Diorama, Orphan Train, and Field

Field 3-30-2014

At this point, I am still gathering materials to start the Goblin Halloween Diorama.  I have been stymied this week by all my dealings with the insurance company and the contractors.  Trying to get my life back in order has prevented me from working on my art.  I hope to have some pictures next Sunday of the start of the diorama build.

Today's field project photo was taken at 8:30 am.  The temperature was 45 degrees, and winds were at twenty to twenty-five miles per hour.  Fortunately, it was not raining when I went out to snap the picture.  It has rained almost straight through for the past day and night.  We would have an occasional let up for a small amount of time then another squall would come through.  The ground is really saturated.  If the winds get much stronger, it may blow some trees over.  Fortunately, the trees are just in the early stages of leafing out so there will not be as many lost trees.  If the trees were in full leaf, I'm sure we would have lost a good many more.

As to the Orphan Train Story.  I want to pass on a link to the National Orphan Train Complex home page.  Under the history section, you can click on rider stories to read first hand stories from some of the riders of that train.  It is a fascinating personal view of an historical event.  I will be blogging about some of the stories during the process  of creating the diorama, but it is definitely a worthwhile read.  Here's the link.  http://orphantraindepot.org/

I wish I had more time today to blog but I don't.  Other things are afoot. More on that later.  It all has to do with the plumbing problem that has turned into a disaster in my home.

I have come to the conclusion that I have been somewhat delusional as to my assessment of the extent of the plumbing disaster that has befallen my home.  (They had to jack hammer up the floor on the lower level to get to the pipes underneath the slab.)  I expected that once all the dealings with the insurance company and contractor estimates were out of the way that the builders would get to work and my home would be put back in order in a matter of a week or so at the most.  Wrong!  First off, I'm still negotiating with the contractor at this point.  Once the matter is settled to everyone's level of dissatisfaction, their first start date is the end of April.  And once they get started, the concrete must cure for a minimum of 28 days before they can begin to put down the flooring.  So it looks like I might be sleeping on an air mattress for a while.  I can live with that better than I can with the fact that most of the furniture and belongings that were on the lower floor of my home are now stuffed all over the place to get them out of the way for the rebuild.  Stuff is stacked up in everywhere.  I feel very stressed from being so crowded. 

At least most of the phone calls and contractor preliminaries are out of the way.  I'll have more time to get started on the diorama.

Goblin Halloween Diorama - Part 2

Regular readers know that the start of a new project is slow.  Ideas must be developed.  Materials must be gathered.  I also clean my studio (a.k.a. the small bedroom) before I begin each project.  Generally by the time I complete a project, the place looks like a disaster hit it.  Leftover materials from the earlier project are covering my work area.  Since my crafting time is limited, I end up working until until the last second and there is no time left to put things away.  So that is my project for today.  To clean the studio so I can begin again.

I've had another synchronicity happen with this project.  This is the second one.  While making sketches of the pieces of the diorama, I drew in a dilapidated house.  Maybe it is a haunted house, who knows at this point.  Anyway, my thoughts ran to how to make a house with a sagging roof and peeling paint.  I only made those sketches a couple of days before posting them and had not thought of it further since then.  Then yesterday, my husband out of the blue shows me an article from a Model Railroad magazine on how to make a dilapidated building with a sagging roof and peeling paint.  This is completely weird because 1. I had not even discussed my new diorama with him yet because I am so early in the process; and 2.  In the decades that we have been together, I have never known him to show any interest in model trains.  I have never seen him look at a model railroad magazine.  I can tell that this is a story that wants to be told, because the universe just seems to be making the information available to me with very little effort on my part.

The two photos above have dilapidated houses in them.  Once is even labeled "haunted house.  The lower sketch was just kicking around ideas of what might go into the diorama.  The upper photo shows the sketches are beginning to tell a story.  Before they days of computers, motion picture plots and advertisement campaigns were developed with the use of story boards that were drawn by artists.  I suppose I could use an art program and sketch on the computer, but I don't find it nearly as satisfying as taking a pencil in hand and drawing on paper.



For readers that are following the Orphan Train story that was in the first post, I will be posting more on that story on Sunday.  Today must be a quick post because I have meetings this morning.  I would rather not try to rush through and leave that story in a muddle.

Goblin Halloween Diorama- Part 1

As I blogged a week ago, I have started to develop the idea for my new Halloween diorama.  Some things going on at home had kept me pretty tied up, but I have finally begun to get the basis for the idea down on paper.  As I mentioned in the earlier post, once I started thinking about making the Halloween diorama, I came across a book Casting the Runes and other Ghost Stories.  They were English ghost stories set in the last century.  They were old fashioned stories of haunted places, creepy seen and unseen creatures, and objects with negative energies attached to them.  This reminded me of a poem read to me as a child, Little Orphant Annie.  Follow this link if you would like to read the poem.  http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/little_orphant_annie.html

The poem and the book of ghost stories reminded me of the superstitions about creatures that creep around in the night.  Those ideas became the basis for this diorama.  However, as I also mentioned in the earlier blog post, there is also a real history story that wants to be told here.  The history is not directly related to the diorama, but to the poem that was an inspiration for the diorama.  Further down in this blog post I will start the story behind the poem.  It is part of American history that is dropping out of sight.  And in some ways it is more scary than the ghost stories because it is true.  If you are interested read on.  (Here comes that history geek again!)  But first, I need to blog about the beginning of the diorama.

Many creative people agree that there is something intimidating about the beginning of a project.  Staring at a blank white page or a blank white canvas and trying to decide how to turn the idea into a tangible form seems to stop people in their tracks.  It feels as if you are paralyzed, ideas won't come, you can't bring yourself to make a mark on that pristine surface. The only way to get past it is to make a mark of some kind.  Once the paper is no longer pristine, the ideas begin to flow.  And that is where I have been for a week.  Finally I started putting marks on the piece of paper and the ideas are coming to the surface.

This week I started drawing in my sketch pad and finally started getting some ideas as to the look of the diorama.  They are just quick sketches, nothing fancy.  Out of those sketches the objects and their placement are starting to come about.  At the moment, I am just kicking around ideas, not everything I sketched will make it to the diorama.  However, by getting them on a page gives me more opportunity to see how the ideas relate to one another.  The story is just beginning to emerge. The photos posted above are from my sketchbook.

Now on to the history!  The poem, Little Orphant Annie, by James Whitcomb Riley inspired the cartoon character Little Orphan Annie.  The cartoon ran from 1924 to 2010.  Two films and a Broadway play were also based on this character.  That is recent history.  The real story is the actual events that inspired James Whitcomb Riley to write the poem.  That is a long story.  Today I will give you the basics.  Over the course of the making of the diorama I will share even more of this fascinating story.

This story is based on events that happened between 1853 and 1929.  Think of the many big events that were happening in American history during that time period:  The Civil War, World War I, typhoid epidemics, and the 1918 influenza epidemic just to name a few.  Also during this time, people were immigrating to America from all over the globe.  Many of the immigrants ended up in Eastern cities living impoverished lives in overcrowded tenements.  Birth control was nonexistent and families were large.  Women died young, worn out from bearing too many children.  War, disease, poverty, and death created orphans.  Lots and lots of orphans. 

It was estimated that there were 250,000 orphans during this time period.  Thirty thousand of them were known to be in New York City alone.  Children as young as four or five years old were roaming the streets homeless, abandoned and uncared for.  Other children had been pulled from their homes because of terrible abuse.  Some children had been given up to a churches because the parents could not afford to feed them.  A Catholic priest attempted to do something about the situation.  He raised money to begin finding homes for these children.  It was a noble idea.  However, for some, the road to hell was paved with good intentions.  The idea was developed that there were farmers in the Mid-west that had plenty of room and wide open space for taking in a child, so orphan children should be placed with them.  It was the beginning of developing the foster care system. 

Children from the age of four to eighteen were placed on trains that became known as orphan trains.  The orphan train would pull into town.  The children were paraded before the crowd on a platform.  The citizens picked the child they wanted and the train headed out for the next stop.  There was very limited supervision.  Some stories were success stories.  Other stories were the stuff or horror stories.  Many times these children were kept as slaves or indentured servants instead of family members.  And I'm guessing that the horror story was on both sides of the equation.  Even the best intentioned family could end up with a frightened angry orphan child or an angry teenager who had spent time living on the street or was put on the train by parents that could not afford to keep him or her. 

To read more about the orphan trains, follow this link:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/

The poem Little Orphant Annie was a poem about an orphan child that had come to live with a family.  Although it does not specifically say in the poem that Annie came from the orphan train, other information on the poet has said that the orphan trains were the inspiration of this poem.  Annie symbolizes the children of European immigrants that had made up so many of the passengers on the Orphan trains.   The poem is tells about the superstitious beliefs of goblins and creatures that are of the folk lore from the old country.  At least this orphan seems to have integrated into the family well enough to be able to sit with them and tell stories in the evening. 

Well, I'd love to go on, but this post is getting way too long.  I'll blog more on this later.

I am also posting today's picture for the field project.  I am documenting the changes in the field near my home as it changes throughout the year.  I

t was cloudy and about 45 degrees Fahrenheit when the photo was taken about 8:40 this morning.  I was a little late.  I had slept in because an owl hooting had kept me awake for hours last night.

Art Dolls in the Interim

 

Uncle Sam Santa

I'm still in the stage of getting started on the new Halloween Project.  I don't have any photos to show yet, but will definitely have a photo of preliminary sketches done by Sunday.  Regular readers know that I have had a major plumbing problem at the house, and half of our house is unusable.  At the moment we are in a holding pattern while it is determined whether the contractor can find flooring to match the flooring in the rest of the downstairs or whether the flooring for the den, hall, 2 bedrooms, and their closets are replaced.  For the time being, we are sleeping upstairs on an air mattress.  Since our regular closets are unusable, our clothes are stuffed into any place we can find to put them.  The chaos is taking a toll on my creative time.

Casual Santa

In the mien time, I have some photos of art dolls.  I hope you will find them amusing.  The first two dolls are soft sculpture dolls.  Soft sculpture is when you create the features by using a needle and thread to sculpt the features.  The second two dolls, have heads made of clay.

The Uncle Sam Santa was one of my early attempts at Americana themed Santas and one of my first  attempts at soft sculpture faces.  This doll was based on a doll pattern commercially available a couple of decades ago.  After so many years, I cannot remember it it was a McCalls, Simplicity, or Vogue Pattern, but it was from one of those companies.   All in all, I don't consider the doll to be a great success.  It is not the fault of the pattern, but the lack of skill on my part.  The only way to become skilled at doll making is to keep doing it until you develop the skills.  You can't just say, "Oh this is horrible" and quit making dolls altogether.

(More text  and a photos below, the blog platform is giving me some trouble with positioning the photos today.)

Although I cringe at showing early work, I do so from time to time just to encourage people to keep working on whatever their artistic interests may be.  It is very easy to get discouraged and just give up. Have faith in the process and just keep plugging away.  Everything improves with practice. 

Jack Frost

The Uncle Sam Santa photos have not been posted before.  I am reposting the other art doll photos to show that there has been at least some progress in my doll making over the years. 

When it comes to doll making, my advice would be to read a book or two on various ways to make dolls, then make one or two dolls from patterns just to get a feel for the process.  After that, start making dolls on your own from scratch.   The problem with patterns dolls is that you are following someone else's idea about how this doll should look.  When you try to reproduce it, things don't come out as well as you would want.  Since the doll does not look like you think it should look, it is discouraging.  Once you start creating on your own, you become more engaged in the creative process.  Rather than just blindly following instructions, you are asking the questions that need to be asked to make the doll come out in a way that is pleasing to you.

Jack of Autumn

 

Field Project

Today I only have more pictures of the field in my field photo project.  (A note for new readers:  the field project is my plan to photo document the changes in this field over the course of a year, beginning with the first day of winter.) 

My whole week has been over run by dealing with claims adjustors and contractors.  If you view earlier posts from this month, you will see a picture of my floor which has been jack hammered up due to a pipe that has busted under the slab.  Things are coming along, but it a process, and you really can't hurry that process up.  You just have to get to each part of it step by step.  All in all the insurance company is doing a great job.  I just wish I could wave a magic wand, say Alacazam and suddenly have my house back in pristine condition.  Unfortunately, life does not work that way. 

I really have not had much time to do any sketches for the new project yet.  All the contents and furniture have been moved from the affected rooms to other areas of the house.  It is so crowded, it really does not  lend it self to being a comfortable place to make art.  I've finally decided that working at the kitchen table might be the best bet for the next few weeks.  My studio is so packed, that I hardly feel like working in it.

Anyway, these pictures were taken of the field this morning.  The sun is shining. The birds are singing,  It is about forty-five degrees Fahrenheit with light winds.  And another Winter Storm Watch has been posted for tonight and tomorrow.  Several more inches of snow and sleet are expected again!  I'm starting to get a bit irritable.   I'll be glad when warmer weather gets here.

I did manage to get out to the hardware store this week and purchase the materials to create a stand for the painted Garden Art Ball that I have been blogging about recently.  When it is warm enough I'll be out spray painting the stand.  Then I'll get a picture of the ball outside.  It is still too cold to leave the ball out.  I bring in all my gazing balls during cold weather because if water gets down in the cracks and freezes it can crack the ball. 

New Halloween Diorama

After completing the Shaman Staff walking stick project, I was having a bit of trouble coming up with a new project.  An intense project, such as that walking stick, seems to take some energy from me and I have to recharge my energy before taking on a new project.  When that happens, I find it is best to just play for a bit until inspiration comes around again.  The Garden Art ball project was essentially a play around project that helped me enjoy being creative while recharging before the next artistic endeavor. 

Sometimes my dioramas are about stories that I want to tell.  Other times, there are stories that want to be told.  The story that wants to be told seems to come about due to synchronicity.  I'll be waiting for inspiration and something catches my attention.  It may be a thought or something I've seen or read, but it intrigues me enough to be kept in memory.  Then some related idea or image will also come to my attention.  In a short period of time, the image will appear again.  It is almost as if an idea just keeps coming up until I feel that I should try to express something about it.

An example of what I am writing about would be my Folk Art Carousel project.  Although I had not seen or thought about carousels in years, in rapid succession I saw a magazine article on building rocking horses.  In no time flat, I unexpectedly came across an antique carousel in a museum.  Things just kept coming up about carousels, rocking horses, or riding animals such as the old coin operated rides.  After being completely out of mind for years, I could not help but see something about them.  I am fascinated by the object or idea and begin to examine it closely.  This close examination is where my art gets its beginning.

So now, I have started seeing the beginnings of my next Halloween piece.  Yes, I am beginning my Halloween piece in March.  If I start my project in September, it never gets finished by Halloween.  Some of my assemblages take months to complete.  It took me a while to start to have a vision about this diorama.  I finally started to get an idea of a diorama that in some way portrayed divination, such a tarot cards or casting runes.  Another idea was about ghosts.  That idea was prompted by my having been gifted a the remainder of a roll of construction material used to cover pipes to keep dirt out of them.  I thought that it might be something that could be stiffened to make ghosts.  At this point, I had no idea of how this might fit into the plan, but the idea was floating around.  (Pardon the pun.)

No sooner than that idea came, I had a synchronicity happen.  I was looking at the computerized library catalog of my local library on a completely unrelated topic.  Along with the type of book I was looking for, a book suggestion came up called Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories by M.R. James, an English writer (1862-1936).  I checked out that book from the library and read some really great ghost stories set in the English countryside.  They are not the slasher horror stories that make up today's horror movie genre, but stories that bring about an element of fear through unseen creatures and forces.   Reading those ghost stories reminded me of a poem by James Whitcomb Riley called Little Orphant Annie that my mother read to my brother and I when we were children.  My brother and I would laugh and shout out the refrain "An the Goblins will get you if you don't watch out".  (My history of enjoying anything related to Halloween, ghosts, and creepy creatures has been a longtime obsession.)  A link to the poem is here:  http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/little_orphant_annie.html

Little Orphant Annie was a story of a child that had come to live with a family.  She would entertain the family with stories of ghosts and goblins.  There is much more to this poem than would meet the eye.   There is a really great back story about this poem that reveals a part of American History that is rarely talked about.  Over the course of creating this art piece, there will be some interesting historical facts brought up.  (So stay tuned, here comes that history geek again.)  Along with the assemblage, I'll be adding some interesting information that is falling off the radar of American consciousness.

Field Project

This morning Daylight Savings Time started.   The photo was taken at 8:40 DST.  I was a little late getting up and out the door this morning because of the time change.  However in real time that means the photo was taken forty-five minutes before it was normally taken in actual hours.  It makes my head hurt just to think about it.  I am not fond of the day that we change the time.  It takes me a few days to get used to the changes, because I am can generally tell what time it is by looking at where the sun is. 

Anyway, the field is clear once more.  We had snow last Monday, and it remained on the ground until yesterday.  There are still a few patches around here and there this morning, but not as much as yesterday.  We had a welcome warm day yesterday.  The temperature was seventy degrees Fahrenheit.  My husband and I were out washing our cars to get the road salt off of them.  It won't be as warm today, only in the upper fifties.  Next week there is a wintry mix forecast again. 

I have not sealed my Garden Art ball yet.  An unfortunate event has knocked me completely out of working on art this week.  Our home is an older home, and a cast iron drain pipe located underneath the slab has rusted out, allowing water to seep into our finished basement.  The pipe had rusted completely away for about half an inch across the bottom of the pipe.  We had to have a plumbing company come in and jackhammer up the floor to get to the pipe.  It was rusted out all the way across the room.  Things were a horrible mess.   Then a second company was hired to come in and clean up the mess left by the first company.  They will have to pour a new slab, and replace the flooring.  Before they can do that, they have had to steam clean the remaining concrete slab.  At the moment, there are huge dehumidifiers and air movers operating 27/7 to dry everything out.  I'm hoping the concrete will get poured tomorrow, but that may be optimistic.  There is a fine layer of concrete dust on every inch of the downstairs.  I expect that in rooms not directly affected, I will have to do the clean up.

Dealing with the work crews and the insurance company has kept me busy all week.  FYI: from what I have learned from my insurance policy, since the pipe was under the slab, not in it,
the insurance will not cover the cost of having that pipe dug out and removed.  I have heard from other people that most insurance companies work this way.  However, they will cover the clean up and the replacement of the flooring.  I have not yet received word as to whether or not they will cover the cost of pouring the replacement slab.  In a second room they may want to patch the flooring rather than replace the whole floor.  I am going to be arguing for them to replace the entire floor because I want it to match rather than look like a repair job.  The insurance agent is supposed to come tomorrow.  Keep your fingers crossed for me. 

All in all, this event has been rather distressing.  I am trying to keep in mind that this is also an opportunity to redecorate a bedroom.  New paint, new floor.  I'd like to get a new headboard and new bedside tables, but it does not seem like the best time for that since we have to pay out of pocket for the rusted out pipes.  I'll see what happens.

Hopefully, the worst of this will be over within a week or so.  I will post about the new project on the next post.  I just haven't been able to get to it.

Garden Art Experiment-Part 8

We had snow on Monday, but fortunately it was only about five inches.  Compared to the ten inches they were predicting, we got off lightly.  Low temperatures have kept the snow on the ground though.  It will warm up into the upper thirties today, so maybe we will have some melting.

I started painting the leaves on my painted gazing ball.  I quickly found out that my plan of painting another layer of leaves over top of the leaves already painted was not going to work well.  What works well in nature does not always work in a painting.  It looked like an over crowded mess.  So I am now in the process of painting highlights on leaves that are already painted onto the ball.  It looks much better that way.  I am about two-thirds of the way through the painting. 

I was planning on giving the finished ball a coat of spar varnish once the painting was complete.  However, there is none left in the workshop.  I'll be using some other type of exterior polyurethane.  It depends on what I find in the workshop that has been left over from other projects.  I can't say for certain exactly what is down there at the moment.  Whatever I have is what I plan to use.  I'm trying to clear out some of the old material that is taking up shelf space down there.
 
I figure that I have another day's worth of painting to do on the ball.  Since I haven't finished yet, the photo was taken on my work table.  Sorry for the mess in the background.  At the moment, the ball is resting on a tin can.  I still have to paint a stand for it.  If you have an interest in how I make a gazing ball stand, view my posts about it from early 2012.  I won't go into the process in this post.

This project has taken me on an interesting journey.  I figured out a way of making a mold and forming a concrete ball.  Then I embarked on a journey of learning how to paint flowers.  I could spend some more time on the leaves to make them more realistic, but I am not sure that is actually necessary for this project.   Once the ball is place outside, most people will be viewing it from such a distance that the detail won't be visible.

Over time, I have come to appreciate the process of painting.  When I first started crafting, I had a plenty of projects that went unfinished because I did not really understand that the intermediate stages of the process could be so discouraging.  I hope to encourage people to stick with their projects and to go back and complete an unfinished project.   If you keep working at it, you will learn how to see what needs to be done to bring the project to a successful close, even though it may not be exactly as you wanted it to be.

I have also found that having a vision of what you want the project to be is helpful in keeping me on track.  That said, I have also found that it helps to be flexible in that vision.  Sometimes you have to allow the piece to become what it needs to become. 

Garden Art Experiment- Part 7

Just a recap of the project so far:  I created a ball mold and cast concrete around it so that I have a concrete ball, and sealed the ball with a concrete sealer.  See the earlier posts for details.  Now I am painting this ball.  Last blog post I showed pictures of the progress of the ball.  I left off with the base coats of the flowers. (First picture)

The flowers have been shaded with various mixtures of Cad. Yellow, Burnt Sienna, and Ultramarine Blue. (Picture 2)  I have also started adding the base coat of the leaves.  I am about half way finished with getting them on the ball.  This layer of leaves is very basic.  They are basically the shady layer of leaves you would see if you were looking down into a plant.  They will not have any detail on them.   Another layer of leaves will be painted over top of them. The second layer of leaves will have shading and detail.

It is also time for another picture for the Field Project.  Slightly more green than before, but not much overall change yet.  That will change here in just a very short time.

This is a very quick post today because a winter storm is headed this way.  The alerts just went up and I am heading for the grocery store.  Yesterday, no one expected this storm to be anything but an inconvenience, but now it is going to be a major event.  If I get to the store early, I might be able to get there before all the milk disappears.