The Daily Delaney

Astro Boy

2012-01-22T23:32:00.000-08:00

Hi. I'm back from Texas. This is a picture of my van, Astro Boy, under a tree by the side of the road in Eastern New Mexico. Astro and I had a fine trip, navigating our way across the country via my iPhone. But now we're back!
Back in Seattle. Back in the snow... and boy am I glad for 4wheel drive!

So, I'm taking a break from the road for a while... This month, I'm moving my art studio down to this big space at the dojo, "The Dungeon"... I need a little room to get away from all the found objects I've found. Before Christmas I was tripping over so many stacked up ideas and potential greatness that i could hardly think straight. So i'll be posting new work as i unearth it... in the meantime, if you're anywhere near Mesila, New Mexico, check out the new show at the Rokoko Art Gallery!

My friends Mitch and A. me Alamag invited me to be part of The Mixed Nutz Show this month. Here are some shots from the opening night!

finally, here's a new pin in the webshop...

Love is a Gambler's Game

'Tis The Season...

2011-12-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

Here we go...

This weekend I'll be at the Phinney Neighborhood Center Winter Festival and Crafts Fair!

kind of feeling like this....

"Never enough hours in the day"

"I have a blog!"

"Sleeping Beauty"

hopefully, Sunday night, I'll look like this...

Mixed Media

2011-11-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

Putting things together...

Things that go Bump in the Night

The Cow Jumped Over the Moon

What I'm doing and what I'm watching

2011-10-19T01:38:00.000-07:00

I had a full and interesting weekend.
Started Saturday with some Karate, and then broke it up by going to the new Seattle international Film Festival office/theater space where i got to participate in a Master Class on Directing Actors. I wasn't there to be a student... I was the guinea pig! My friend, Travis Sterner, had signed up for the class ans he wrote a scene for me and a lovely actress named Luisa to perform. the instructor was an amazing teacher named Judith Wexler. She had us run the scene... which felt flat... It's not surprising that happened. We had just learned it and also we had just met and all of a sudden we were performing this in front of a room full of critical strangers. So Judith asked us how we prepared and Luisa said she had found emotional subtitutes for her beats in the script and I said that I had just memorized it and practiced it from several different angles so I would feel warmed up and flexible and ready to try things. Travis talked about how he tried to direct us toward the emotional states of these people. And then Judith did something interesting... she asked Travis why he wrote this scene... and the question and answer opened up this whole landscape of possibility for the few pages of dialogue... We then improvised the scene from a couple of different angles. It was like swinging on the trapeze without a net. We had no idea where we were going but while we were out there, the sights were glorious. I'd never worked with a teacher like that before, but I had the easy part. Travis had to watch us riffing variations on the words he had sweated over. but I think he learned a great deal about how to build full, realistic characters. all in all, a great way to spend a couple of hours. Then, i went back to the dojo and danced with my sparring partners for a while and then went off to work until 1 in the morning!

So ... what am i watching lately?

News Flash... the best show on television is "Louie" on FX. At first glance it looks like "Seinfeld" with basic cable swearing. But give it a few minutes and you'll be hypnotized by this brutally honest and poignant show. Louis C.K., the writer, director, editor and star, is closer to Chaplin than Seinfeld. His stories don't have big laughs at the end, the joke is often on him, the bad guys often win but just as often wind up sitting down on a stoop with him asking "What the fuck just happened?". The stories are punctuated by beautiful moments of human connection. Simply amazing.

Then there's "Archer".

Rude, Raunchy, and Hilarious... "Archer" is the funniest thing on Television right now. The hero is the world's greatest secret agent... and a total dickwad . That's not a term i through around lightly, you know. Imagine James Bond crossed with George W. Bush and working in an office staffed by all those people you're glad you don't work with anymore

"Justified" - a great cop show inspired by Elmore Leonard about a federal marshal in the coal country of Kentucky. His ex-wife sums him up as "the angriest man I know", but the show is all about the impulses we give into and the ones we don't and how we live with those choices.

"Sons of Anarchy" -

Great actors telling the story of a Southern California motorcycle club... It started out as a biker riff on Shakespeare... a little Prince Hal, a little Lady Macbeth... but lately it's become it's own thing and right now it's all about the power of the lie. I'm not sure there's one person in the show who's being completely honest with anybody and the resultant tension is exquisite.

And ,of course, "The Good Wife".

What am I not watching?
"American Horror Story"... wow. what a stinker. There are things in that first episode that Iwill never be able to un-see.
Sheesh!

The Morning After

2011-10-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

The other night it rained. This is not unusual in Seattle. It is sort of Autumn, kind of the way it was sort of Summer before this. The weather isn't sure what it's going to do from one day to the next. I actually think we have a couple of weeks of warmth and sun ahead of us still. My garden seems to feel the same way. The tomatoes are just ripening now. That may sound frightening, but it's not like they haven't been growing. Some of them are the size of small pumpkins. It's just taken until now for them to hit their groove. Now they're racing to the finish line (with the help of a makeshift green house.
Same with my flowers... My delphinium didn't bloom until last week! But now they're stretching towards the sky every day.

But the other night the rain was biblical. Drenching buckets of rain for 10 or 12 hours. Furniture getting upended by the wind. You'd think that would be the end of the garden. But the storm passed. The sun poked through the ceiling of clouds.
And the flowers remained.
They endured.

Experiments and memories

2011-10-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

Here are a few more shots I've been playing with. Yesterday, I excavated a box of slides from the years 1996-98 (back when you had to apply to shows with actual slides) For a few years, was pretty obsessive about taking pictures of my work and now I'm glad I was. There's so much here that I had completely forgotten about...

Repurposing...

2011-10-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I'm working with my sculpture purely as imagery. For a long time I've had the idea using some those pictures that I'm always taking of my "guys" and creating something in a different medium... a book or a film, maybe animation... some kind of story. Anyway, a couple of days ago I was prepping some pictures in Photoshop, getting ready to send them off to the publicist for the 'Dillo, and I hit the sharpen filter once too often. Something happened to this character's hand and I saw the picture opening up in a different way... so I kept going and came up with this...

I think this will show up at least as one of a set of notecards this Christmas.... who doesn't love a good stocking stuffer....one must be aware of the potential to monetize, yes?

The Only Goodbye

2011-09-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

Lately, I find myself thinking about death, not just because I got to try to embody it in a film, but because it won't go away. It keeps showing up in my life and in the lives of the people I love. I lost a friend last week, this week someone very dear to me is saying goodbye to one family member while the loss of another is still so fresh... Me, I think I'm doing great one day and something will remind me of Bob and I'll be a wreck all over again... I remember the day I got the news about him. I was in Seattle. He was in Florida. My sister was in a plane flying back from NYC to Seattle. I realized that she would get off the plane and be alone and get the news over the phone, like I did. So I wanted to go to Sea-Tac to tell her myself. On the way down, I stopped in West Seattle to commiserate with Rik and Patrick. They were wonderful, as were their wives and Kio and Eric, who didn't even know they'd be attending a mini-wake. They helped me relax and laugh and for a little while It felt better. But an hour later I was on the road, sad, angry, and apprehensive and gunning it as I came off the ramp and on to the freeway with a shot of Cuervo in my belly. The road was wet and the driver in front of me must have been skittish. He hit the brakes just as he was about to merge into the 60mph traffic.

I was still a good 20 yards behind him but when I braked to slow down and avoid the other driver, I must have hit a slick spot on the wet road. I felt my back wheels start to sway out from behind me and tried to correct but I must have been going faster than I realized and went into a spin. I was on the right hand side of four lanes of traffic. I was locked in a clockwise spin and whipping left across all the traffic at the end of rush hour. Once around, twice... like I was in the Scrambler ride at Coney Island. My life didn't flash before my eyes... but I was pretty sure this was it. I was going to die in a car wreck and probably take somebody with me... stupid, stupid, goodbye, I'm so sorry.

...and then it was over. One more half a spin and my foot on the brake brought me to a rest against the concrete barrier in the carpool lane... facing the wrong way. No smoke, no crushed metal, no innocent bystanders caught up in my train wreck. I was alive and safe. I didn't even need a tow truck. There was an opening in the traffic, so I took a breath, put the Acme in gear and got on my way. I still had a job to do. I was thanking God that my sister only had to lose one of us that day.

In our film, our "Death" has a heart and a soul. In one scene, he comes to visit a woman working in her garden, thanks her for all the beauty she has brought into the world and gently takes her soul.

The woman on the right is Andy Stein. She plays the Gardener. The woman on the left is Michelle Dean. She's our Assistant Director (who should consider a second career as a casting agent, considering all the amazing people she brought us).

In this picture, Death is touching her. That's when I take her soul and life leaves her body. When we shot this, we needed Andy to go limp and let me gently guide her to the ground. We played Death as a being with an intrinsic love and respect for the people he handles (mostly). So when Andy went limp, I would take her weight, just like I would if we were dancing or if we were sparring and rolling on the ground, knowing exactly where I wanted her to end up and getting her there safely. We must have done it a dozen times.

At one point, Andy looked up at me and said "Thank you for cradling me so nicely. I have a bad back and I'm worried about it". It really hit me that I had stumbled into a metaphor for how we take care of each other in our lives and at the end of them. We can't stop each other from dying, we can't make it any easier for us to take. but we can make it easy on them. We can cradle them. We can offer them our love, whether they are aware of it or not. That may be the only moment we get with them. The only goodbye. That has to be enough. I wish I had had it with Bob. But I know that he went on his way quickly. When Death took him, he played it like I would have. I'm grateful for that.

Here's a piece from the great Dave Barry about saying goodbye. I fell in love with it years ago and sometimes use it for auditions. But lately it hits me in so many ways...

Some people make it easy (Picture of the Day)

2011-09-18T20:33:00.000-07:00

"Some people make it easy, J.P." - Death

Today, we shot a couple of scenes where my character, Death, does what he does best. Here's a shot from the monitor of me and the great Gary Watson who plays a guy who very much deserves what's coming to him.

I am amazed at how well this crew works together and gets the job done. Special thanks go out to today's "day players" Gary, Andy Stein, and Ulyana Tverskoy! You all rock!

Wearing Black until somebody invents something darker...

2011-09-16T14:44:00.000-07:00

One more shot from our Alki location... just to rub it in for the wonderful Carolyn Counterman... Here's me and the lovely Travis Sterner!

Last night was spent rehearsing the big revelation scene with Lizzie at Andy Tribolini's amazing loft. no pictures from that... Tomorrow, we shoot all day catching the scenes beween Death and his boss, the guy with the God complex...God.

Thanks again to one and all who helped get us over the top on Kickstarter... even if you just spread the word and rallied your friends. As Lindsey says, Kickstarter only works if you are part of a strong community. You all showed me that I am.

Pictures of the day!

2011-09-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

Last night, we filmed on the shoreline at Alki Beach, just next to Salty's in West Seattle.

We got some beautiful footage as the sun was setting and even a little afterwards. Thanks to the whole crew for showing up and just nailing it in a very limited time frame!

Me and Lizzie filming an intimate moment with the help of a small army. Did you know it's her birthday today? Be nice to her!

Carl and his large boom. He really loves his job.

The Picture of the Picture of the Day (which will be crucial to the plot of the film, but in order to use it in the scene last night we had to create it on the spot with the help of a computer, a digital printer and a generator hooked up to Travis' truck)

Location, Location, Location!

Seattle really is one of the most beautiful cities in the country. Waterfront, mountains, skyscrapers, ferries... Isn't it a shame that the city and the state of Washington have chosen to try and save a few bucks by closing down our film and tv liason offices when other states are pulling in the dollars that come along with location shoots?

Pictures of the Day!

2011-09-06T22:25:00.000-07:00

From Day 2 of shooting...

Kaylee's mom flipping her between shots!

Death takes a nap... gotta love the trailer!

Sunset over Lake Washington after a long, rewarding day.

Three days left to the ILD fundraiser!

Picture of the Day

2011-09-05T12:59:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves Death!

(thanks, Evan!)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1657155360/i-love-death-its-a-film-not-fetish

Picture of the day!

2011-09-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

Here's Andy rehearsing the great "Flying Toupee" bit. Behind him is Jen looking impish after yanking his hairpiece off. We had a great day shooting the wedding scene down in Burien.

Rehearsal for "Death"

2011-08-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

Okay... so now we're close to our first official shooting date for "I Love Death". You don't often get to rehearse in film ( I imagine that usually comes down to time and money, but there's also the consideration of usually not having the location or the props for the scene until the very last minute so what are you going to do that you won't have to do over later?, but we carved out a couple of evenings for it. I'm glad we did... "Death" is going to be a short film, but it's going to be full of little moments. So it's important that we fill them up and make the most of them.

Naturally, we're starting by shooting the climax of the film first. It takes place outdoors... at the wedding (oops... did I give something away?)... so we had to find someplace to rehearse outdoors this evening.

Here we are at Bellevue Downtown Park...

Here we have, l. to r., Andrew Tribolini- our First A.D. and one hell of a funny actor, Travis Sterner- our Writer/Director, and Lizzie Raetz, our Leading Lady.

Bellevue Downtown Park pretty much has nothing in common with the actual location we'll be shooting at, except air and random people passing by, but it sure was pretty to look at.

There will be chaos and special effects but for tonight we were limited to faking it, so just imagine a terrific storm blowing the toupee right off Andy's head here. Trust me... it'll be cool.

We worked on those small moments that are going to make or break the story. I can say right now that I trust Travis and his vision for the movie. I think we're in really good hands.

If you'd like to help support "I Love Death", please click Kickstarter, here.

More to come...

Making Movies...

2011-08-17T15:01:00.000-07:00

Some days it seems like you've got nothing going on and never will... and then there are days like this. I've been teaching my stage combat kids again, and teaching another group of kids art, I just had a pretty decent weekend at the Anacortes Arts Festival and I'm working a couple of banquet gigs and now, after a year of waiting and hoping, I'm making movies!

First up... I Love Death... a tender love story about The Grim Reaper... actually a nice guy named Ben falling in love with a woman on his "list". It's sweet, it's funny and, if we can pull it off, it will break your heart and make you howl with laughter at the same time. I've been involved with this project for a year or so, ever since we did a reading at ACT last birthday (!). We have a great cast and a really solid crew... we knocked both these promos out in an hour-forty-five last week.

I love working on films. Something I learned a couple of years back on "Curtains" is that when the cameras are rolling is the only time I'm important to the process. Really. In between takes, my job is to keep everyone happy and get the hell out of the way. There are a million things going on that need to happen and have nothing to do with me or my needs. I find myself thinking of the tenets of the martial arts... the most important of which is courtesy... If I could add another, it would be patience...
Afterwards, as Spenser would say "Readiness is all".

So, yes, we could use some money to pull it together. Anyone who kicks in to the budget will have my eternal gratitude and some nifty gifts as well. Think of it as just like donating to PBS, only without having to sit through Dr. Wayne Dyer or another Moody Blues concert!

You can learn more and make a donation here...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1657155360/i-love-death-its-a-film-not-fetish

And after this comes "Vampyr"!

Garden Art

2011-08-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

Tonight I finally got some birdbaths and planters up in the Webstore...
You would not believe some of the things that have found their way into my studio. A few weeks ago, I decided to start putting them together into new structures and forms.
Check'em out!

It's been a very busy couple of weeks. More to come later...

LaLaLand

2011-08-01T10:33:00.000-07:00

One of my new birdbaths...

more to come....

Another Season...

2011-07-30T19:59:00.000-07:00

I started this Spring piece to replace the one that sold at Wedgwood (!). It has several layers to go before it matches the rest of the seasons but now that I look at it, I find it really satisfying the way it is. So I think I'll quit while I'm ahead!

I'll start a new one tonight!

Tales of a young actor...

2011-07-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post. Things are happening ... and fast. I've gone from no jobs to five in rotation, with the potential of getting one of my dream jobs off the drawing board and into reality. I've also gone from two "wouldn't it be nice" movie projects to "here are the shooting dates, can you color your hair?". I'm training like a maniac every day to make sure i look my best on camera. And I'm training a friend who misses her karate but also wants something different. Suddenly, I'm throwing techniques that I thought I knew for fifteen years and feeling them really connect and work for the first time. Huh... practice... who knew?

And, of course, this week I spent the most amazing time with four great kids in a stage combat class. They surprised me every day and in the end, they made me quite proud. I'll be posting video on that as soon as I make sure it's okay with their families.

Today I'd like to point you to a blog I've recently discovered, A Year of Auditions.
http://ayearofauditions.blogspot.com/
It's exactly that.
Stasia Kehoe posts stories about people... not just actors, but dancers, musicians, authors... people facing that weird, awful, exhilirating experience of walking into a room full of strangers and saying "Here I am! You want some of this?"

I'm today's featured post, telling the story of how I wound up in Seattle and how I got my first gig.

I hope you like it...

http://ayearofauditions.blogspot.com/2011/07/actor-greg-kevin-delaneys-audition.html

This Weekend...

2011-07-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

I've been out of touch for the last few weeks dealing with some challenging situations. Some were literally life and death, others just felt that way... I'll talk about that soon. Right now, let's just look to this weekend!!!

I'll be here at the Wedgwood Art Festival. I'm pretty excited about it. There's a good organization behind it. They've been promoting the hell out of it the last few weeks.( I almost caused a car accident when i saw one of their signs by the freeway!) It's a beautiful neighborhood in Northeast Seattle with a ton of cool shops and restaurants. I'm looking forward to a good weekend and have been creating some cool new things... Check'em out!

Juggling Cats

A Walk in the Clouds

Flutterby

Secrets and Lies

A Close-up detail of the Editor and Chief planter

She Likes You, Too

"Cancer Sucks...

2011-06-13T23:01:00.000-07:00

... But My Life Does Not"

I did this piece last week and my friend Mac saw it on the web and wanted it for a friend who is working her way through chemotherapy these days. "Cancer Sucks, But My Life Does Not" is her motto, so I worked it into the base of the piece to commemorate her bravery and her struggle. When life hands you a challenge, is there anything braver than putting on a tiara and setting your sites on the horizon?

Office Space

2011-06-07T21:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a piece I did last week... I barely had my space set up in Pioneer Square before this went home with a woman who just knew her father didn't have anything like this....

...and here are my Seussical Sisters vases... I think one look at the shape of them and you can pretty much tell where I got that idea...
Each vase has a different face sculpted on both sides...

These are available

separately

or as a pair.

Spring is sprung!

2011-06-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

Bag Lady

Just coming up for air... working three, no, four jobs this past week... so I'm a bit dizzy. Please enjoy some shots of my new work along with some flowers I grew!

First Date

Someday, Son, All This Will Be Yours

Faceplants!

2011-05-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready for this weekend's University District Street Fair in Seattle... Here are some new found object planters I've been working on...

If you turn these two around, they look like this...

Technology Marches On!

2011-05-12T11:39:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, the amazing Lindey Lane wrote a sweet book called Snuggle Mountain. (I'd say it's a children's book, but when you create a thing to be read to a child, aren't you creating it just as much for the grown-ups involved?) The illustrations were done by Melissa Iwai, a wonderful artist. It's a great book, but like so many great books, it was published but didn't make a big enough splash in the marketplace. It came into being, eventually all of its copies were sold, and, like so many stories, it went out of print.
But now it's back, in a whole new way. Lindsey and Melissa have taken a step into the brave new world of interactive books and transformed Snuggle Mountain into an app for your iPad. Now you can explore the world of Emma as she climbs up the mountain, searching for pancakes in the land of the two-headed giant! it's available on iTunes. Check it out!

While you're at it, check out this link, from Laura Miller at Salon. It's an essay about how much more there is to libraries than just stacks of old books and ladies who go "Shush!". I think we'll always need a place where we can explore books and ideas and writing in real time and three dimensions. The best experiences I've had in libraries have always come from finding those things I didn't know i was looking for. Happy accidents...

and from the happy accident department...

Key Pendants

click here!

Someday we'll find it...

2011-05-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to Kermit the Frog. Never has so much been said so well with so little... a couple of rods, some scraps of green felt, and a ping pong ball cut in two...

From 1959...

Jim Henson could say more by scrunching up his hand than most people can with all the words they know...

For Mom's Day...

2011-05-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

Commissions...

For Eileen, from her kids

For Val, from Eileen

Good News, Bad News

2011-05-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

The bad news is I really wanted to find these pieces a good home last week... and I didn't. The good news is the extra time allowed me to get some decent shots of them!

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Poem for the middle of the night...

2011-04-26T02:00:00.000-07:00

Recovering from the intensity and fun of Norwescon. Many thanks to all the folks and all the fans who put on the show and made me feel welcome!

Here's a better shot of "Winter"...

Four Seasons: Winter

available here

Four Seasons on a drippy april morn

2011-04-22T07:49:00.000-07:00

WINTER

SPRING

SUMMER

FALL

a poem for the morning after completing a big project...

Off to the con. I have a very good feeling about this....

Did you know...?

2011-04-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

Did you know....

.....that in order to grow healthy roses, you have to literally hack the living crap out of them after each winter and cut your bushes down to little itty-bitty stumps because if you don't the plants will grow all the way through the winter until they look like multi-legged anorexic supermodels standing on their heads in the dirt?

And did you know that, having cut them to within an inch of their existence, you might put them into shock, perhaps giving the impression you've slaughtered them in their beds?

But did you know that you just have to wait a week or two and the plant will slowly sprout again? Because, you should know, that roses are the cockroach of the plant kingdom and pretty much nothing you and your misguided attempts at gardening can do anything to stop the return of these stylish and iron willed Cactus relatives!

And did you know that April is National Poetry Month?

And did you know that you should not be intimidated by poetry?
It's true! Anyone can be a poet! Really! As Hemingway said, "Write what you know!"

Start small with a haiku!

My nose is stuffy

Pizza ignites my allergies

Why is it so good?

See?
Still intimidated?
Then follow the example of the amazing Lindsey Lane. She's discovered that you can "find" poems just by putting book titles together. Like this...

You can find examples of Lindsey's found poems on her blog!

Don't read?

Hate Books but love Movies?

Try it with your home video collection!

See? There is Poetry all around us! (more so when you live with small children!)

But what's been going on with those sculptures I've been working on? The ones i really hope I get done in time for this weekend? Funny you should ask!

Did you know that you can't paint polymer clay with
a conventional spray paint? You did? Then why the hell didn't you tell me that? It would have saved me a bunch of time this week!

Did you know, however, that those smart folks at Rustoleum now make a paint especially to use on plastic?

And did you know that if you handle it just right, you can make your polymer clay look just like glass... like this?

...or porcelain... like this?

or even bronze... like this?

Stay tuned...

I just officially got off the waiting list for the Norwescon Art Show. I better get these babies done!

Learning Curve

2011-04-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

So these are the other two pieces in the series (in their embryonic state). I'm moving back and forth among them to make sure that they all relate in size and mood. It also helps me keep moving, avoiding getting stuck or obsessing too much. I have to keep adjusting my plans as I see how they're coming together. Methods I've used in the past don't seem quite right right now, so I'm doing some creative shopping. these will look quite different in a day or two...

I had a profound realization this week that I can talk about but only in the most general terms. I'm working a new job for an organization that shall remain nameless. It's a lot of fun and there are no weapons or illegal substances involved. Just the egos of some very hard working people who are trying very hard to reach a lofty goal. I get paid to help train them. At the end of each session, I and an instructor who is very much my senior are tasked with giving these folks feedback on how they did on their exercise. Some folks are exceptional, most are very good... only a few so far seemed to need a great deal of improvement. Pretty impressive. But what makes the difference to me is seeing how the people react to the feedback. Some take in every word and want more. Others wear their own expectations of themselves like an armor, guarding themselves against failure so much that not even the positive feedback can get through to them. Sitting on the other side of the table like this has made me realize how all my teachers wanted me to succeed, how everybody I ever auditioned for wanted to see me wow them. It completely changes the dynamic for someone going into an experience like that. It sure changed it for me.

In honor of that realization, here's a piece about how that person on the other side of the desk used to look to me...

No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die

available here

Putting it together

2011-04-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

More from the Norwescon project... 2 out of a set of 4... a little rough at the moment... lots more to do, but sometimes it's nice to just work the clay with my fingers...

...and something a little more finished for today...

Lost in the Stars

available here

Experimenting through a haze of antihistamines!

2011-04-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

Feeling a little run down today. I'm working on some large pieces for the Norwescon Art show in a couple of weeks... here's one of them...

Flash of Genius

2011-04-08T00:18:00.000-07:00

Once again, I am humbled by the amazing talent and creativity that i get to enjoy every time i work as a juror for the annual Edmonds Elementary School Orca-Strated Art Show. Every kid in the school gets to pick a piece of their artwork (from this school year) and enter it into a school wide show, open to the public and judged by proffessional artist types like myself. Amazing stuff... better each year... impossible to judge...

Many thanks to the faculty and the Artmoms for making it happen!

Flash of Genius

available here

Lighting a candle and cursing the drizzle!

2011-04-06T23:40:00.000-07:00

I don't know about anybody else in Seattle, but I could stand a little sunshine right about now. In the meantime, how about some new work?!?

I'm too sexy

available here

Work It!

available here

Spring Awakening

available here

Tune in tomorrow for more!

Artist resources

2011-03-29T14:08:00.000-07:00

F.Y.I....

If you're a Seattle area artist, the fine folks at the Northwest Arts Alliance will be presenting their second Skills Workshop this coming Saturday, April 2nd. If you are one of the many artists facing the learning curve that smacks you in the face the first time you have to apply to a show using the Zapplication portal, you should consider signing up for this.

I've been using Zapplication for shows for several years now. Prior to participating in the NWAA Workshop weekend, I had about a 10% success rate with Zapplications (1 acceptance for every 10 Zapplications).

After applying what I learned from the Photoshop, Photography, and Jury classes at the workshop, I've been accepted to 3 out of the 4 shows I've applied to so far this year. So that made the time and money I spent there a very good investment.

I also had the opportunity to work with some very smart, friendly and enthusiastic artists who were willing to share their knowledge and experience to help each other to be more successful. It made me realize what a wonderful resource our community is. Experiencing that alone was worth signing up.

You can find more info here...

http://www.nwartalliance.com/workshop-reg.html

Working overtime!

2011-03-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

More self portraits... I was working on these until 3 in the morning. These are the weeks I have to knock my self out or my brain just doesn't shut off.

Working Overtime

available here

This one is all metal and textures...

Mandatory Overtime

available here

If you look closely at this one, you can see me reflected back at you....

Mother of the Universe

available here

And more new stuff...

2011-03-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

"Pinball Wizard"

Still grooving in the studio... titles to these pieces will be posted when I add them to the shop.

Polyform has just come out with some really nice metallic colors... these are all done in their new "Antique Gold" and "14 Carat Gold".

Work In Progress...

2011-03-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

Some new pieces for the upcoming Best of the Northwest show...

Hard Boiled (updated with new image)

2011-03-11T00:36:00.000-08:00

There's something I like about private eyes. The standard images are powerful... the trenchcoat, the cigarette, the man in the shadows... but what gets to me is the emotion of it all. Look at Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon... really, look at him...
You can't imagine him without seeing Humphrey Bogart...

What I love about the performance and the character in the film is that for half the movie you don't know whose side this guy's on. Then there's a moment after he meets The Fat Man when he throws a fit and trashes the hotel room, storming out to prove he means business and he wants in on the action. The camera follows Bogart into the hall and out to the elevator. He pushes the button and looks down to find his hand shaking and he laughs at himself, as if to say "Wow, I can't believe I pulled that off" and you realize he's playing every other character off against each other to solve the case, to learn the truth...
And ultimately, that's what he wants... somebody killed his partner and even though the man was a fool, even though Spade didn't like him and was fooling around with his wife... even though Spade is head over heels passionately in love with one of the suspects, well... he's supposed to do something. That something turns out to be tricking a confession out of the woman he loves and handing her over to the cops that don't like him and don't trust him to face a death sentence.

A long time ago, I watched Bryan Ferry singing. He clutched his jacket closed around his chest while singing a love song and in that moment, the band, the lights, the crowd all went away. There was something so personal and lonely in that gesture that it stuck in my heart and wound up making its way into my work.

There would be a guy who would be holding his coat tight against the elements... on the job...searching, lonely, loyal and determined...
part Bogart, part, Ferry, with a little John Constantine thrown in... Constantine is a comic book wizard who usually winds up in trouble way over his head but can survive anything (He even survived that awful Keanu Reeves movie!)

Here he is in a Tarot card designed by the great Dave McKean. Don't let the title "fool" you. In the Tarot, the fool is the guy who makes things happen... he's the one who starts out on a perilous journey even if he doesn't know where it will end. He's the one who knows that he doesn't have all the answers, but he's unafraid to look for them. by stepping out on the path, he inspires movement in the universe to help him on his quest. He faces surprises and challenges, but ultimately succeeds and gains the knowledge he seeks... much like Spade and Spenser and Marlowe and McGee and all those guys who walk the mean streets of our dreamscapes.

Here's one of my latest versions of him... this year I've been dealing with people and their animals... I think we're more alike than different. Here he is having a flash of recognition, a glimpse of an old soul.

Lindsey thinks all my pieces are visions of myself... she's probably right.

Lost and Found

available here

Market Research...

2011-03-07T23:32:00.000-08:00

The Best of The Northwest is coming up in just a couple of weeks, March 26th & 27th... I gotta get to work! Any suggestions of what you'd like to see me do?

Snake Eyes

available here

Everybody Panic!

2011-03-04T18:03:00.000-08:00

No Cause For Alarm

You work with what you got...

2011-03-02T22:44:00.000-08:00

The guy in the picture here is Jack. He's from Alaska. He was a guest on the Royal Argosy Dinner Cruise this past Saturday. He didn't know it, but his friends had set him up to be a suspect in the murder mystery we were putting on that night. We ask people to give us some personal info when they make their reservations so we can work them into the story. So Jack's friends gave us this picture.

They had no idea how perfect a picture they chose. Saturday night, we opened a new script I wrote called "Spaced Invasion" all about alien abductees and recovered memories and lost hybrid spacebabies. Usually, I'll get info on a few guests a couple of hours ahead of time and then set about coming up with some insane yarn that ties them into the body we just found (in this show, it's a guy named Phredd, who might be an alien or might be a con man, but either way he's dead and his body was found up on the roof of the Experience Music Project).

There's a rule in improv that says "Just say yes"- which means when someone throws a circumstance at you in a scene, don't fight it- just say yes- let the circumstances be what they are and then deal with it- no matter how ridiculous! It's like that bit in "Ghostbusters"- "When someone asks if you're a god, you say YES!" You just go with it and hope it tales you someplace funny.

Well, I got a picture of jack with a Starfish on his head and there was no way I wasn't gonna use it!
That became a picture of "Jack the Alien Fishboy". His scuba tank? A jetpack! Before you knew it, everyone in the room was telling stories of jack and his alien invaders rising up out of Puget Sound and Jack was soon identified as the missing spacebaby and eventually revealed to be the Murderer of Phredd (his long lost Spacebabydaddy). I just want to shout out to Jack and the crew of the Second Deadliest Catch for showing up to play and helping us all have such a great time.

For info about the Royal Argosy Mystery Cruise and all our other shows from Events on the Edge,

Click Here!

Today's piece...

"Here To Help"

A Quiet Day at home...

2011-02-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

Sensory Overload

I'm getting ready for three nights in a row of various comedic improvy mysterious things culminating in the first performance of my new mystery "Spaced Invasion" on the Royal Argosy Boat Saturday night. A little peace and quiet watching the snow flurry with the feline americans is just the ticket today.

Hero

2011-02-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

This morning was a good news/bad news kind of morning. The good news was that it was a sunny day, my housemate Coop was in the kitchen making his daughters laugh, I was excited to write a speech for Rik and Piper's 20th anniversary party tonight, I was looking forward to a trip to see my sister this weekend, and down in Texas, Lindsey was getting ready to show off to a book editor. To top it all off, the first "Chronicles of Narnia" movie was playing in the background... and somehow that segued right into the bad news...

As I sat at the table next to young Domina (who was, as usual, coloring very carefully within the lines) and started my morning news-surf on my computer, I ran right into the weird discovery that the man pictured here, one of the executive producers of the Narnia films, had died yesterday in New York City.

His name was Perry Moore and aside from nurturing the Chronicles into their onscreen lives, he wrote a very good book a couple of years back. It's called "Hero" and it's a novel about superheroes. Now usually, such stories a better served by comics, occasionally they work as films, but to tackle that world in a novel is unusual. But Moore created a deeply layered, resonant world of action and color and he populated it with very realistic characters. The Hero of the title is a second generation superhero, the son of a disgraced champion now living in hiding and shame. The last thing the father wants is a son to follow in his footsteps.

And did I mention that the Hero is gay?

It's a great story. I think Moore got away with telling it in a novel because it falls under the heading of young adult fiction (it's built around a young protagonist, so the publishers market it to that age group). But like the best cartoons and fairy tales, there's a story there for adults. How do you deal with a secret? How do you find someone to love? More importantly, how do you find someone you can trust to love you as you really are?

I think often we cheat ourselves by calling things "kid stuff" or "serious literature". Does it grip you and keep you reading to the very last page? Then I think it's a good book. I think I understood Ahab better by watching Ricardo Montalban in "Wrath of Khan" than I did after slogging through "Moby Dick". I can appreciate the mechanical skills of a writer for a paragraph or a chapter, but I want a story that grips me and moves me and speaks to me. There are lots of reasons people get stuck on comic books at an early age. Sometimes they speak to the heart of a damaged child living in chaotic circumstances who sees themselves as special. But that can't be all... They also speak to minds that wonder "What if..." or hearts that believe in ideals and visions of a better world. Will Eisner told stories about "The Spirit", a guy in a black mask and a red tie who fought crime, but he was also telling stories about people living stacked one on top of another in a crowded, dirty city and how they survived day to day with momentary pleasures and simple joys. James Robinson wrote about Jack Knight, "Starman", fighting bad guys in Art Deco-inspired Opal City. But the overall picture was of a son coming to grips with his place in a long family tradition, looking at where he came from, making peace with it and moving on into a life that is finally all his own.

I'm sorry that Perry Moore won't be around to tell us any more stories. I like the way he saw things and I was looking forward to what he had up his sleeve. Pick up "Hero" if you get a chance.

"Everytime A Bell Rings"

Teacher of the Year

2011-02-17T14:28:00.000-08:00

"Teacher of the Year "

Here's to anybody who's got the guts and the heart to stand up in front of a room full of kids

and teach them something... anything at all.

Scene of the Crime

2011-02-16T14:38:00.000-08:00

One of the questions that comes up when I try to sell my work online is just how big my pins actually are. You can give a measurement... but that really doesn't give any sense of the scale of a piece. So from now on, I'll try to put something else in one of the shots to give folks a better idea of how large or small things are...

The pin in question is called "Scene of the Crime".

It's smaller than Batman. But what isn't?

"Jazz Hands"

"Building A Mystery"

"Simply Baffled"

This one's not for sale... it belongs to one of my Texas regulars. She dropped it off for repair and I thought I'd get a shot of it while I had it. I haven't done work in this style for quite a while. It's fun to look back on the phases I go through.

Big Thanks and New Stuff!

2011-01-21T14:46:00.000-08:00

Soooo....
Last weekend, I attended a weekend's worth of workshops hosted by the Northwest Art Alliance, the fine folks who bring us the Best of the Northwest art fairs several times a year. We talked about jurying (that thing where you send in pictures of what you hope the people who run shows really want to see and then you never know why they must hate you specifically), and thing like booth design, selling techniques, wholesaling, photoshop techniques and photography.

I want to thank everyone who volunteered their time and energy to make the weekend happen. Not just the organizers... while I know it was a huge amount of work to get it up and running, and watching Karen Seymour work the registration desk Saturday morning was a tutorial in multitasking and good humor, I want to thank all the other artists who showed up to learn but wound up accidentally teaching, either by speaking up when a presenter got stuck on a question or just by allowing an image of their work to be put up on screen and saying "Whaddaya think about this?". You never know what will happen when you just take the leap to put your work in front of strangers and hear their gut reactions to it. So thanks to everyone who showed up.

And big thanks to the Amazing John Luke for showing up with his camera and lights and pretty much his whole photo studio to show us how to make our work look good. The man just gets the job done!

I was lucky enough to show up asking for help when there was no one else around and he wound up shooting a dozen of my pieces for me because we couldn't figure out how to get into the manual controls of my camera. Here are some of his shots (and links to them in my shop).

"This is my career"

"Social Butterfly #5"

"Birth of a notion"

"Closing time"

"Carmina Banana"

King of all Social Media

2011-01-20T22:49:00.000-08:00

Here is the interview I did on the KVUE Morning News in Austin on opening day of the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. If it seems like I'm driving the interview, that's all to the credit of Melissa, the interviewer. When I arrived that morning, I was presented with a prepared script covering what I would be talking about. It was hokey and contrived, not to mention inaccurate. The staff brought me out to the studio to sit off-camera one segment early and when I mentioned that they were acting on the wrong information, the quick-thinking anchors, Melissa Gale and Olga Campos actually heard me and then just asked a few questions and let me talk. What you're going to see here is Melissa then recalling all the points I brought up and feeding me the right questions to get the all the info out that we had just covered off-camera. She was able to completely change her game plan two hours into a two and a half hour broadcast that had started at 4:30 am. God only knows what time she had to show up for work! Think about that the next time you wonder if the talking heads on TV know what they're doing.

Thanks to Sherry Smith for making all the connections and to the amazing Brain Trust at the 'Dillo for thinking I was the guy for the job.

The Dog Who Ate Christmas

2011-01-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

Sun's up in Seattle... just barely. Last night there was a windstorm so strong it folded up the patio furniture and threw it all over the yard. I slept on and off and was up before 6. I must still be on Texas Time. Maybe with this guy...

This is Bear Cub. Once upon a time, he was a lost and scared dog and a sweet family took him in and gave him a home, sort of filling a place that was left when a scrappy, adventurous little terrier was lost. You can never quite replace a beloved animal. No two are alike in the ways that they get into your heart and your life. You think you know how an animal is supposed to work and then another one comes along and turns everything you know about them upside down. And it's all good... it's just a different good.

Bear Cub defied expectations. In his prime, he was a substantial piece of dog, kind of a lean Rottweillery kind of guy with a nice deep bark, intimidating if you didn't know him. When I first met him, I was down for Christmas and staying next door and I was in charge of feeding and walking him while Lindsey and company were away for a couple of days. I had no idea how attached he had gotten to his people in the short time he'd had them. My friend Cheryl and I opened the door to go inside, and we both got bowled over when this terrified beast exploded out at us and took off into the night. We gave chase around the block, close enough to see (but not prevent it) as he bolted in front of a moving car and disappeared into some bushes. Half an hour later, we found him, huddled and shaking in the backest back of a big backyard, under a bush and up against a chain link fence, petrified and miserable. There's nothing like having to overcome your fear of big dogs than having to rescue one that is more scared than you are. Cheryl and I got down on our knees in the dark and dragged him out of the thicket. That was as far as he wanted to be dragged. That was it. No more. If dragging a big scared mean-looking dog is scary, try picking one up and carrying it for a block and a half. That's what we had to do, all 60 shivering pounds of him.

We got him home and in the house, fed and finally into his bed . And I sat with him a while. That's when he did the thing that endeared him to me forever. I patted him as if to say "That's it. Leaving now" and he reached out a big heavy paw on the end of his long awkward leg and laid it over my arm like he was trying to say "Not yet. Please?" How do you say no to that?

He was nervous and he was lonely. That came with him from someplace we'll never know. You couldn't leave the pantry open or else he'd go in and wolf down a bag of potato chips, but not for the food value... he'd just as soon eat whatever was in Lindsey's office wastebasket. I think he just needed something to do when there was nobody home to keep himself busy.

Last year, a couple of days before Christmas, we awoke to hear Gabi scolding him. He'd gotten under the Christmas tree and attempted to open some presents a couple of days early, which involved chewing them to pieces. I'm not sure there's anything that girl likes more than Christmas, so the fury was intense...but she got over it... eventually. With sweet old dogs you have to have to have a lot of patience. And he was very, very sweet. And he was gangly and awkward and sad and loyal and easy to forgive and easy to love.

When it's time to let them go, it's hard to know when. One day, all of a sudden, they're old. Disease moves fast in those strange bodies of theirs. And they can't tell us what they're feeling. What they want. When cats want to leave, that's exactly what they do. They find a nice quiet place that they somehow know is the absolute last place you're gonna look and they stay there until they quietly pass
away. Dogs are different. Dogs struggle to get up and walk downstairs with you. Dogs lift there heads when they hear you pull up in the driveway, even if you're on a riding mower. Dogs lay their paws on you and say "Not yet. Please."

How I wish they could talk.

I have my theories of the evolution of the soul. I think if you've lived a good life, you'll get to come back as a beloved housepet. Cat or dog, it doesn't matter. Someone's going to love the hell out of you. The difference is that the cat's revel in that wonder of just being cats and they enjoy the freedom and they make you come to them. Dogs, though, on some cellular level they kind of remember being human, and they remember what it was like to talk, to feel, to connect with another person. They can almost do it, to. but the lips don't quite work they way they used to and the hands are pretty awkward these days, so they bark and wag and sigh, trying so hard to get through to us, always happy when we get the point, always just a little bit sad because its so hard.

There's no shame in trying to hold on to that connection just a little longer. When it's time to let go you know it. You try to do it with love and respect. You do it in a way that's not scary for your animal. If you're lucky, you'll have dear friends around you to hold you up when you finally let go.

We have to do better.

2011-01-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

a great grandmother - 2008

This week finds me thinking a lot about parents and children and family and the bonds we form. How fragile they are, how easy they are to take for granted, how devastating it can be when that bond is broken, whether from death or separation or something worse. Yet it all starts with a moment like this one here. A big surprise...Look at you! Where did you come from? Aren't you perfect? I'm gonna love you forever and ever! And we do the best we can, don't we? It's the biggest job in the world, being a parent.

Being a child has its challenges, too.

This week, something awful happened in Arizona. A madman went off and blew half a dozen people out of the world. Somebody's grandfather, somebody's husband, somebody's wife, somebody's children, somebody's child. And while important people stand around and try to pin blame, or dodge it,

the fact remains that there are now six holes in the world that will never be filled. I think of a line in "Unforgiven" by David Webb Peeples... " It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have." We have to do better.

A couple of days ago, we were doing an Open Door show, and at the end a boy came up to us, worrying his hands, and he said "What if something like ...that happened to you and you told your parents and it stopped... and a couple of days later it started again?" We have to do better.

We have to do better because the odds are already stacked against kids and the adults they're gonna grow into. It's all so fragile and fleeting and busy and easy to miss when you're right in the middle of it and life is blasting you from every angle. Can we slow it down? Can we try to pay attention? Could we be a little nicer? Can we say "yes" more often than we say "no"? Can we fill the moments we're standing in right now so that we leave finished and without a sense of "if only..."?

I think we can.

Enjoy Every Sandwich

2011-01-06T07:20:00.000-08:00

It's a new day in Austin. The sun just came up in the window, taking the place of a bright morning star. Gabi is at school, looking perfectly perfect. Lindsey is doing yoga in a 105 degree sweatbox, discovering what's possible. I have the house to myself. Almost. There's a big black dog on a round brown bed in the corner and another one, a little older and a little stiffer, upstairs. There are two cats coming repeatedly in and out of the bathroom window, because they can. And I'm thinking about this guy in the picture above.

His name was Bill Brown. The smile on his face says it all. For all the years I've know her, he was my friend Brenda's constant companion. In the car, at the dojo, sitting under a bench near the Wild Rose, Bill was always around. He'd sit at the edge of the mat at the Dojo, yearning to come out and play but he knew he wasn't supposed to, so he'd put his paws over the edge and just inch his nose out a tiny bit, trying to get just a little closer to his girl.

He's gone now. My friend, Karri, was there to help him on his way when it was time. She took care of him when she could and then she took care of Brenda when she couldn't help Bill any more. She's done the same for me and my cats. It's her mission. Giving us a little more time to recognize what we've got and appreciate it just a little longer. Maybe to really appreciate it for the first time.

Losing your animal really sucks. But sometimes you can see it coming. If you're lucky, you have someone like Karri to help you through it. People always wonder why their pets can't live longer. Wouldn't it be great? No. Probably not. I mean what if they outlived us? Watching Sombra dreaming in the corner, I tremble to imagine what kind of memorial he would arrange for me. "Okay, Lindsey, you fling Greg out into Barton Springs and I'll go fetch him. About a million times. It'll be fun!"

This has been a year of tremendous loss, for me and so many folks around me. I've had people taken from me in the blink of an eye. I've seen worlds turned upside down by secrets coming into the light. Loved ones struggling with things programmed into their genes. Cancer, addiction. Lifetimes of hanging on to bad habits and false assumptions. But I'm still here. And I'm grateful for so many things, so many people that enrich my life. They challenge me, care for me, frustrate me and entertain me. I watch my brother work his program so hard and I have to admit that if an Irish Catholic laborer in New York City can quit smoking and drinking after 40 years, truly I live in a world where anything is possible. I watch my friend Tony show up on the mat to work out looking like Professor X because the chemo has made all his hair fall out and I realize just how strong a person can be. I talk to my kid sister and I hear a clarity in her voice that I haven't heard in years and know that sometimes you have to be satisfied with just a tiny success. For that moment. For the right now.

I am grateful for friendship and love and sweetness and faith and support and forgiveness and for laughter, especially laughter. It saved me over and over again. I'm grateful for knowing that out there there is one person who has promised to shoot me if I ever lose my sense of humor and also knowing that it ain't gonna happen today. I'm grateful for Craig Ferguson for reminding me that there's no shame in striking out, so why not swing the bat? I'm grateful for dogs like Bill and Sombra and Bear Cub that look me right in the eye and say "Don't think about last week, don't think about next week. Be here now. And give me a snack"

And I'm grateful for this guy down here. He was a great writer and a lousy role model. He abused himself and all the people around him. He lived like there was no tomorrow until there wasn't. But he was lucky enough (or maybe not) to know when his time became short. Like a friend of mine long gone from this world, he kicked it all up a notch and cranked out as much good work as he could. He made no secret of his circumstances. And when Letterman asked what he had learned from the process, he said "Enjoy every sandwich".

So there. Enjoy every sandwich.

And share it with the next dog you see.
.

given circumstances and what you do with them

2011-01-04T08:32:00.000-08:00

Each year, I come to Austin to do the 'Dillo hoping that i have enough work to get through the show successfully and each year I wind up doing more while I'm down here. This particular year I had hoped to be able to just show up and work the show for a couple of reasons. It was a shorter show and I know from experience that sometimes my just being there to say "hello" to the guests will make the difference between buying and browsing. So I wanted to be there more. Also, Lindsey and Gabi are really wonderful about letting me take over their porch and set up a road studio to work in and this year they had work done all over the house and everything looks really great including the porch with new storm windows and a freshly painted floor... and I kind of wanted to make a smaller footprint for their sake... but plans don't always work. I got a bunch of new work done up North, but I was working extra gigs in Seattle right up to my leaving, so I had to set up the shop to assemble and package all the pieces I had baked right before leaving. And, one of the plain facts is that being here always cranks my impulses up to the next level. I work fast and I take more chances and have more fun with my stuff... feeling like a rockstar will do that for you (thanks again, Shannon). So here are some of the pieces that came out of Austin 2011...

Thankyou, Lindsey and Gabi. I could not do it without you either.

"Oh, I knew that", "Best Night Ever", and "Crystal Blue Persuasion" are available here.

Five new pieces...

2011-01-03T19:28:00.000-08:00

check them out here

picture for the day

2011-01-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

Today is all about filling orders and looking at the books, shooting work for the website and packing things to ship out. But here's something for the Amazing Shannon, who went above and beyond for me every day this year!

Merry Day After...

2010-12-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

Got the rest of the stuff loaded out today... the decompression has started. I'm almost too tired to stand. Before I crawl off with Jack Reacher and Elvis Cole and Harry Bosch and Stephen Sondheim, I thought I'd share this lovely song...

Thanks to Neil Gaiman.

More to come, but first rest...

Hot Club, Cool Cab & the best Christmas song ever!

2010-12-23T12:30:00.000-08:00

So last night, I got picked up by Carlos in the Cool Cab!

This is Carlos

This is the cool Cab...

This is what it looks like when you try to take a picture in there!

Yesterday, the wonderful Albert and Gage...

Here's Chris Albert rocking out on "Linus and Lucy".

How can anyone not feel good listening to that piece of music?

Today, Hot Club of Cowtown!

I wanna go home with the Armadillo...

2010-12-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the Palmer Events Center! austin hit the mid-eighties today. Armadillo Day 7 has come and gone and i'm still standing (just barely). The word all around is that it's a good show. Everyone involved with the show is so much happier to be in this space. It's run by the same people who run the Convention Center, but it feels like a whole different world. I guess the biggest difference is that people actually like to come here! Attendance is up and the guests seem much happier. Last night set a record for a Monday, kids music in the daytime and The Eggmen doing Beatles covers at night. Best Monday i can remember, but the Eggmen made me decide i don't want to be behind the stage next year... if the sound from the monitors was that loud, I hope the boys were wearing earplugs!

I spent today making new pieces in the daytime and working the show last night. Marcia Ball and Ruthie Foster played this evening. I couldn't get close enough to get decent shots but they sounded wonderful... blues on the electric piano. Just a great show. the amazing Shannon did a great job for me today.

Here's a look at her in her new hat!

And how about those Derailers!

They proved that sometimes the best way to do a Beatles cover is to do it your way instead of theirs!

And, of course, Band of Heathens!

Great Band, but you know that guy who drives you nuts at concerts? the one who's dancing all by himself and started before the music did, the one who somehow manages to keep getting into your shot no matter where you move? That guy who tries to get you to dance and if you don't want to just turns his back on you and dances right in front of you...?

That guy in the corner of the shot?

Yep, it's him!

sleep now...

From now till Christmas eve!

2010-12-19T06:49:00.000-08:00

The Armadillo Christmas Bazaar is now open! We've had a great first four opening days... Good music, great sales and very good attendance. The Palmer Auditorium, our one-time-only venue is just perfect for us... big but not cold, clean but not sterile, and expansive without being intimidating. There are great food trailers across the street and we can go outside for fresh air and sunlight and be out on a beautiful plaza. You can find me in Booth T-1 behind the stage. I'm a little sleep deprived but that's no surprise.

Here are a few shots from yesterday...

My friend and superfan Dale hysterical with his new piece

"The day my therapist went 'Tilt'".

Me and John trying to come up with a suitable explanation for Mrs. John about this purchase...

Ian Maclagan (looking strangely like Dam Judi Dench) and The Bump Band

Erin from Security amazed that she got away with going backstage to tell the guys in the previous picture to shut up because whatever they were fighting about was drowning out the house music.

... and Sunset from the loading dock.

So far, so good...

Showtime!

2010-12-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

Okay... I've landed in Austin... did all my shopping (I never thought iI'd say this but I want to give a shout out to the helpful folks at the North Austin Home Depot), got caught up on my sleep... very important and chronic... I always think there's just a little more to do, one more piece to finish, one more detail to fret about, and before i know it I've been awake all night with not a lot to show for it but some frazzled nerves and a cool piece of work that I may not be able to talk about coherently.

The show is 1/2 set up. got the walls up, the floor down, the lights hung, and all the shelve in place. I'm in a new "neighborhood", back behind the stage, with folks around me I've never hung out with. I'm sure I'll get to know them pretty well in the next 11 days.

I had one of those moments that makes it all come home for me yesterday. One of the folks from a neighboring booth came by to ask if he could take some pictures of my work on opening day. He has a dear friend who loves my work and is fighting cancer. She wanted him to help her do a little virtual shopping trip because she won't be able to make it to the show this year. Wow. You put the work out there, but you don't know where it will land or how it will touch someone. I'm honored and humbled.

Anyway, Shannon's on her way... we'll be there all day through tech check at 7:09 tonight.

Tomorrow I'm up at hell o'clock to appear on the KVUE morning news at 6:40 am to talk about the 'Dillo and what I'm doing there. Don't miss it. I may not be coherent.

Blast Off!

2010-12-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

See y'all in Texas!

ready for blast off...

2010-12-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

Twelve hours to go....

Lost and Found

2010-12-07T16:59:00.000-08:00

Another piece fron what seems to be turning into my "Furball Period"...

And there was much rejoicing....

When the spirit moves you...

2010-12-06T19:19:00.000-08:00

you gotta dance...

Spirit Dancer 1

Spirit Dancer 2

and be kind to animals...

Christmas Carols!

2010-12-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

A few new pieces for the holidays...

Keepin' it real!

2010-12-01T18:20:00.000-08:00

Add Glitter to Pictures

Tomorrow night, 99 Cent and the whole Biscotti Family will be back at the Spirit of Washington Event Center in Renton. Where will you be?

http://www.meetthebiscottis.com/

Use the Don's Discount for 1/2 price tickets...

go to

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/119478

and enter code FAMILY

Raw Materials

2010-11-30T23:06:00.000-08:00

Here are just a few things that are going into my latest batch of work.

Stay tuned.

One Day Only...

2010-11-29T15:15:00.000-08:00

We have to see with better eyes

Today only... Cyber Monday sale at my webstore

http://www.etsy.com/shop/gregkevindelaney

Enter the code "harleyquinn" at checkout and receive 25% off your purchase!

Shopportunity Knocks!

2010-11-27T22:16:00.000-08:00

this weekend... up at Lowell Artworks in Everett!

Setting up things for Christmas!

with great artists like Staci...

and Shelly...

When business was slow, I would write Christmas Haiku like this...

Making my tassels...

Stacy cutting up yarn

Shelly is laughing

and this

Another Christmas

A single sound that ruins the day

That McCartney song...

Slow but steady...

2010-11-26T01:21:00.000-08:00

Spirit Dancers... I haven't done these in several years and I realized I miss them... stay tuned

Making the best of a cold, cold day...

2010-11-24T21:54:00.000-08:00

Harmonic Convergence

2010-11-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

Today Seattle was kind of shut down. What other cities would call a light snowfall, Seattle is referring to as "Snowmageddon". I would have thought Northwesterners were made of sterner stuff. Guess not!

(Hmmm... Blogger isn't letting me put up any pictures tonight... Imagine a picture of my cat looking out my window at the snow...)

Ooh...your imagination is very strong today!

I don't mind snow. I love winter... as long as it's on the other side of double-paned glass. It just blows my mind to live in a place where people turn into driving school dropouts at the first sign of a flurry.

So I stayed home, fueled my self with a homemade roast garlic pizza and attacked the "to do" list in the studio!

(now imagine a picture of those armatures, but now two of the pieces are done!)

And here's a wall piece that I finished!

(imagine a cool wall piece with a sun and a moon together surrounded by singing planets)

that's the idea!

Harmonic Convergence is available here

And then... Updated!

2010-11-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

Armatures... phase two!

Phase Three!

MASS PRODUCTION!

2010-11-22T00:49:00.000-08:00

What do you call a group of sculptures... a school? Today was a day of laying groundwork for a school of sculptures. I've got eight in the works this week. I was doing sketches and bending wire all day, with a break to run to the mall and by another half ton of Sculpey. Tomorrow I'll be roughing out the clay on the armatures here and then, as the week goes on , I'll be moving between finishing them off and working on about a dozen wall pieces. I'll get them all done and ready to ship out after thanksgiving. That'll give them two weeks to get down to Austin in plenty of time for the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar... I'll post more shots of these guys tomorrow.

In the meantime... here's the Sea King 2.0!

He's a revision of a piece I did earlier this summer. Originally, he was attached to a big hammered copper thingy. Luckily, the piece fell and he popped off and shattered. When I gathered the fragments up, I realized I liked him better the way he was. I ditched the copper, reinforced his "hair", rebuilt the shapes that make up his face and then painted him with my polymer/acrylic concoction. Much better!

Sea King 2.0 available here

one more time!

2010-11-14T09:09:00.000-08:00

Last day of the Best of the Northwest coming up... Here's a couple of shots of new stuff in the booth...

Excellence

2010-11-13T06:35:00.000-08:00

Having a good weekend so far at "The Best". Attendance was good for a Friday in a brand new venue.
The space is a new cruise terminal on Elliot Bay. Like all cruise terminals in our dumb century, there are issues... staff and security that make you feel guilty of something for trying to be there at all, parking and shuttle bus issues... all of that seems to be getting worked out as we go. The light in our room is stunning and you can't beat the view.

Some new pieces...

okay... it's 6:30 am and I need to finish a couple of things before I leave for the show... I would have done so last night, but the 8:30 catnap turned into an 8 hour snooze-a-thon.

Later,
Greg

Where I'll be this weekend...

2010-11-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

The Best of the Northwest

I'll be here all weekend. It's a stunning location down on Elliot Bay. Click the link for directions and Parking info. Come on down!

tonight's batch

2010-11-10T22:21:00.000-08:00

I hit some buttons In Photoshop that I never played with before and rather than get derailed from my todo list, I'm going to walk away from my computer... but I've got some ideas.

Still working on the menorahs....

2010-11-10T00:52:00.000-08:00

...but I got a bunch of Christmas pieces done today!

Among other things....

Also did an Open Door show today and we have another tomorrow... have I mentioned that acting life and death situations in elementary schools cafetoriums is all at once intense, absurd and amazing?

More to come...

And another!

2010-11-08T23:21:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a day... 55 pieces of jewelry finished... and this guy...

The Time Traveller Goes Shopping

available here

and lots of stuff like this...

more to come...

Ta Daaaa!

2010-11-07T19:01:00.000-08:00

The finished product...

available here...

And then...

2010-11-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Another Work in Progress

2010-11-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

Siren Song...

A different kind of mermaid...

from the armature... paper and wire and foil...

then some clay...

she's going to have wings like a fairy... made from shells I gathered on the beach in the town where my stepfather lived...

Rather than doing all her color with layers of clay, I'm trying something new... blending liquid polymer with acrylic paint and metallic pigments to create a colored clay I can paint onto her...

I'm digging the hands...

Stay tuned!

Work in Progress

2010-11-05T12:14:00.000-07:00

A time traveller in search of a bargain...

More to come...

You get a corpse! And YOU get a corpse! And Everybody gets a corpse!

2010-11-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

I got to help Rik fulfill a lifelong dream yesterday... well not his life, actually. His daughter Izzy's life... you see, ever since she was born, he's wanted to build her a haunted house for Halloween. So I went over on Friday to help him plan it out and build gags. His idea was to have all the kids help Doctor Frankenstein gather the pieces to make his monster.We made dummies out of pillows and clothes from Goodwill. Izzy drew "dead guy" faces on them and I split the bellies open and filled them with plastic bones for all the little "Igors" to find. We built a graveyard out of plastic and burlap and decorated it with constrution paper leaves and bats and a generous lack of available light.

After the little hunchbacks gathered the bones, they would follow the doctor into the lab (garage covered floor to ceiling in black plastic) where he would have them pass him the monster parts - Guts (noodles in oil), a Heart (a skinned tomato) and The Brain (a peeled and carved honeydew with some food coloring) . The Doctor would disappear behind some plastic, make some noise and hit a switch that activated a strobe light. The garage door would lower, raising a lack plastic curtain attached to the top edge and revealing ... THE MONSTER (Rik's boxing coach, Neal).

Needless to say, by the time our planning session was through, I was playing the good Doctor and Rik was backstage pulling on strings making the corpses float up out of our burlap graveyard. The amazing thing is that all the bits worked pretty well. It took a couple of times through to work the bugs out... The first time, the kids got stuck trying to unbutton the shirts on the dummies, which made finding the bones too much work. Then Izzy, who made a fabulous Pink Flamingo, took one look at the Monster and said "You're not a monster, you're Uncle Neal!". Luckily, Izzy was a good sport and figured out that she could be in on the secrets and help us scare all the neighborhood kids. We did the tour five times in all and each time through was a learning experience... vamping for time, giving the kids more stuff to do, throwing in more gags to surprise Izzy and her brother, Roy the dinosaur. I went up to the toy basket and found all their rubber bugs and snakes and glowing eyeballs and mixed them in with the bones and the guts. During the fourth tour, I looked at the six dummies hanging up and the six kids in the graveyard and put on my best Transylvanian Oprah voice and said "You get a corpse and You get a corpse and everybody gets a corpse!".

The kids didn't get it, but I heard Rik giggling behind the curtain.

It was totally awesome and not nearly as much work as you would think. And I don't think the kids ever noticed that they weren't loading up on candy all day. I absolutely recommend to everyone looking for something different to do on Halloween.

notice the "Help Vanted" sign... everything I know, I learned from Bugs Bunny

Just Around The Corner...

2010-10-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

So after a couple of weeks of this...

Meet the Biscottis

And this

playing the Don at the Banquet Expo

And this...

having a gallery show at home

I almost felt like this...

Gotta Get A New Gig

available here

Then I figured this would be okay...

Waiting for what comes next

from the Broemeling/Sanphillipo Collection

Then I looked at the calendar...

Is it that time already?

available here

I gotta get to work!

A Brief Respite for A Once In A Lifetime Memory ...

2010-10-21T22:24:00.000-07:00

I love my country. I love my President. That is not to say I don't have problems with both... I do. But when the man is sharp enough to recognize the spark in a young girl's eyes and walk across the yard to meet my friend Mieraye and do this...

... well, let's just say he's alright in my book.

Go, Barry!

Now, y'all get out and vote!

from the official White House Photo Of The Day!

There's Art In Here Somewhere...

2010-10-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

No, really... there is. I took these picture a couple of nights ago while I was cleaning the studio and rearranging stuff, and trying to plan out what I would do on the blog for the next few days. I typed the above title and hit save before the idea slipped away.

We've been cleaning house and rearranging stuff to make room for an art show we're doing this weekend. For the last year or so, my studio has sprawled into a space that I've always wanted to use as display space. Now that I've got another artist as a housemate, it seems like a great time to turn that idea into a reality. With all the stuff that I fling around while I'm working, I thought it would be fun and funny to create a piece as i was cleaning and make the title to this post literally true.

Little did I know that when Coop and I moved my work bench I would find this smiling up at me...

"Joy To The World", finished, titled, mounted on a stand and lost to the world at least six months ago!

"Joy to the World" is available here

See It Before It's Gone...

2010-10-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

As I was driving along Highway 405 in Renton today, I made way for a 4x4 to merge into my lane. One side of the truck was all covered in mud, like it had just splashed through a huge mud puddle. I figured the driver had taken it off-roading somewhere. Being an overgrown child myself, my first thought was wee-hah! but my second thought was i wonder if he ran over any tortoises... or trashed a beaver dam... or heedlessly damaged the environment he was blasting through too fast to even notice it?
I know. Total buzzkill. But I live across the street from this great little park that's built on the site of a natural spring and the home of these cool little frogs... at least it's supposed to be. Years ago, the state took the dirt it had scraped up when expanding I-5 and dumped it all in the land around the spring, burying it and wiping out the frogs and god knows what else lived in the woods and waters there. A few years back, an effort was made to reclaim the land. Fill dirt was excavated, the spring freed up, plants replaced. They even attempted to restart the frog colony. There's plaques and signs detailing the history. So where are the frogs?

Last night, my housemate came running in, shouting"The Frogs! I just heard the Frogs!". I ran outside, but got nothing but silence. I must have missed it. I hope I did. I would be a shame if they never came back here to sing in the fading light of dusk.We've lost too many species to our own callousness and shortsightedness, pushing them off land that was not ours to take. There's a book I like called "Planetary", about a bunch of archaeologists that go around unearthing mysteries and monsters, in order to learn from them and preserve them. Their motto is "It's a strange world... Let's keep it that way.". Believe me, I'd like to live in a world where there are Bigfoots and Mothmen and Nessies. It would be a very cool place to live. But right now, I'd be happy with a few more frogs.

"See It Before It's Gone"
available here

Out of Chaos comes order... eventually.

2010-10-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

"Princess Party"

available in my Etsy store...

If that is the butterfly, then this must be the cocoon...

I Juggle Cats For A Living

2010-10-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get my work bench cleared off but every time I make an empty space, Burt the Wonder Cat decides that it may be the perfect space for a nap... or a nice place from which to offer moral support... or maybe that space shouldn't be empty so he knocks over a jar of beads there to give us both something to play with. Then when i go back to sit down in my desk chair, I find Harley the Feline Fury there keeping it warm for me. That must be what she's doing, because there's certainly no room for both of us in the chair. Sigh...This is going to take longer than I thought.

I Juggle Cats For a Living

available here

Cleaning House!

2010-10-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

...no, it's not another sale... I'm really just cleaning my house today. Do you have any idea what kind of a mess I make when I'm working away in my studio? I completely trash the joint. It looks like the Terminator came back through time with the intent of killing Liberace. It looks like a train wreck during morning rush hour for a bunch of people heading to work at Cirque du Soleil. It looks like the aftermath of a bar brawl in the middle of Pride weekend! Piles of rhinestone chain, bits of clay, bags of sequins spilled out where they'll stick to the wrong thing, boxes of stuff that I didn't find the one thing I was looking for in but maybe I'll need them in a little while. Sharpies to paint charms with, little glass beads, tiny hands, rolls of wire, action figures that look like they just got back from a tour in a combat zone. It gets really bad when I'm in between art shows and half my display stuff is packed up for the show and the other half is placed strategically where I'm sure I'll trip over it. I make my self nuts with it... so today is cleanup day!

"I Just Beat Another Deadline"

available here...

Before Summer Fades...

2010-10-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

... here's another "Social Butterfly"!

"Twilight"

available here...

Today was a good day to stay inside and finish projects (Seattle can't decide if it's going to have an Indian Summer or an Eastern European Winter). There were moments of sunshine interrupted by long stretches of overcast bluster. So I cleaned 400 emails out of my inbox and finished this piece, a commission from my friend Eileen -

"Let's put our heads together"

This one is mounted on one of my new pin stands.

I reduced the height of the stand by almost half and discovered that it actually emphasized the piece the way I've always wanted it to. Finally!

Social Butterflies

2010-09-27T21:55:00.000-07:00

So... This past Friday evening, we performed our musical, Meet The Biscottis, down at the Spirit of Washington Events Center in Renton. I always say that every time we do it in a new location, we have to reinvent the wheel. It's so true... sound changes, lighting changes, timing changes, blocking changes. Do we have to work around waitstaff as they run food out to the tables? do we have to run it out ourselves? Do we have to compete with noise from the bar or the street outside? Script changes? Does this bit work anymore? Did that bit ever work? Why don't we try this? Does the management hate us? Does the management like us? Does the management know we're trying to do a show here?

This was our second show in this space... in August, we started working with this group (old friends from our days on the Mystery Train) and they really did a wonderful job for us... built a stage (well, actually they rented it but it was there!), set up a dance floor so we wouldn't beat our legs up. I really appreciated that because I spend a good part of the show either getting flung around by other characters or doing the flinging myself. They provided a lovely space and cooked a great meal for our guests. We had a good show.

This week, everything changed. Same place, different caterer. Slower ticket sales. some changes had to be made. Renting a 12' x 24' stage and having it loaded in and out is not cheap, so the stage had to go. Time was tight. we had two brushup rehearsals set for the week before and had to blow off one because several people were too sick. Other actors were rehearsing other projects. I myself had two rehearsals, a performance , an art show and a morning acting gig the week of this show. We all went in to a different space, different lights, the dance floor made up the performance space leading right up to the tables. We were working with wireless speakers and our sound man, Vinnie, was in a totally different location.

I should have know something was up by the way the audience made themselves at home on stage before the curtain went up. They had a party going before the actors even came out for the pre-show.

The show started and we knocked it out of the park. Great sound, beautiful harmonies. Everyone was confident, taking their time, hitting their lines and letting the audience have space to laugh. The floor set up let us get close to the audience all night long. Everyone we pulled up onstage during the improv scenes made the show better. I had trouble not cracking up at them.

And when the show was over, Gary, our Emcee, invited people to take the neon sign on the stage at its word. They were at "Club Vito" and they should feel free to stick around, have another drink and dance on the stage.

And they did!

Wonderful night. Best.Show.Ever

The Biscottis will be back October 15th. You can learn more about them and order tickets at

http://meetthebiscottis.com

You can learn about the Spirit of Washington Event Center at
http://spiritofwashingtoneventcenter.com

The pin up above, the first of my "Social Butterfly" series - "No Time To Lose!" is avaiable in

my online store

Krickett

2010-09-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

My Go-To Girl, my right hand in Texas since 1996 is having a Birthday today. Krickett Grimes, Mother, Friend, Nurse, Life Support and Fake Harley... I couldn't do it without her!

Erica

2010-09-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Okay, so to make a long story short... my stepfather, Bob Kelly, lived in Naples, Florida. There he had a wonderful girlfriend named Phyllis. Phyllis has a daughter named Carri and Carri has a daughter named Erica. For most of Erica's life, Bob was the most stable male figure around. Helping with school projects, watching her in plays, taking her to lunch, just generally being there, acting pretty much like a grandfather... except he wasn't. Sort of like the way he was to me, like a father... but not exactly. So what is Erica to me? My stepfather's stepgranddaughter? My little sister one floor downstairs? I don't know either! But she's sweet and talented and doing plays and making music and I'm really proud of her.

Here's a video of her...

This Only Happens In The Movies...

2010-09-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

I love movies. I love a good story. I love powerful images. I love being fooled by a clever technique and an elegant effect. I love characters that know who they are and act accordingly. I love characters that figure out it's time to change and do. I love to be surprised. I love to be touched. I love to get to the end of an improbable fable and still be able to say "Yeah, but wouldn't it be nice?". I love a guy in a rubber suit... well, most of the time... (Godzilla... yes, Joel Schumacher's version of Batman? No). I love gunslingers and swashbucklers and classic monsters. I love slapstick and stop motion and gangsters and hardboiled private eyes. I love Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks and Busby Berkley.

I love Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff and Buster Keaton. I love Tom Hanks dancing at FAO Schwartz and Antonio Banderas dancing on top of a bar with a guitar that fires like a shotgun. I love Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter, and Charlton Heston. I love Atticus Finch, Dexter Haven, and Lily Von Schtupp. I love Katherine Hepburn. I love Audrey Hepburn. I love Audrey the talking plant in Little Shop of Horrors (the first one, the cheap one). I love the way John Travolta gets to dance in every movie, even if it's a bad one. I love doves in slow motion and lions in winter. I love George Clooney. You got a problem with that? I love Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and Linda Hunt in Silverado. I love almost everything in Silverado. I love that Clint Eastwood keeps doing the last thing you'd expect him to do. I love vampires that know not to sparkle and werewolves that howl because they're lonely. I love the way Doctor Lecter strolls to his dinner date. I love the way the watch that Holly gets at the beginning of Die Hard is the thing that saves her life at the end. I love directors who know when a film is done and leave it alone. I love sitting all the way through the credits every time. I love movies.

I should probably make one.

"This Only Happens At The Movies" is available here.

Blow...

2010-09-17T16:11:00.000-07:00

This is a piece commissioned for a certain firefighter down in Ariziona. Recently, he took to playing the bagpipes...

His wife asked me to do a piece about playing the bagpipes... and bagpipes are funny looking enough on their own. I didn't feel like I needed to do a terribly realistic rendition of them. My work is more about how a thing feels when you're in the middle of it than how it really looks. So I decided to make the pipes part of the person.

It was only when i was done that I realized how much the piece looked like my favorite film comedian...

Doesn't Harpo look like he's plying the bagpipes here?