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Sortmind Blog – Michael D. Smith

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith
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What Passes for an Artist Statement

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on July 26, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJuly 26, 2011

I don’t find artist statements useful. In fact, most of the numerous ones I’ve read strike me as obligatory but unintelligible fluff. But, as I begin to wallow into yet another reassessment of my visual art, I resurrect an older essay, “Visual Art 2007,” which I’m removing from www.sortmind.com and revising here. The essay still rings true but a few edits have updated it for 2011.

Manifestos come about because we’re battered by the hurricane of universal energy and we want to fix our methods, our shelters against that wind.  But manifestos themselves get remixed into that hurricane. They wink in and out of existence.

The universe is looking for vessels into which it can pour its raw energies. We need to enhance ourselves to receive these gifts. To demand that the universe merely give us gifts (“I am an artist!”), to aggressively seek the transcendence which accompanies the gift, is self-defeating. That’s why artists burn out, go on ego trips, become dishonest, squander their energies.

We want methods because we want to be assured that the universe will still call on us. But our methods soon become empty rituals. We may have seasons of a certain way of doing things, but we need to be open to changing everything entirely.  We need to recognize that any process has to be reevaluated when the universe decides that something new is to be poured. Continue reading →

Posted in Acrylic, Art Process, Drawing, Painting | Leave a reply

Large Paintings Show at the Renner Frankford Library, August 3-30

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on July 25, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 11, 2015

Energy Flood 1 copyright 2011 by Michael D. SmithIn August 2011 I’ll have four large paintings showing at the Renner Frankford library auditorium in Dallas.  The link–URL also shown at the end of the post–takes you to the Renner page with hours and location.  The show runs August 3-30 (hanging day 8/2 and pickup day 8/31).

This 7’ x 7.5’ canvas is one of four large ones I’ve done this year to exorcise an ancient demon of wanting to paint extremely large.  Actually, I might want to paint these sizes again, but the vast scale of these unstretched canvases changes my procedures and materials dramatically, not to mention realities like supply expense, transportation, and difficulties in lighting and photographing.  And the fact that often you’re standing in the middle of the painting while executing it.  Also it made me wonder how pour artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock dealt with wrinkles on the unstretched canvas.  As well as cat hair and other miscellaneous debris.  A large unstretched canvas has a surprising weight and is a challenge even to pick up or roll properly.

The original canvas I worked on was twice this size–7’ x 15’.  Maybe I was trying to set some sort of personal size record and so offended the muse somehow, but when I painstakingly C-clamped the heavy awkward thing to a makeshift wall in my studio and finally took a look at it, I realized how bad it was.  It was so large I could not get back far enough to take a decent picture of it.  It was horribly dark and dull and static and ponderous, over-planned and … mediocre.  I found myself unwilling to even look at the thing.  I already knew it was a wrong-headed mistake, but when my wife Nancy gave some excellent comments on exactly why it was mediocre, I was consciously able to crystallize why I needed to cut the canvas in half and simply have fun doing some total sloppy improvisation on two halves.

Energy Floods 1 and 2 copyright 2011 by Michael D. SmithSince all four of these large paintings are unstretched, they can be rolled and stuffed into my car from dashboard to rear window; however, this process mandates curtailing my usual love for built up texture.  I wanted the canvases as light as possible, and with a flat surface to minimize damage while rolled up or being transported.

If I ever take it into my head to staple these canvases onto stretchers, which would reduce the overall size by a minimum five inches on a size, I might consider revising them with more texture and some additional color.  In their unstretched state they seem like rough drafts of paintings, with all the awkward exuberant energy of a rough draft of anything.  I found myself thinking as I did these large works that these were depictions of large paintings, something you might commission an artist to do as backdrop for a theatrical production about an artist who painted large scale …

copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith

link to Renner location and hours: http://dallaslibrary2.org/branch/renner.php

Posted in Acrylic, Art Process, Painting | 2 Replies

An Archeological Excavation of Akard Drearstone, Draft 1

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on July 19, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 27, 2019

If you’re well known and announce on your blog that you’re “going dark” to work on some major project, your readers may accept this in anticipation of some future gift.  If nobody reads your blog and you announce that you happened to have gone dark due to some major project, well, this is not so impressive, as nobody missed you in the meantime and if anybody happened to, they don’t give a flip about your darkness.

In my case, which I suspect runs along the lines of the latter, a long-standing desire of mine shoved aside other writing projects, including blog.sortmind.com, for almost two months.  This was to scan in and correct the entirety of the 1,587 page rough draft of my novel Akard Drearstone, written from February 1976 to March 1978.  I’ve been asking myself if all this hasn’t been a waste of time and energies better spent on new fiction, but I think this dig into the past has been beneficial.  Besides, I just finished a new novel in May, Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar, and here was an opportunity to relax with some easygoing archeological work.  Obsessive, all-consuming, easygoing archeological work.

Continue reading →

Posted in Akard Drearstone, Early Writing, Novels, Publishing, Writing, Writing Process | 11 Replies

Back to The First Twenty Steps For a Moment

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on June 10, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

The First Twenty Steps copyright 2011 by Michael D. SmithI was able to place my heartwarming novella about a motorcycle gang on amazon.com, via their Kindle Direct Publishing program. So The First Twenty Steps can now be downloaded to either a Kindle or a Nook. The price is still $1.00, and the book is still available on Barnes and Noble.

This was an interesting experiment because it was a completely different (and not so straightforward) process than with Barnes and Noble’s PubIt, and involved saving a Word document as HTML and then having that converted with free third party software, MobiPocket Creator, into something called a “.prc” format, as opposed to PubIt’s .epub format, which seems to be evolving to be the standard.

I was able to use the same digital cover photo, and the two editions are identical. The Kindle URL is:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0054GQBHG

and PubIt meanwhile has updated my URL to:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-First-Twenty-Steps/Michael-D-Smith/e/2940012097644

Harry, the novella’s hero, is an ex-convict, just released from prison in the afternoon, who later that night finds himself mixed up with a motorcycle gang’s plan to steal a supercomputer from the dreaded Dataflux building.

The novella is not available in print, but someday I may investigate the whole Print on Demand technology. I would love to see one of those POD machines in operation. Here’s an interesting overview of the pros and cons (or, as the article seems to indicate, mostly the cons) of POD publishing:

http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/

Feel free to write a review of The First Twenty Steps on either amazon.com or the PubIt site, or as a comment here on the blog. It would be nice to get a comment from someone other than Russian pharmaceutical spammers, BTW. And if anyone is setting up as blog and would like me to explain why blogs attract so much comment spam, and such spam’s relation to Google search results, let me know. WordPress has a nice add-on that blocks these creepy but often hilarious literary gems.

copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith

Posted in Novels, Publishing, Science Fiction, Self-Publishing, The First Twenty Steps, Writing, Writing Process | Leave a reply

The Martian Marauders, Book One of the Jack Commer Series

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on April 27, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJuly 11, 2020

The Martian Marauders copyright 2011 by Michael D. SmithMy novel The Martian Marauders is scheduled for publication with Double Dragon eBooks in January 2012.  The Martian Marauders is the first in my Jack Commer science fiction series, which includes Jack Commer, Supreme Commander and Nonprofit Chronowar.  I’m halfway through a fourth novel in the series, with a working title of Seven of Cups/Beyond Damnstar.

Publication of The Martian Marauders is scheduled for January 2012.  But there’s no way this crude cartoon–one in a set of bizarre Tarot cards I drew a long time ago–would be the cover of the novel!

In 2033 Captain Jack Commer drops the planet-wrecking Xon bomb to end The Final War, forcing a hasty evacuation of the remnants of Earth’s population to Mars. But by June 2034 previously unknown native Martians have risen in rebellion, led by their new human emperor, the political agitator and traitor Sam Hergs. Amid family squabbles arising from the presence of four Commer brothers aboard his ship, Jack finds himself in the deep Martian desert battling Martian insurgents armed with shatterguns that crack their victims into millions of jagged pieces of glass.

Jack’s ship, the Typhoon I, is sent to Mercury to destroy a Martian death ray designed to incinerate what the Martians now consider a despoiled Mars. There John, the youngest Commer brother, impetuously rams the ship into the enemy base in a suicide attack, killing all crewmembers and marooning Jack and Joe in deep space.

Though the brothers are eventually captured by Hergs’ agents, taken to yet another Martian base on Venus, and finally escape, Jack compromises the entire mission when he kidnaps the Emperor’s consort and falls in love with her.

copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith

Posted in Double Dragon Publishing, Jack Commer, Martian Marauders, Novels, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing | Leave a reply

My Visual Art is Somehow Literary

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on April 12, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

I’ve long had a history of straddling the two horses of writing and painting, and there have been a few times where I seriously thought I should ditch writing in favor of art.  Yet what has always felt best is to say that I’m 80% a writer and 20% a visual artist.

I can allow those percentages to vary a bit as I try to keep one foot in each horse’s stirrup, hoping they head more or less in the same direction.  But while painting is necessary, the writing horse must lead.  This does not mean illustration, just that the energies involved in my visual art—and they do differ from writing energies—are literary.

I’m not sure I can really pin down how that works.  But I’ve noticed that in all cases where I’ve flirted with abandoning writing in favor of art, I’ve been out of contact with myself, even if the surrounding energies have been high.  Visual creation can take on too much importance, luring me with its physicality and immediacy.  Three examples are:

  • Walking back across the soccer fields from the Media Center one February morning my freshman year at Rice, I had the sudden certainty that I should chuck the difficult, lonely writing quest in favor of the power of painting.  While my actual output of that time was mediocre, I was immersed in the studio, the materials, the other artists, the art community, and the high-energy experimentation.  It was natural to respond to that energy. 
  • Spring-Summer 1986.  During this time I was experiencing a renaissance of painting energy and a rededication to developing my visual style, not just trying to repeat older processes.  Although at the same time I was connecting with some new writing energy, with two new science fiction novels that year, the visual energy was in ascendance, and I began to consider whether I should pursue art first. 
  • The Summer Art Career, 2006.  After a period of several years of doing one-man shows and selling some art, I took early retirement from the library with the hope that visual art would lead to career and financial success.  But this delusion didn’t last through the summer.  Continue reading →
Posted in Acrylic, Art Process, Drawing, Novels, Painting, Sculpture, Writing, Writing Process | 7 Replies

Dystopias—And I’ve Written My Share

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on March 13, 2011 by Michael D. SmithMarch 24, 2020

16Tower copyright 2006 Michael D. SmithTry on the idea that concern about, interest in, or desire for Apocalypse is really an ego trip.  That you can’t imagine future generations superseding your mortal, contemporary consciousness.  If I die, it all must die with me.  Whether you postulate the apocalyptic dystopia coming next week or several hundred years from now, your basic urge is to assert the primacy of your consciousness over that of future generations.  Basically, you do not wish future generations well.  You refuse to seriously consider a prosperous human society in the year 9782.

Few science fiction dystopias seem to be set much further than a few hundred years ahead, as if that’s as far as we can imagine, or that we need to feel somewhat bodily close to the time period in question.  The science fiction novels that do go extremely far into the future, thousands of years distant, generally have a more relaxed view of vast cycles of empires rising and falling, with human nature more or less staying stable.  Many of these even postulate a complete forgetting of “Old Earth,” which becomes a sort of myth, and they make the reader feel comfortable with that concept.  It’s never really a tragedy that Old Earth is forgotten; in a way it’s a relief.

Continue reading →

Posted in Novels, Writing, Writing Process | 1 Reply

Activity | Cleanup | Foundations | New Work

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on March 7, 2011 by Michael D. SmithAugust 20, 2019

Where I’ve been the last two and a half months–not really offering excuses for so few blog posts, but that was one of the outcomes.

The Sculptures Exhibit

In January I set up my exhibit of twelve sculptures at Park Forest Library.  I’d already finished a certain dance with sculptures in December, and my 3-D energy seems to be on hold for now, so in a way this exhibit was a bit anti-climatic.  But it was satisfying, looked good, and, as with any art exhibit, took a lot of planning time and psychic energy.

The First Twenty Steps Revision and PubIt

On January 28th I finally pushed the button on barnesandnoble.com’s PubIt site that published The First Twenty Steps.  It was a good sense of accomplishment, an end to the whole Phase I of getting 20 Steps rewritten, primed for publishing, and put on the site.  Organizing my thoughts about the novella and learning the PubIt process has been very good.  I’ve been submitting novels to print and e-publishers for a few years now, and though the inevitable series of rejections doesn’t daunt me, this is all an extremely slow process, and I was impatient to put something out there and see what happens.  As for Phase 2, I’ve done some initial marketing and will keep experimenting with that effort over time.

The Older Stories Project

I’ve ridden my writer self hard over the past five years, especially accelerating this past year so that most of my novels and novellas have a 2010 or 2011 completion date.  I know the positive reason for this: the shocking awareness of how off much of my past writing had been, and the urge to quickly bring it psychically up to date so that I can finally move forward again with an accomplished body of work as a foundation.

In January and February I scanned in the last eight of my older stories and painstakingly proofed them against their original typewritten copies, completing a years-long project of putting all my fiction into digital format.  I undertook all these scanning projects both as practical backup and as a hunt for past energies.  I think I’ve kept perspective in knowing that the past energies by themselves aren’t really fuel for new creation, but a sort of strengthening of foundations for new exploration.

Here are the story energies:

Words Pages
33 11,800 44
Alan Ice on Morningcide Drive 10,301 35
Chapter 32 14,018 50
Damage Patrol 15,882 59
January 1st 5,301 20
Man Against the Horses! 12,640 45
Oliver 21,689 76
Perpetual Starlit Night 7,962 33
Randy and Laura 14,712 58
Roadblock Zarreich 4,880 19
Space, Time, and Tania 14,320 49
Starvation Levels of the Infinite 9,292 37
Summer Burning City 1,475 6
The 66,000 M.P.H. Bicycle 9,340 24
The Highland Park Cadillac Races 18,447 64
The Selector 1,551 6
Tollhouse 19,099 75
Twenty Years Ago at Darkforce 9,585 43
Where Eagles Have Unfortunately Landed 12,631 46
Zorexians 23,317 78
238,242 867

I was surprised to realize that, despite my turning away from the short story form decades ago, I do have 867 pages of (mostly long) stories and that is no small accomplishment.  Playing with my spreadsheet, I find that I’ve submitted 357 pages of these as stories to publishers (including the published “Space, Time, and Tania,”) and another 293 have been offered as parts of novels or stories I’ve queried about.

What most of these stories have in common, aside from being too long to be published as stories and too short as novellas, is an urge toward the novel.  Many of them are divided into chapters and seek to play out their action on a novel-like stage.  They’re not just padded and word wasting.  So I think my realization was accurate, during the writing of my first real novel, Akard Drearstone, that I was intended to be a novelist and not a short story writer.  The forces behind these stories were longing for novelistic expression all along.

Would I rewrite any of the above stories?  I’m doubting that for almost all of them.  “Perpetual Starlit Night,” “Starvation Levels of the Infinite,” and “Roadblock Zarreich” are current anyway.  “Twenty Years Ago at Darkforce” and “Randy and Laura” might someday fly, an updated “Damage Patrol” as well.  But basically I’m looking at these 867 pages as archives.  A record of where I’ve been.  While I’m committed to taking care of my “writing career” and seeking sane publication where possible, I’m not going to scrape up old stuff hoping to find something to throw out into the publication maelstrom.  I have lots of new energies opening up.  The spreadsheet above is just an example of some of the foundation work going on.

The Big Paintings Project

In February I did the first of three big paintings, Improvisation Gesture, an experiment in doing a large format, seven feet by eleven feet, on unstretched canvas on the floor.  To keep the canvas lightweight and amenable to being rolled, I made the paint layers fairly thin, with none of my usual sand, ceramic stucco, or other texture mediums.  The result is more like a tapestry than a typical painting.

Full improvisation was the plan for the first of the three.  As I’ve long suspected, the large mural-like size allowed me to spread my restless painting energy over a wide space, avoiding the constant reworking on a smaller canvas into a complicated mess that must eventually be saved from itself.  Working on the floor was like sending some urban kid out to a farm to play.  There was also a surreal feel of not doing a “real” painting but a theater set “depiction” of a 1950’s action painting.

When I first starting using acrylic paint, my brushstrokes were arbitrary and amateurish.  I didn’t even realize this until the mid 90’s, when I saw that paint was really—paint!  A physical medium, not just “filling in color blocks.”  I then sought texture buildup because I could eliminate the use of brushes, or make their strokes nonapparent in the volcanic buildup of texture.  But for the thin paint on the large unstretched canvas I just used paper towels to eliminate all strokes.  The final result is “itself.”  I can’t say now whether this is an excellent painting or just good practice.

At 77 square feet this is the largest continuous surface I’ve ever done.  The 2004 triptych was 75 square feet but in three 25 square-foot paintings.  All this isn’t important in terms of impressing myself or others with big numbers, but does highlight the physical challenge of learning how to control such a large space.

I have a couple more paintings planned in this large unstretched format.  In the future, I can always stretch these over (big!) frames and even add more texture if I feel like it.  Initial showings can be stapled to a wall or affixed with other creative means.  The final stretching would lop 5” off all sides and result in an image that looks more or less like the initial one on sortmind.com.

Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar

One of the main reasons I wanted to push 20 Steps out and finish the stories, as well as make a solid start on the big paintings project, was so that I could clear some timespace for Seven of Cups/Beyond DamnStar, a new novel I began on January 18th.  It’s not autobiographical at all–this is the Jack Commer universe, after all–but pertinent to current concerns, and, in contrast to all the psychically necessary archival work described above, refreshingly up to date.

This is my first new fiction since Ocean Singe Horror in 2008.  I’ve never lost confidence in my ability to channel the new stuff.  I did much of that throughout all my recent novel revisions, but Seven of Cups was the first numinous blank sheet in quite a while.  This blank sheet is much different from starting a journal page or composing an essay or a blog post.  And while the novel springs from various little blank sheets of assembled and ruminated notes, the novel itself is somehow completely separate from them.

I can feel a lot lining up behind what I’ve already done.  I’m allowing it to be whatever “it wants to be,” and it’s a relief to not have to care about being polished, accessible, or publishable.  No query letters or synopses to compose.  I feel no need to hurry up and get the project done, though I’m impatient to see how it all turns out.  But I recognize that it can’t be pushed like a rewriting project or a scanning/copyediting project.  Of course I want it to be an excellent work, but—you just have to take it as it comes.

I have a feeling SOC will crowd out other endeavors for a while.

copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith

Posted in Acrylic, Akard Drearstone, Art Process, Collapse and Delusion, Novels, Painting, Sculpture, Self-Publishing, Stories, The First Twenty Steps, Writing, Writing Process | Leave a reply

The First Twenty Steps

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on February 10, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

The First Twenty Steps copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith The First Twenty Steps
a novella by Michael D. Smith
available as an eBook for $1.00
from
barnesandnoble.com

Placing this novella for sale on Barnes and Noble’s PubIt site is an experiment.  I want to see how e-publishing works and I regard this short work as one of my best plots.  I’m not intending to self-publish all my novels in this manner, but I do want to put this contribution out there and see what happens.  I want to experiment with e-publishing formats and processes, and to offer some sample work.

And since the PubIt site asks me to name my “publishing house,” why naturally I settled on Sortmind Publishing.

The First Twenty Steps is 25,730 words, 96 pages in Word, and 60 pages on the Nook or the free “Nook for PC” app.  (Nook owners will recognize that there are a lot more than 60 screens of text.)  The novella is not available in print (yet!) but that’s the whole point of PubIt, which offers only eBooks.

Harry, the novella’s hero, is an ex-convict, just released from prison in the afternoon, who later that night finds himself mixed up with a motorcycle gang’s plan to steal a supercomputer from the dreaded Dataflux building.  He finds a kindred spirit in Roberta, who’s in thrall to the gang’s passive-aggressive tyrant, Alexander.  Falling in love, Harry decides he must help her by infiltrating himself into the gang and eventually escaping with her.  But when Alexander announces that the gang will commit a major crime this evening to pay back favors from the corrupt city council, Harry realizes that their plan was doomed all along, that he and Roberta have compromised themselves by their contact with Alexander’s evil.  And then the motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal … Continue reading →

Posted in Dreams, Novels, Publishing, Query Letters, Science Fiction, Self-Publishing, The First Twenty Steps, Writing, Writing Process | Leave a reply

Sculpture

Sortmind Blog - Michael D. Smith Posted on January 16, 2011 by Michael D. SmithJune 28, 2019

Park Forest Library Exhibit, January 2011While my visual art has primarily been geared to painting and drawing, I occasionally do some sculpture. Three-dimensional design is high energy and compelling. The factors of gravity and balance are a delightful challenge, and they ground me in what’s real.  Instead of a painting exhibit, I offered to do a January 2011 sculpture exhibit at the Park Forest Library in Dallas, primarily because this branch has four glass cases excellent for displaying sculpture, but not so much for paintings, which have to be small and propped up in four 3-D spaces each about 24” x 24” x 48”.

Once I realized that I needed a few more sculptures to round out my first choices for this exhibit, I had a great time this past fall nailing and gluing and painting. The energy is so high that I definitely could turn out a couple of these every week for … how long? I don’t know. Let’s say X, X being equal to whatever amount of timespace and energy is necessary to work out whatever sculptural karma needs working out …

However, not only did I call for a hiatus on sculpture energy for a while as I assess the direction of my visual art, but space limitations alone will hold down the number of sculptures I make. Even the smallish ones I make take up a lot of room. They can’t be stacked like paintings, or hung on the wall. And eight cats pose a direct threat to their continued existence.

The gamma burst of sculptures this fall made me realize how important sculpture is to me, and I was surprised to realize, as I reviewed old photos going back to college days, how many I’ve made. Not a huge amount, maybe seventy to a hundred, but I can see several recurring themes in them.

Graduation Thesis II copyright 2010 Michael D. SmithSculptures have always been fun and easy to make because I’ve rarely thought of them as “art,” just a sort of glorious 3-D exercise, and my materials are frequently leftover wood from constructing painting stretchers or bookcases, offhand debris that doesn’t seem like expensive art supplies. But they can be glued and nailed and painted. They are balanced slabs and struts, with right angles dominating, like demented architectural models. Their meaning is simply themselves; they’ve never needed to express emotions or philosophies. And when they outlived their usefulness, or collected too much dust or became household clutter, I’ve easily deactivated the things, often using their wood for new sculptures.  Most of my sculptures no longer exist.

I find I can gaze into and through them in fascination, discovering new relationships between the parts, new spaces. I can muse on their self-evident forms and postures and gestures. I call them meditation objects for that reason.

The sculptures also lend themselves to investigatory digital close-ups. In fact, these seem to work much better at describing the quality of a given piece that does the traditional full shot with two lights at different distances.

Black Wood Construction 2 copyright 2010 Michael D. SmithBecause I now see the sculptures as important, I gave them their own section on sortmind.com. The sculptures are in no particular order, but the seven beginning on page four of the index are a representation of some of my early work.

Since I didn’t learn elementary techniques of photographing my art until the late 80’s, my photos of these early sculptures are careless to say the least, or else nonexistent. It’s funny that I would snap a shot “for the record” with my flashcube-weaponized Kodak Instamatic, but not bother to make sure I got all of the piece, or in any way seek to avoid recording a toilet in the background, before I dropped the cartridge off at Eckerds drugstore for expert, archival quality processing.  As an example see the color-faded photo of The Cotton Sculpture, my most significant one from my Rice days.  The Cotton Sculpture is probably the largest one I’ve done at 6’ high; only a handful of my sculptures have been this large.

The Cotton Sculpture copyright 1970-2010 Michael D. SmithBut I can just imagine the gravity, weight, balance and cost issues inherent in moving to much larger work than that. Factor in X again (plus Y = rural Texas farm to store all this stuff in the sun and the rain) and I would love to explore some larger sculptural issues.

Timespace/energy X is defined by however the actual work goes, of course. We make up X as we go along.  We’re building the starship on the way up.

copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith

Posted in Art Process, Sculpture | 2 Replies

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Michael's books

Why Meditate: Working with Thoughts and Emotions
4 of 5 stars
Why Meditate: Working with Thoughts and Emotions
by Matthieu Ricard
WordPress Web Design for Dummies
4 of 5 stars
WordPress Web Design for Dummies
by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...
5 of 5 stars
Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End...
by Philip Plait
Using Joomla!
3 of 5 stars
Using Joomla!
by Ron Severdia
Serpent's Tooth
5 of 5 stars
Serpent's Tooth
by Toni V. Sweeney
On a cruise Melissa bonds with an older man, Travis, who turns out to be a famous celebrity in hiding from a once successful life. But by degrees we become aware that his enormous success came at the price of bonding with demonic forces...

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