next to last totem blog

Enough of the Totem

     Need to finish the totem and move on as my blog suggests. Life moves on and so does my art work at times.  I am looking forward to starting something new and would like to take you the readers through this one also. I also have plans to start a new novel about a guy who builds a house for free off of craigslist free postings, and how it changes his life and others as well. This I am going to do in a more reader friendly way and will not publish on here until I have wrote the first five chapters, this process could take a week or a month. Will let you know. I also plan on revamping my house with my carvings, in an effort to surround myself with my hard work, and to better appreciate what I have done in an effort to make myself better at what I do. To serve as inspiration to do more also, even if at my own expense I am the only person in this world to appreciate what I have accomplished.

     Sometimes I think the artist’s worse fears are not that he isn’t capable of doing any one thing perfect, but instead for anyone to not see what he sees when he looks at something, to lose sight of the artist’s vision. Myself I have looked at objects supposedly to be true art objects showing a new vision or whatever, as I am not convinced yet that it is anything but trash, and wonder if truly the artist intended the meaning to be so obscure no one even understood the meaning but instead nodded their heads as if to acknowledge this artists inner vision. Picasso was abstract and I can understand the symbolism. A plastic crate for milk bottles in the middle of the floor of a huge city art museum symbolizes what? Sometimes I think it symbolizes an art major with nothing for a final thesis. The air stands for the air in his head, the nothingness, devoid of any thought what so ever to make his parents happy with him finally earning his degree after 7 years of torturous payments. Anyhow I guess it did impress me as I looked at that crate and said to myself I can do better than that and maybe one day I will have my work here, and then I wonder what people will say?

     All I can do is keep trying, and that keeps me going. Now I need to get off here and apply about 3 coats of Helmsman spar varnish to the overall carving and seal it up and finish this phase in my life. It is strange, but when I as the carver started the totem and devised the symbolic nature of the individual items that make up the totem, my thoughts on what they represent are now so much different than then, as personal events have marked the carving in so many ways in the last couple of months. This is usually the way it is when carving as I can look at certain carvings and see my past laid out before me, as if they are mile markers in my memory, some good, some bad, but just as my blog suggests –Life moves on.