GOINGS ON AT ALMA & NANCY'S JOSHUA TREE STUDIO...
NOVEMBER 2012
BIG SCULPTURES
There are several new big sculptures in the works getting ready to make their debut...
NOVEMBER 2012
TOMIO KOYAMA EXHIBITION KYOTO & TOKYO
FUNCTION DYSFUNCTION: ALMA ALLEN, ANI KASTEN, ADAM SILVERMAN
Alma showed at the Tomio Koyama Gallery in Kyoto in June/July and the exhibition travels to Tokyo November 14-26th, 2012. More on the exhibition here.
Japan Times review here.
OCTOBER 2012
TORTOISE VISITOR
Our tortoise friend has been visiting frequently. He's quick to laugh and has such great stories he hasn't worn out his welcome yet but he has worrisome flashes of grumpiness if you don't have his preferred lettuce...
OCTOBER 2012
COMMUNISTAS
Working on some projects for a new Commune designed shop...
AUGUST 2012
SOUTHWEST TREK
We were excited to have multiple excuses to get out of the intense and muggy heat of Joshua Tree in August. We needed to deliver a claro walnut and a bronze table to some clients in Colorado and Alma was excited to check out a marble quarry there which had recently been taken over by Italians. The large quarried marble blocks were stamped "Made in the USA" which gave me a little tear of patriotic pride that our American geological forces created marble envied even by the Italians. My patriotism deepened as our visiting Greek guest and travel companion marveled at our tidy, paved roads in the middle of nowhere; our willingness to obey traffic laws and parking protocol; and the ready availability of such fine confections as Nerds and candy corn. Also, unlike one of the German visitors, as an easygoing American I didn't yell at and insist that those people near the bottom of the arch remove themselves from the vicinity of my photograph.
Alma's prodigal son "Little Fool" joined the journey after gallivanting through Europe and Thailand wreaking havoc. His exasperated Greek and Italian caregivers hoped he could ground himself by visiting his homeland. It was either that or spend the summer picking pineapples run by one of those disreputable religious organizations to help troubled youth. The time Little Fool spent meditating by the Grand Canyon did seem to humble him. Meanwhile, Alma and Frieda grew emboldened to carve and move stone on levels more epic than even Michael Heizer could imagine, with volcanoes, wind and erosion as inspiration. It was great fun traveling with a two year old (well not always that great) and two Europeans who had never seen the incredible and otherworldly red rock county of Southern Utah and Arizona before. (Aspen however didn't fair as well compared to the charming ski towns of Switzerland.) The dramatic and vibrant red cliffs, rock formations and arches as well as the cool historic stone buildings make Joshua Tree seem kind of "meh" - sort of a Poor Man's Southern Utah. But the availability of good beer and wine fills in that gap nicely giving Joshua Tree a slightly more positive spin as the Drinking Man's Southern Utah.
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AUGUST 2012
SOUTHWEST TREK (CONTINUED) - MATTER OVER MIND
Colorado marble...
AUGUST 2012
SOUTHWEST TREK (CONTINUED)
Faceted claro walnut and bronze tables in their new Rocky Mountain home...
AUGUST 2012
THE SCULPTURE WHO FELL TO EARTH
I've used this phrase before in a posting about getting Poncho from the pound becuase her coloring resembles David Bowie's in the 70s film The Man Who Fell to Earth, and because she she's a super sweet space alien. But it seems apropos again with this piece. It feels both of the Earth and also like it fell from the sky.
Although Alma hollowed out the interior to greatly reduce the weight, it still weighed about 1000lbs and needed to be craned into location... to dramatic effect.
AUGUST 2012
THE SCULPTURE WHO FELL TO EARTH (CONTINUED)
A little before...
AUGUST 2012
THE SCULPTURE WHO FELL TO EARTH (CONTINUED)
...and after!
AUGUST 2012
THE SCULPTURE WHO FELL TO EARTH (CONTINUED)
...and the maquette on which it was based...
MAY 2012
MAKING THE ROUNDS
Alma is working on a piece for his upcoming show "Funtion/Dysfunction: Adam Silverman, Alma Allen and Ani Kasten" in Kyoto at the Tomio Koyama Gallery opening June 8th. Here he is turning a piece which was cast in bronze (pictured above). This is how that bronze table started out. Well actually it started out as tree in a farmer's orchard in Northern California. Turning something this size, around 36" wide, is fairly harrowing because that's a lot of mass spinning through space. The bolts which attach the log to the lathe sheared off a few times from the weight. Here's a little video.
APRIL 2012
QUONSET CONSTRUCTION
We recently completed a new studio building. Alma had designed a simple building but the County Building department lost our plans three times. Three times! Clearly, the slowdown in housing development didn't equate to short lines and fast turnaround time. The local office has been shut down except for one day a week and your submitted plans apparently have to take the Plan-Eating-Poodle Express to various other offices in San Bernardino County. Since we did in fact want to build the studio in a timely manner, we switched to a prefab quonset hut since these are very common in the desert and therefore straightforward to approve. When I finally picked up the corrected plans, Frieda was grabbing at them so I brilliantly put them on the roof of the car. You can see where this is going... About 30 minutes later I realized what I had done and returned to start combing the highway by the one-day-a-week office. I was able to piece together each filthy tire-track covered page scouring a half a mile distance... and made some new friends. There's quite a bit of activity on the shoulder of the road you don't notice when you're zooming past.
After the long approval process though things went fast. A sudden impending wind storm made that imperative. Once we started the process of putting it up, there was no stopping. The giant metal panels needed to all be put together and secured lest they be torn to shreds or decapitate some coyotes. At first we had six people working in pairs bolting on either side. But, this being Joshua Tree, band practice and various other vagaries brought us down to four with me recruited as the fourth. With only four people the crane was employed (and showed up) to help lift each panel which got pretty exciting as the wind had already picked up. The amazing Loring walked around on the sixteen foot high roof as if walking on the sidewalk. As an avid rock climber I figured he'd be comfortable with heights but Loring said he in fact has the opposite of the fear of heights. He's like one of the Mohawk Indians who built all the skyscrapers and bridges. He would stand on the roof smoking a cigarette whereas I would be hugging it for dear life.
FEBRUARY 2012
CARRARA MARBLE MOUNTAINS MAJESTY
Alma is gearing up to make large scale sculpture, as evidenced by the new truck and crane. Between building the new studio space and giving his arms a rest, it also explains the dearth of new sculpture. The carpal tunnel surgery on both hands helped a great deal but then he got another stress fracture near his elbow - a recurring issue from all the repetitive hard work.
He recently made a trip to Italy to research and obtain new stone tooling and toured the fantasy land of mountains made of Carrara marble! Solid marble for miles - it's so wild. He thinks it will take quite some time before it's all pillaged like the trees in early US history... I think it would be cool to polish off the tops like a sculpture. He visited several sculptors and fabricators including where Louise Bourgeois' eyes are made!
DECEMBER 2011
ALMA'S NEW RIG
Alma recently got this new truck and crane – new to him that is. The crane is used from a school district and I was relieved when he finally found the Mistubishi Fuso on a Nevada Craigslist. The Fuso is 4WD so can go off road yet is fairly small and can carry a lot of weight and there aren’t many of them out there. Alma had been eyeing one that was sitting around back at a repair shop in town that had been used by a local Porta-potty business before the housing boom bust. In fact that truck was probably the one they had to use to service our County-required construction Porta-potty nestled atop our steep unpaved driveway. I wasn’t excited about the possibility of the Porta-potty truck becoming our own even with the motto “We’re #1 in the #2 business” removed.
While finding the Fuso as well as a crane that can lift 6000 lbs without paying four times that amount turned out to be tough battles, that was the easy part. The truck came from Minnesota and had a bit of rust on the frame so Alma shopped around trying to find someone who could sandblast and reinforce the frame to install the crane. He hunted down a guy who did that type of work but after meeting with him and then several unreturned phone calls, took that to mean it was more work than he wanted so, Alma being Alma, decided to do it himself. Donning his sandblast gear and after giving Frieda and the dogs a scare, he went to work cleaning up the truck frame so he could have good surfaces for welds. He had to create a whole steel substructure as well as these flying buttress type contraptions on the back to stabilize the truck when the crane is operating. (I wrote a paper in the 6th grade about flying buttresses so I had to get that in since I don’t do things like forge science fiction like steel lifting machines in my daily life. I have to reach back to that paper I completed in the 6th grade for a sense of accomplishment.) He also engineered various pulleys and bars to support the loads. Needless to say it was quite satisfying when he got it all going and can now go just about anywhere and lift just about anything. It made him laugh. 6000 lbs is two of our cars! I think my favorite part of the set-up is this dangling red arrow that shows you the angle of the crane and the amount it can lift at that angle. It has to be at a high angle to lift the maximum weight but the red arrow isn’t wired in, it’s just based on gravity. I like how low-tech that is. If it were newer you know they’d have some fancy electronic gauge that could break when this works just as well.
Here’s a video of the first test of the crane moving a log bench into our wash.
NOVEMBER 2011
TAKING TURNS - ALMA ALLEN & ADAM SILVERMAN
Adam Silverman and Alma have collaborated again on ceramic and wood combination pieces for a show titled "TAKING TURNS" on view in Japan in November and December, 2011. These pieces are only available at dieci in Osaka and Play Mountain in Tokyo! Details below...
TAKING TURNS:
11/26/11 (SAT) - 12/4/11 (SUN) @ dieci (Osaka)
12/10/11(SAT) - 12/18/11 (SUN) @ Playmountain (Tokyo)
OCTOBER 2011
LITTLE FOOL FALLS IN LOVE IN PARIS!
Always narcissistic, in fact solipsistic might be a better description for Little Fool if I understand that word correctly, he proved that opposites don’t always attract in his choice of partners. But the heart wants what it wants and we are delighted for the Little Fools! And quite jealous of their romantic time spent in Paris!
SEPTEMBER 2011
TIS THE SEASON
Last night I had the pleasure of waking up to a tarantula slowly walking towards me across the bed pillows. I'm pretty certain it was headed over to eat my eyeballs. Frieda was there too but lucky for her she was sleeping and was therefore spared the whole 'tarantula in the bed' relocation process. She hasn't paid for years of expensive Transcendental Meditation (TM) training like I have to have coping mechanisms for resting peacefully in bed again. (The TM training has already paid for itself by not one, but two, scorpions in the bed!) Frieda should also be grateful that we (i.e. Alma) captured the tarantula before photographing it and resisted the temptation to take the far better photo of the tarantula inching towards her sweet sleeping face. This despite the fact that we are both "artists" and would have to be forgiven for such behavior in our Herzog-like pursuit of creating "adequate images" for our civilization. She'd just have to hope she could get some money in a book deal trashing us later on.
I'm of course interested in the "nature vs. nurture" debate and wonder whether we are born with an aversion to giant, segmented, furry, black arachnids or develop them through sociological pressures. I'm excited to have the opportunity to carefully observe a fresh human baby, Frieda, in a controlled environment since I'm pretty much with her 24/7 and therefore can't attribute the nanny or daycare for any behavior. I'm quite confident she would not have responded well to the tarantula. Truth be told, I maintained my cool, if only because swatting it as fast as possible with a shoe was not really an option with a creature of this stature.
I posted a photo on Facebook and was interested to see that the responses seem to break down into two camps: sincere expressions of horror and disgust, and the obligatory attempts of positive spin by desert dwellers experiencing Stockholm Syndrome. Some said I was "lucky." Others suggested I let the tarantula creep up my forearm to feel the "delicate weightlessness like butterfly kisses." I'm sure it does feel like butterfly kisses as it slowly forms a cocoon over your nose and mouth.
For the record, the bowl pictured is a salad bowl - the largest Pyrex bowl in the set of Pyrex bowls.
SEPTEMBER 2011
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
We're melting down a bronze sculpture which didn't work out which leads to this creepy image.
Fortunately we eventually got the temps high enough to transmutate its soul to another sculpture - another "Little Fool" in fact.
Last of the Little Fools...
SEPTEMBER 2011
FIRST CROP OUT OF THE KILNS
We've got some beautiful claro walnut coming out of the solar kilns. With the dynamic patterns and figuring, it's hard to want to work with any other wood.
SEPTEMBER 2011
DOG YIN AND YANG
SEPTEMBER 2011
BABY AND DOG YIN AND YANG
SEPTEMBER 2011
TUCKER TECH, ROCK CLIMBING LEGEND AND MALE MODEL
I think I've written about Tucker Tech, (his real name!), before but even so it bares repeating. The only climber to be featured twice on the cover of Climbing Magazine, he is also legendary for building stone structures rivaling Machu Picchu and stupendous beer consumption. He can boast a multiple day, all beer ascent of El Capitan. He pulled cases of beer up alongside him on ropes as he scaled the mountain and slept on its barren cliff face. I believe he had a pretty severe headache at the end of it but who else can claim all beer ascent!
He prefers a dry stack approach when building rock walls but we talked him into slumming it here with us to surface our courtyard walls. Frieda has been studying with the Master and her form really catches stride after kicking back a coulple of Natty Ice's with Tucker.
Tucker has also been serving as a scale model for claro walnut burls as well as subject for Greg Epperson and a possible Patagonia catalog spot. Greg is a frequent contributor to Patagonia and other publications for his astounding climbing photos. Greg took this great shot of Tucker and Frieda and has possibly sullied Tucker's hard-earned curmudgeon reputation forever! Especially if it actually gets published in Patagonia!
AUGUST 2011
SHOJI MORINAGA VISIT - DON'T TRUST GOOGLE TRANSLATE!
I'm dating this August even though these first photos go back to July and it's actually almost the end of September as I write this... I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I'm not getting any lucrative advertising offers for my prolific blogging!
We had the pleasure of hosting master woodworker Shoji Morinaga from Kagoshima in Southern Japan for what probably seemed like two extraordinarily long months to him in scorching hot Joshua Tree. Shoji wanted to work with Fritz, I mean Alma, as well as California native woods and he created a beautiful body of work during his time here. He had an exhibition of his turned wood bowls (pictured) at Tortoise on Abboy Kinney in September which has now traveled to Japan.
One day as I was checking out Shoji's blog, (instead of writing my own), I used Google Translate to interpret what he had to say about his time here in Joshua Tree. In one entry Shoji wrote about Alma who was building some shade structures - pictured left. Google Translate wrote "Slowy every day I am piercing Alma's dreadfulness." What?! That's pretty mean! No good deed goes unpunished I guess... I asked my Japanese sister-in-law to translate and she advised that actually Shoji wrote that he was amazed that Alma makes everything himself, and what an accomplishment that is. The word he used was "sugoi" which is a catch-all term for wow, incredible, remarkable, not "dreadful!"
This experience helped explain why Shoji emailed before his arrival that he was "throbbing with pleasure" to visit Joshua Tree. GOOGLE! The correct word is "excited!"
JULY 2011
SCULPTURE PILLOW
One of Alma's oak sculptures is multi-tasking as a pillow for Poncho.
JUNE 2011
CLARO WALNUT
In addition to the truckload of claro walnut logs we got to make slabs for furniture, we also got a truckload of claro walnut burls to be used for sculpture and turned work. I mentioned before we got a new lathe that can go up to 24” wide from our previous max of 16” wide. Well now this puppy can go up to 48” wide. We got a lathe extension part that had to be custom made at the factory. We probably won’t ever make turned tables much wider than 36” or so because the solid wood pieces get so heavy. The turned tables are super dramatic in the large scale.
Not only is the size of the new pieces really out of the ordinary, the wood we used is something rarely seen in such huge chunks. Alma’s favorite wood is California claro walnut burl with its gorgeous and dynamic colors and patterns. (Actually ironwood is his very favorite wood but it's just a bush with limbs only around 10" wide.) We had the opportunity to get a bunch of big claro walnut burls from a farm in Northern California and we decided to stock up. Usually if the farmer or arborist bothers to excavate the burl from underground instead of just chipping it, they sell it for veneer or gunstocks. We’ll use them for sculpture as well as turned tables, stools, and bowls, becoming available in the coming months. Meanwhile Frieda continues with her rigorous schedule as part of her woodworking apprenticeship. At 18 months she begins training on the use of chisels and axes.
JUNE 2011
SOLAR KILNS
We built these solar kilns based on a design by Virginia Tech University using "25 years of research and development on the solar drying of lumber in the United States and foreign countries.” It claims to dry a load of lumber in "approximately one month of moderately sunny weather at its location in Blacksburg, VA" so I imagine it will work mighty fine here during a Joshua Tree summer. (I hope I didn’t give up having 70s shampoo commercial beach hair for nothing!) Although it sounds like the kilns should work just as well in Paris or Kathmandu.
The gossip in the neighborhood seems to be that we popped up a couple of grow shacks. In this town that is sure to make the competition anxious! Speaking of which, we once met a California State prosecutor guy when buying a tool off of Craigslist who said that the Joshua Tree area doesn't have as many meth labs as you might think because those seem to be too ambitious an undertaking for the high desert folks. I thought that was funny.
We have one kiln for turned pieces – stools and tables – and one for slabs milled for dining tables, coffee tables and benches. It would sure be cool if when we opened the doors the wood came out as beautifully finished pieces, like a really great game show prize, and our work was done.
JUNE 2011
OUR TORTOISE FRIEND SAYS HEY
Pretty sure this is the same tortoise who makes an appearance every Spring. She came right into the house and had a look around. I understand you aren’t supposed to touch tortoises even to just give a gentle nudge in the right direction, so we set out a sculpture scarecrow to try and turn her around. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure she wouldn't enjoy life with two dogs and a toddler but God only knows what goes on in tortoise life in the desert. Between the bugs and snakes and coyotes and mountain lions, maybe life in here would actually be relaxing.
JUNE 2011
ROCK WALLS
The much anticipated rocks walls have finally begun to take shape although we're still working out the process. Now that the summer heat has really set in, it seemed like a perfect time to start. Gathering rock from the hillside, mixing cement and moving it in a wheel barrow, all delightful activities on a hot summer day.
MARCH 2011
ADVENTURES OF LITTLE FOOL IN ITALY
Alma might be stuck in Joshua Tree working all the time but at least his progeny gets to go out and explore the world. A collector recently sent us a fantastic series of photos documenting the adventures of one of Alma's bronze sculptures, known in Europe as “Liittle Fool,” in his travels from Athens to Milan to Florence experiencing fine food, beautiful women, and, my personal favorite, a demonstration of Florentine women protesting the bunga-bunga dalliances of Berlosconi. See more here!
MARCH 2011
CRUMMY PHOTO OF A GREAT SCULPTURE
A recent sculpture commission in marble and bronze with a walnut pedestal. The shapes and interaction of the sculptures and base are muddied by the wood in the background.
But since the walnut slabs are pictured in the background there, might as well explain that those are some cool pieces that show the graft line of English and Claro walnut. Farmers often use California Claro as the heartier root stock but graft English onto it because it produces more nuts.
MARCH 2011
We did some rock work and the dogs now have a regal platform from which they can bark at squirrels and survey the scenery.
TALES OF AIRPORT SECURITY
Alma thinks of his sculptures as a type of vocabulary – different thoughts or feelings articulated in wood and stone. So he loves to see how different people combine pieces and what the new grouping has to say. We had a studio visit from a lovely couple from Texas who put this great collection together and apparently POSSIBLE TERRORIST THREAT is how the Transportation Security Administration interpreted the forms in wood, stone and bronze. The collector reported that the TSA man was nice and carefully wiped both sculptures with a paper disc which he subsequently put in a machine that detects explosives residue. This was all in addition to the usual runs through the x-ray machine unwrapped and in separate bins.
Admittedly, the sculptures do all possess a vaguely bomb or weapon-like quality, that is if your mind is occupied with threats and not musing on more benign forms of nature like fruits or pods. On the flip side, I have a story where it would seem more concern about security would be in order. I worked at the Archives & Collections department of Universal Studios during the September 11th World Trade Center attacks and big cement barriers quickly went up all around the studio. Every time you drove onto the lot you were subjected to a screening by bomb-sniffing dogs and security personnel who even scanned the underside of your vehicle with a mirror and made you open your trunk. You have to admire the arrogance of Universal Studios to think that terrorists would first attack the financial center of the world and then set their sights on a lesser known movie studio in the San Fernando Valley. One day I was excited to have a car full of cartoonishly hazardous looking prop bombs from a movie you probably haven’t heard about - a live action version of the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon starring Robert De Niro in one his prouder cinema moments. I thought, “This should make the days of the security guards! Finally some action!” And if I got tied up for hours in interrogations, it would certainly be more exciting than simply returning to my desk in the basement of the Commissary building to do paperwork. But Rocky & Bullwinkle didn’t create any more movie magic with the security guards than at the box office. They didn’t even look twice at the giant prop bombs fashioned out of painted styrofoam or ask me about them.
A decade later on Frieda’s recent airplane travel, she had to remove her 4 1/2 inch long silver Mary Jane shoes lest she be one of these new breed of highly sophisticated and cute infant terrorists that would put the Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction to shame.
MARCH 2011
THE MYSTERY CAMPERS
Frieda, Fritz, Poncho and I all went out to investigate the mysterious camping site which appeared the other night on our land (although we know it’s the Earth’s land dude). The campers built a firepit and left behind a table of some sort, perhaps used for firewood, or they left in such a rush in the morning that it got forgotten. We imagine it was some stoned hippies who were fairly surprised to discover they hadn’t in fact used their outdoor skills and bravery the night before to discover remote high desert territory but ended up camping in the favorite pooping spot of a couple of pooches who live in the house within shouting distance.
Fritz is a big picture kind of guy and conserves his energy and his cool (even though it was only in the 60s) under the juniper tree and lets Frieda and Poncho handle the nuts and bolts of the investigation.
MARCH 2011
THE EPIC TALE OF THE BRASS FIRE BOWL
Last summer Alma was commissioned to make a brass fire bowl and he came up with a design which was deceptively simpler to execute in model scale. For the model he took a sheet of copper and hammered out the bowl section – a simple and clean design. With the full scale version, Alma carved some custom wood mallets on the lathe to create the desired effect. The final bowl created a couple of slightly warped spots in the surrounding surface but it seemed like they could be flattened fairly easily with the same method so Alma heated up the brass to pound them back into place. This made the spots warp more. Heat more, warp more. He realized he’d have to hammer and work the entire surface to get it to even out. A week was spent of full-time hammering and heating, in Joshua Tree July temperatures, and to the great annoyance of our neighbors who would periodically yell SHADDUP! Around Friday at 6pm, it was as warped as ever – the whole surface had big waves. One end was 8 inches higher than the other. There was despondency in the air. You’d pound one side and it would go Poing!, then flip it over and pound the other side and it would spring back another way. Thinking we were going to have to start over, and out of frustration and angst, Alma jumped up on the wooden jig holding the brass and stomped on it in a tantrum-like fashion while it was still hot. As is rarely the case with conniption fits, this really helped! The brass evened out a couple of inches. Then Alma finally figured out how to work out the warp using a rolling pounding motion and he’s been really happy smoothing out that puppy. A real arc of the artistic process. We’re very excited about the final result which looks beautiful in the moonlight. This is for the house recently featured in Architectural Digest and Architectural Digest France and the firebowl made the cover of the Danish design magazine Rum.
