PFF & SS - Stool, more art, & ebook launch

Hello to all my friends at Paint Party Friday and Sunday Sketches!

I wanted to share some art and the inauguration or the ebook store we launched.

Jim's birthday is May 24th and all he really wanted was for the ebook/kindle store to be launched - which is what I have done, with 13 titles and more coming.

In order to launch it I have been writing people and letting them know these ebooks are available, either for folks to read or to buy for other people as gifts. Some as cheap as $1 and short as a few pages - others way longer.

So far all the writing is his, and I assist in graphic layout, and cover design. I have some book ideas of my own, but for now it is his writings I am sharing about.

Things he writes are anything from short fiction to exploratory biographical essays about folks involved in the renewable energy field. They range from $1 to $6. Many more are coming. 

The book I'm particularly excited about is the one shown on the cover here, Homily Sticks... etc - this book contains all the poems/verses we have put into wood art - and contains a fine collection of all the wood art - some examples of which I have posted here over the past few weeks/months.

It has been in any event a great winter project, that hopefully will continue. I especially enjoyed putting the Homily Sticks book together, which required a great deal of Photoshopping! It gave me a good excuse to document the pieces we have made. I not only have been able to edit the pieces to account for a bad camera, but I've been able to put a groovy background on the pieces, and show all sides of the things. That's what happens when you have 3D work - all sides are important

So there you go! Please feel free to share the link to our Amazon store with anyone who might be interested. "feel free to purchase one if you fancy one" goes without saying :D

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=James%20L%20Hickey&search-alias=digital-text&sort=relevancerank

Also am sharing pics of a stool we have been working on. This is the first time we take on a big furniture piece, and it has been rewarding. Our good friend John Behr out of Tennessee built it, and we have been decorating it. This is only 1/2 finished, as can be seen.

thanks for stopping by! Have an awesome weekend!

Homily Sticks - Alicia Jimbo Collaboration

Not often in a course of a day, week, or year, upon participating in an art fair or event, does one so consistently hear “I have never seen anything like this before!” So it was with Jim’s Homily Sticks and Ponder Panels which, though met with some reserve, garnered enough of an interest from a Snow Bird New Orleans couple at the local BRACA art fair we attended some weeks ago that they purchased three.

Homily Sticks comes from marrying two of Jim’s favourite things: words and wood. His artistic statement regarding this nascent art/craft form follows:

In the course of its tumbling meander toward the sea, the rivers hereabouts cast up a practically limitless amount of cast-off wood, frequently as one sort or another of wooden needle. Beaver-bitten, human-hewn, or merely shaped by calamity and gravity and wind and water and stone into the classic shapes of daggers and handles of one sort or another, these forms are not what most passers-by would consider prepossessing. Often stuck in muck, covered with dirt and detritus, or moldy and buggy on the surface, these examples of nature’s short-swords often appear both common and homely.

Jim Hickey begs to differ. For many decades, he has collected samples of such items. Recently, he has begun to work the wood: cleaning it, sanding it, shaving it, developing the faces of the sticks so as to be more presentable.

He then lets the pieces sit, listening for what each one has to say until a semblance of sense emerges from a piece. After writing down and shaping these words, he burns them into the sticks: inevitably, some element of philosophy, morality, or intellectual investigation is what emerges, since even though he’s listening to the wood, the message is going through the ‘Jimbo Translator,’ which cannot help but bear the imprint of someone in love with words and ideas.

Alicia will often add touches of artistry to the words. Jim provides color and, as a final step, stains and finishes each piece according to what will both enhance and preserve a particular stick.

Although many of the sticks have holes and wire attached, adding potential functionality to the conceptual or aesthetic presence, others are freestanding or appear on finished bases. They all proffer some message—hence the ‘homily’—but mainly they are beautiful, natural sculptures that invite an appreciation for the infinite number of ways that time and tide craft gorgeous material for our contemplation.

We plan to develop this medium further. Meanwhile, Marshall Arts, in whatever form it takes, as well as local fairs and tailgate markets of all stripes in the WNC area will see these sticks come to life. They can also be seen in Marshall Arts’ Etsy store.

Revisiting old works: Atacama then and now

Back in 2006 I cobbled the following painting together, and called it Atacama, a place I've only, alas, gotten to see the mere outlines of, thanks to a random outing to the city of Copiapo with family members 10 years before the creation of this work. I was not particularly remembering that particular outing, which involved hunting clams by the seashore on our way north, a storied and hilarious journey inside a creaky winnebago accompanied by step sibling Francisco (recently married... how time goes by...) the youngsters (one now completing passage at the Naval Academy ... time does go by indeed!), and Los Tres (tape deck.. no MP3s!! Ancient!!) , and plenty of cachaça and.. of course... red wine. Rather, something of the arid colours of the piece itself reminded me of the Northern Chile desert. I hadn't even thought about any of the other aspects of that trip until I sat down to relate this.

In any event, this 3 foot x 3 foot landscape begun as a school project for a Tim Flowers drawing class. Random driftwood was the subject matter, or, to be more exact, the picking of a subject matter and developing it across a whole semester. Anyone who know anything about me and Jim, it's that WE HAVE US SOME WOOD. This is part of the reason we are developing the concept of the Homily Stick, among other things - but I digress.* The drawing part (floating woods in a yellow-blue background) was something of a culmination of a semester's work - possibly uninteresting and unremarkable in itself as an artwork, but OK enough for a harried last-minute effort. The piece since then evolved when I affixed the finished, coloured drawing onto an abandoned canvas found on the side of the road of the never-forgotten Oakhurst neighborhood of Decatur.

The piece lived on in this way for years until a sudden impulse of late led me to affix all sorts of whimsical details, glitter, fabric, decoupaging of all sorts. I was revisiting lots of old pieces - some which were frankly unresolved, some which required minor tweaking, others which I randomly decided needed revisiting, such as this one.

Part of the impetus was finally unearthing a lot of the random playing cards, bits of ribbon, old-timey Victorian calendars and other assorted hodgepodge that artists tend to acquire in hopes that someday they will fit onto a piece - and the truth is, the original image always looked a bit plain, a bit severe to me. I feel I managed to integrate more of the background with the foreground, and added a bit of zip, zap and zing. I like the way the foreground was extended in the yellows, grounding the drawing more onto the wacky outer space quality of the original discarded canvas.

The last thing I want to do, as soon as I get some funds, is encase the whole thing in a layer of EnviroTek epoxy resin, though I balk at this seeing as the interaction of chemicals and elements can change things in unexpected - and sometimes undesirable - ways.

In any event, the new and improved version can be seen here.

*everyone forgive my trucculent and spacey prose - I must be undergoing an unfortunate Mercury transit.