silver sprung

wenge clock

Added some antique cherry bead molding. It goes pretty well with the wenge and adds a nice three dimensional aspect to the face.

This started as a rather thoughtless experiment with usinng clothes iron to press veneer...and it worked out pretty well for a wenge clock face. Its really hard make anything out of wenge that looks bad though.

pedulum clock pt 2

adventures in ghetto veneering continue, this time it turned out pretty well. tiger maple veneer hand cut for the box or encasement for the clock face and pendulum.

scrap sculpture using shaped wenge veneer

go go 90's

street tango, buenos aires, argentina, 1998

rock garden, buenos aires, argentina 1998

connecticut av. and tilden, wash dc, 1997

calvert street bridge, wash dc, 1997

ireland, 1999

ireland, 1999

prayer rock - look closely and you'll see a cross carved into the stone. during the roundhead days, catholics met in the woods at these secret prayer rocks, which served as make shift chapels. on the other side of this rock, is a small pit, and a stone alter. ireland, 1999

st patrick''s cathedral, ireland, 1999

lush stream, ireland 1999



I took all of these photo's on a 35 year old Nikon manual, that unceremoniously died when I accidentally dropped it in front of union station. The photo's are all scans of actual photo's, so the quality of the scanned images are so-so.

after the rain

navy yard area; artomatic building on M st; assorted vacant office building

there's almost always crazy colors at sunset after the requisite daily summer thunderstorm

mondrian clocks fin

A long time coming, but you have let the nitrocellulose harden before you're really "done" and that takes about 30 days, sometimes more depending on the humidity. Also, finally got mintue/hour hands that look good on them.

rosewood/oak pendulum clock

Rough fit for the LED's, but you get the idea. Oh yeah, went with the red LED's, they have lower forward voltage demands, thus require less battery power than those gaudy white LED's.

4 red LED's, in series, 9V supply, SPST switch, 2x 47ohm resistors.

Grain filler, coat the first. I'm gonna do two coats of grain filler, sanding with some 320grit wet sand paper. The grain filler really does make the grain pop out, especially with the rosewood.

Settled on a design, drilled 4 holes at the 12, 3, 6, and 9 positions relative to the center. At each of those "cardinal clock numbers" (I just made that term up, but it sounds sensible, right?) I am installing White LED's in some nifty chrome LED mounts; thus making time telling easy and snazzy....like telling time with jazz hands.

Rosewood and quarter cut oak. I tried different approach this time, by way of using a thin sheet of mdf as back to this pattern. I've got to add a frame around the perimeter, mostly likely I'll use rosewood, and off set it by 1/8" or so to give clearance for the pendulum. I'm thinking of using some old timey bead trim to bring out the pattern some, but that will have to wait until this is dried, drilled and sanded.

On a sidenote, I kinda see now that this pattern is reminiscent of an American flag, but is really based on this ubiquitous image seared into our frontal lobes:








I am in the midst of laying out a exact replica of color bars in assorted African and Asian hardwoods...stay tuned

1.6180339887

This piece has been ongoing for almost a year, delayed by a conundrum over how to finish it. Problem solved with multi-color (gray, white, blue) fleck, imitation marble spray paint. Going with a kind of industrial color scheme dawned on me after several comments that from others that it reminded them of a city. And in a fit of city planning, I originally based this piece on a mathematical/aesthetic idea to combine the Golden Ratio with the Fibonnaci sequence, and represent that relationship through a series of dowels; each dowels height is based on the proportions arrived at when mapping a Fibonnaci spiral floor plan to the sequence of progressively, and in Golden proportion, dowels that both in height and quantity add up to a Fibonnaci sequence.



Two quantities are in the golden ratio if between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller...roughly enumerated as 1.6180339887, aka "phi." The Golden Ratio is used in and related to Fibonnaci numbers and sequences.

gorge walk

looking into the gorge from the stewart avenue bridge.

I took the side path that ran parallel with the gorge, some interesting sights but nothing compared to the gorge/creek floor.

yeah i know, a lot of water pics, but look closely, on each one i left the aperture open for different amounts of time....more time open, more misty/foggy/haze you see in the water, basically think frosting

cairn/inukshuk in the middle of the creek....more further down....

this crazy black walnut tree was growing straight out of the limestone, about 60 feet above the creek bed. tight.

watch your step

if you look closely, you can see the drops of water suspended mid-air

wet and wild steps

seeing that tudor crib up there gives you a sense for the scale

these 3 pics of a really crazy geologic formation of slate, being worn away by various trickles of water. also, demonstrable proof that i should have brought a tripod.

this was the biggest of the waterfalls I saw, but I think there are bigger waterfalls further along

a group of wee cairns/inukshuks....