Wind Sculpture

Someone Sent Me Two Feathers is a kinetic wind sculpture commissioned for a private home in Capistrano Beach, California, south of Los Angeles.

The sculpture is kind of unusual and I consider it to be one of my finest works, so maybe it deserves a page of it’s own. It was completed in 2006 but recently people have inquired about similar sculptures and I realized I didn’t have the video up on the website, so here’s a post about it.

As a kinetic sculpture, of course it’s heavily influenced by the work of George Baker, with whom I studied and worked for quite some time. I was an assistant in his studio for about 12 years and helped build over 100 commissioned sculptures, nearly all of them kinetic — motorized pieces, fountains, wind sculptures, some moved by hand. Although most of my own work is not kinetic, it is nice to revisit that genre once in a while.

Certainly, the motion can be fascinating, bordering on the hypnotic. But the challenge is in balancing pure sculptural form, while adding motion and a certain amount of choreography. The wind does not always blow, of course, so you want the still composition to be as successful as when moving.

The site is a residence on a bluff, up above the beach, the house commanding views north down into Dana Point Harbor, south down the beach, and out to sea. The work was commissioned by Ann and Roger Worthington, who knew George as well. I eventually did a number of other sculptures for them, but this was the first and largest. The house they built and helped design is just magnificent inside and out, everything from the landscaping to the furnishing would not be out of place in a museum.

A better site for a wind sculpture is hard to imagine. It’s ideally situated on the entrance side of the house, just out of the direct daily ocean breeze. A direct blast of onshore wind would probably just send the sculpture whirling around too fast. But with the wind being broken up by the house, there is a nearly ideal blustery quality to the air that gets the sculpture moving gently and randomly nearly every day, especially in the afternoon hours. Of course the morning I went to take some video – what would you expect – there was not much air movement.

Details: the sculpture and base are made entirely of 304 stainless steel. The base is about 4′ high and the total height of the sculpture is 12′ (3.66m). There are three sets (pairs) of aircraft stainless steel ball bearings. They are well shielded from rain and are not highly stressed, and should last for many decades without any attention if past experience is a guide. As I write this in 2012 the sculpture has never needed any mechanical attention. The sea air has not had an any deleterious effects on the stainless steel.

Fun fact: you can see this sculpture from space! If you go to Google Maps, enter the figures in the search box 33.458911,-117.670547 (latitude-longitude of the sculpture location). Zoomed in all the way, in satellite view, the sculpture is clearly visible in the middle of the circular driveway.

Installation of the Sculpture Project in Karuizawa, Japan

I was in Japan from Jan. 9-14, installing the five sculptures for the resort in Karuizawa. (Original blog post describing this commission.) The sculpture crates all arrived by ship in Tokyo Harbor safe in their container and were unloaded and trucked to the XIV Karuizawa resort. ArtInter Tokyo, the art consultants managing the project, headed by Takaki Tanaka, arranged everything wonderfully and it all went quite smoothly. The installation crew of four were experts at this, being full-time art installers that do quite a bit of work maintaining the sculptures at the renowned Hakone Open Air Museum. So altogether there were seven of us on the installation.

The resort itself was a hive of activity to completely finish construction, as the building is scheduled to open for occupancy soon. This is really a first rate resort, and of course the legendary Japanese attention to detail was evident everywhere in all the design, the landscaping, the materials and finishes, everything.

XIV Karuizawa - the new resort - sculpture crates

Shipping a few thousand pounds of artwork nearly 6,000 miles, it gives you a bit of trepidation opening the crates. It was encouraging that the crates looked immaculate from the outside. Everything inside was in perfect shape.

We uncrated and moved all the sculptures to their positions, where footings had been poured to bolt them down. Unfortunately two of the footings were in positions that just weren’t quite right. We went ahead and placed the sculptures carefully, with the exact rotation and position I wanted. But since the two footings would have to be re-located and this would take some demolition and concrete work taking some days, there was no choice but to arrange to return later and finish the installation. So we took the sculptures to a temporary safe storage area. The crew was scheduled to return without me on Jan. 27 to finish the installation and anchoring.

So at the point these photos were taken, the installation is quite incomplete, the lighting is not finished, the buildings and landscaping aren’t quite there, and so I was unable to get great shots of the final sculptures in perfect settings.

Below is the first sculpture you would encounter leaving the resort lobby and starting down the path to the residences. The first photos are of the sculpture at my studio just before being crated up. 

And above is the same sculpture set down temporarily to determine it’s best position. On the level above, behind the railing, you can see the smaller sculpture In Virtue of Adversity. 

The rough-hewn granite pedestal I had designed for the fifth smaller sculpture turned out very nicely. It was built in Japan from my sketch. We were able to anchor this sculpture down permanently during my visit. (In this photo there is a bit of masking tape around the pedestal top to mask off the anchoring cement.) 

To explain a bit more about this resort, XIV Karuizawa is a large complex with a number of different sub-resorts in the same location. There is the original resort section called Grand XIV; while we were there we were given luxurious accommodations at the second complex Sanctuary Villas, shown above. The units are large suites with gorgeous glass sunrooms, formal Japanese tatami mat dining room, huge spa-quality bath – decadent.

My sculptures dot the grounds of an entire new wing of the resort – I’m not exactly sure what they will be calling it. There is also another half of this new wing, and the artwork there is a very long fountain installation by British artist Simon Allison.

The entire resort is actually a time share arrangement – XIV refers to the number 14 – each unit has 14 owners who are each entitled to time of 1/14th of a year or about 26 days. So no, in case you were wondering, it’s not a hotel open to the public that you could just make reservations at.

Hopefully I will be able to obtain much better photos of the sculptures in a fully finished installation in the next month or two.

Completion and Shipping of Karuizawa Sculptures

At the beginning of December, all five of the pieces for Karuizawa were finally finished. (Original blog post on this commission.) This is a project that has occupied the studio in pretty intense activity for the last 6 months, so it was quite a relief to put the finishing touches on them, get some photographs and video here at the studio, and get them in their crates. On Dec. 16th the container was loaded on the MOL Explorer out of the port of Los Angeles en route to Tokyo.

The movie shows the sculptures outside the artist’s studio just prior to crating and shipping.

Prior to the work being packed up, representatives came to the studio from Japan to check on the finished sculptures. I am scheduled to be in Japan in mid-January to oversee the sculptures in their permanent placement. The resort buildings are just being completed and it will be mid-winter in Karuizawa, and due to our installation the landscaping may not be quite finished yet, but I do hope to get some decent photos of their new home.

Karuizawa – Close to completion

Patina work involves putting the final color on the bronze, using a large blowtorch to heat the metal up, and spraying on the secret alchemical formula. Bronze is mostly copper but is quite a bit lighter orange hued than copper. It’s very reactive so tarnishes and stains and turns green or brown outside quickly. The patina I favor is a red that is said to be the most stable of all bronze patinas.

In these photos I’m putting on a first patina application. The metal has to be around 200 degrees F or near the boiling point of water, so that the chemical steams off. The temperature is pretty critical, and if the metal isn’t hot enough the solution just dribbles down the surface and pretty much ruins the patina. So you quickly learn not to let that happen. And that explains the foil, which protects the cold surrounding metal from overspray. I now use an infrared electronic thermometer that can just be pointed at the surface to get a readout of the temp.

Later I decided the color should be a bit deeper because outdoors it looked much paler than under the studio lighting. So another entire layer was applied. It takes about a full workday to do one layer on a sculpture this size.

Both the bronze and the stainless pieces in these photos have what I call a textured or “parrot’s feather” surface. This is engraved into the surface with the edge of a disc grinder. The heavy 7″ grinder has a coarse cardboard disc with a hard rubber backing pad. First the pebbly mill finish of the plate stainless steel has to be ground away. Then the edge of the disc is used to lay down bands of layered wavy lines of arc shaped grinding marks. Up close it resembles feathers.

The stainless for this particular sculpture is just left the natural silver color. I also use this surface for stainless and bronze sculptures that get colored with a patina in some way, either through just heat treatment or with heat and chemicals. The texture not only makes the surface very lively and reflective, it can also result in a variety of different colors coming through.

The other shots here are of welding the stainless sculpture to it’s base, and engraving the signature. Signing it means it’s done, so that’s always a great moment, believe me, when you sweat over a piece for a couple of months.

Below is a short video showing some of the work being done on K2. I don’t have titles yet, and despite the number, this is actually the last of the five sculptures to be completed for the project. The other three large sculptures are currently being ‘detailed’, fussed over and patinated, which takes some time. But it is good to have the major construction of them all finished.

I’ve been asked how the ‘engraved’ surface finish is applied so I chose some of the footage to illustrate that. We have taken some good film throughout the design and execution of this sculpture project that will be made into a short documentary sometime in 2012.

Progress on Karuizawa – October 1

The smaller 36″ high sculpture for the Karuizawa project is now finished. Doesn’t look like stainless steel? The gold finish with the texture probably looks a bit like bronze, but that is a heat patina I apply to the stainless using a blowtorch.

For the moment I have no titles for these sculptures, so I’m just calling them K1 through K5 for “Karuizawa”. I find it difficult to think up titles and usually do this after the sculpture is finished and I have time to reflect on it a bit.

Additionally, the first large stainless steel piece is also virtually finished except for mounting on it’s base.

The first large bronze sculpture is also nearing completion, and the raw plate metal for the other big bronze piece is on the cutting table ready to begin soon.

Plasma cutting (below) is a process of cutting stainless steel with a torch, in this case an electric arc combined with compressed air does the cutting. A hand-held torch is drawn along   the edge of a pattern laid out on a plate of metal.

Website re-design

After many years, and failing to really keep the website updated, I’ve recently done a complete redesign. Now I’ve got much more up to date photos and a more complete set from my catalog of work, and I hope the gallery slide show format is both more elegant and easier to navigate. Also, much of my earlier work was photographed on slide film, which has all been re-scanned in much better quality.

Also, the site is based on WordPress, which is significant in that it’s actually blog website software, so I will be able to write and organize blog posts much more easily to give people a better idea of what’s going on in the studio with the most recent projects.