns and directions first. The palette is easy because the colors are so limited. I’m using Golden Liquid Acrylics in white, titan buff (a cream), raw sienna, raw umber and lamp black.

Here’s the first pass. The key to tricking the eye, besides getting the color right, is to continue the pattern onto the new surface, as if I’m simply filling in the blank that was lost when the opening for the light was cut into the stone.

M:Light1

Then the fun starts, bouncing my brush around to create all kinds of squiggles and dots. After two more passes, I’m done.

M:Light2

To finish, I clean up the messy line between the stone and the fixture.

Here’s another, with a close up of the stone turning the corner of the soffit to go down the wall. Look at that perfect match-up in pattern.

M:Two

I’d never thought about the age of the many marbles and stones I paint before I read the book. An excerpt:

“If you think of the city as geology unearthed, it is nonstop: he pointed out features of the sidewalks and streets; walls, roofs and stairs; atriums, cornices and decorative rosettes. All were stone, all were known to him. Just this one block, a random sample of any block in this city or any city, contained the history of geology across eras and locales…

The stone has multiple stories to tell us, for it has had multiple lives. Every stone has a parent — for the limestone, it is the creatures of the sea — and even in this latest, most quiet phase of its last hundred million years, it has seen some things. Quarries, created to pull stone out of the earth by the tonful, each have distinctive characters, and the people who know stones come to know the quarries… A street full of rocks, made buildings, becomes a whirlwind tour through eons.”

Finding Flow

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by ThisHandcraftedLife in decorative papers, Paper Craft

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

art, craft, handmade paper, making art, Mihaly Csikszentmaihalyi, paper craft, psychology

Artists often talk about a term called “flow,” which is when you become so engrossed in the task at hand, you lose all sense of time, the outside world falls away and you’re floating along on your own little planet.

For me, the feeling of flow is one of the biggest thrills of making art, where all of the decisions are right ones and things come together effortlessly.

Over the past few weeks as I’ve unpacked from my recent move, I’ve seen the effects of being hooked on the feeling of flow. Here’s a symptom: these are bookmarks I’ve made by combining handmade paper with all kinds of ephemera, everything from old stamps and postcards to my own drawings and photos to yesterday’s junk mail.

F:BM2

Oh, isn’t that nice, you say. A bunch of bookmarks. No, I REALLY like the feeling of flow. There’s something about the combination of color, image, texture and text that clicks in my brain.

F:BM1

And that’s just the tip of the bookmark iceberg. I love the zone that I find when I work with paper.

The term “flow” was invented by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmaihalyi in the 1980s. He describes the mental state of flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Like I said, flow feels great!

After I made enough bookmarks to sink a ship, I graduated to pencil cups. These are tin cans that have been covered with papers. Once again, couldn’t stop.

F:Cups

A few tips from Mr. C. on some of the components you might find when you’re in a state of flow:

• Clear goals that are challenging yet attainable

• Strong concentration and focus

• The activity is intrinsically rewarding

• Feelings of serenity and a lack of self-consciousness

• Timelessness: an altered state of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time

• Immediate feedback

• A balance between skill level and the task at hand

• Feelings of control over the challenge and the result

• Lack of awareness of physical needs

• Complete focus on the activity alone

If you’d like to explore Csikszentmaihalyi’s fascinating books on flow and creativity, here’s his Amazon page.

On the days I’m looking for something other than paper, well, there’s always rocks.

F:Rokcs

The best thing about flow? You can find it everywhere, from cooking to making music to reading to running: whatever engages your senses so deeply that you are utterly in the moment. The tricky part? Finding focus in our distraction-filled world. Get away from your electronics, let go of anxiety and sink into it. Flow feels so good that you’ll want to find it over and over again.

What about you? Where do you find it?

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