inside the sand mold

I like to use words in my sculpture. I have been working with words since the 60’s. I have a machine in my studio that will make rubber stamps from lettering I design. I press these raised letter forms into the sand and this impression will appear on the surface of the bronze when it is later cast into the sand mold. The image shows the inside of a sand mold with the lettering in reverse ready to pour 2200 degree molten bronze.

Picture two shows the flask in place over the wax tree with the vents hooked onto the insides of the flask. A folded piece of paper is than rubber banded around the outside of the flask to extend the height of the flask to prevent boil over in a latter step in the process.

Picture three shows the dry bowl with an exact amount of jewelers plaster weighed out in grams on the scale. In the next picture (labeled as the second number three) shows the plaster, water, wet mixing bowl, slotted spoon, and beaker for measuring the water.

The picture labeled four is the plaster in the middle of mixing while still lumpy.  I mix up to two minutes as needed for the lumps to absorb into the mix.

Then we move on to picture five where we put the bowl of plaster under the dome on the “vac-u-cast” machine to suck all the air out of the mixture.  We allow the mixture to come to a boil then count 20 seconds and release the vacuum and take the mixture to the next step.

Picture six shows the plaster at full boil under the dome.

The next step, picture 7, we pour the plaster into the flask just to covering. Then in picture eight we put the flask under the dome carefully not to lose the bottom of the flask.  This time we turn on the “vac-u-cast” for 90 seconds to remove any air that may be trapped around the pendants. We remove the dome and add more plaster to just about a quarter of an inch from the rim.  (This space will allow the vac-u-cast to work when we pour the silver into the flask at a latter time.

Once done we clean up our dishes and start the next one.

From start to finish for one flask takes about 15 minutes.

Check out some earring that you can’t find on my web site on ETSY

Step 1:  Create the sprew or the tree itself.  I take a strip of sprew wax that is in long segments and cut it down to the appropriate height for the flask.  Then I cut that strip into four even strips.  Then taper it at the top.

Step 2:  Using sticky wax shown melted here in a shallow can I square of the end of the sprew and dip it in the molten tacky wax. (This part moves fast.)

Step 3:  Quickly plant the sprew in the center of the button of the base as shown.  (The button is made out of tacky wax and is inside the rubber cap that will be used to secure the flask for the investment process at a later time.)

Step 4:   Check to make sure that the sprew is centered on the button.

Step 5 and 6:  Stamp the chosen wax pendent’s with the “STER” stamp if pouring silver, if pouring bronze no stamp required.  Using an alcohol lamp as a heat source, I heat up a stainless steel stamp and very carefully stamp the pendants.  (Alcohol is used in the lamp because it burns clean and does not leave ash behind on the stamp, which could add unwanted texture and junk to the pour.)

Step 7:  Using the tree we set up and the molten tacky wax again we will now attach the wax pendant. First take the pendent and hold it against the side of the heated tacky wax can to angle the stem at 45%. The angle must be on the front side of the stem of the pendant. Than dip in the tacky was and stick to the tree keeping the face of the pendant facing up. (Latter when casting in metal this will insure that any junk in the pour will rise to the back of the pendent instead of the front.  By the time of the pour the tree will be inverted with the button becoming the pour basin for the molten metal.)

Step 8 and picture 9:  Continue adding pendants in this same fashion till the tree is full.  Make sure to leave space at the bottom of the tree to allow you to get in with snips to trim off the pendents.

The next step would be investing:  From Wax to Plaster.

Check out some of my jewelry on ETSY.

Beginning the process of dreaming in clay a new series of sculptures called “Pages from the Book of the Earth”

I want to introduce a new plan unfolding at Kaminsky Studios. Back in 2004 I had the golden opportunity to produce a series of sculptures that gave me the chance to speak about some of the ideas I have been nurturing for many years. I called the collection: Pages from the Book of the Earth. These sculptures were tied to an idea that “The Earth Speaks” we just have to learn to listen. Over the next while I will be posting glimpses of the collection until July when I will be having a show of the complete collection.

I decided to spend some time there. Only how was I going to make a living.

One of my interests as a sculptor was with the concept of intersections, I was interested in what happened when things, information, energy and such came together. How did they change each other. One thing that was clear in that little tourist town was that you could make a living making something that was unique and interesting and it could be sold if it was reasonable in price. My professional specialty was metal casting. I decided to try turning my intersection studies into sculpture that you could wear. I started with belt buckles.

Now for some technical stuff. Most metal castings these days are done by a process you have probably heard of, the lost wax process. It involves making something out of wax, putting it in a ceramic kind of shell, burning the wax out and filling the hole left with molten  metal. That was how I did the earliest Eureka castings. Along the way, though, I discovered a process known as sand casting. That involves packing a fine grain sticky kind of sand against the artwork, pulling the artwork out and then filling the space left with metal. It is a process we have been doing for thousands of years.

You can’t stop a curious guy from fiddling with the craft. After a while working with sand casting I started playing with the process itself to make the artwork. I enjoyed working inside the sand mold creating the artwork in the space I began to call the sand matrix, working in the negative and  pouring metal into the sculptural form. All my jewelry designs were done that way. Over the years I chose the best of the designs and made rubber molds of them to cast them by the lost wax method.

I made jewelry from 1971 until 1984 when we left Eureka Springs to come to Fayetteville. In Fayetteville there was more opportunity to make larger sculpture so I stored the molds and got involved in public art works. In 2008 the economy took it’s tole of the art community and I had to again find a way to make a living. I took all the many designs I had made molds of and started casting them again. Now here we are in 2012 and I am still making the jewelry along with a number of other sculpture projects. The lessons I learned in the sand molds are giving all my sculpture greater depth and new meaning.

My personal evolution is the story of New Yorker inspired by the majesty of The Ozarks. Just like my art, I’ve learned to be more than just a New Yorker or a resident in the Eureka Brotherhood Cooperative,  I am seamless a part of my surroundings and experiences. My art too has evolved in this way.

Come walk with me into the field across the road. The grass is high but it is not quite time to mow. It is a beautiful day under the baking sun and the blades of grass sway and tickle your arms and your knees. You feel the energy of the wind on your check and in the force of the grass as it moves against your skin. The wind is invisible but you know it is there because the wind affects the grass and the skin on your cheeks but you cannot see the wind. 

It is not a matter of faith that you know the wind is there but a series of clues you refer back to the source. The wind exists and you can speak about it in many ways. You can measure it with various instruments and describe its attributes and even make predictions about it if you had your degree in meteorology. Or if you are a poet or some sort of artist you can make stories about it. That’s what I do. Artists of all kinds take their experiences and transform them into symbols that they offer to the world and wait to see if others identify with that experience. We want to know if the shared understanding we have is valid. 

You can see the field as a set of discrete objects connected and interacting, always in relationship to each other, intimately connected by proximity and responsive to the energy of the wind or whatever other energy may come its way. 

Neighbors in the marketplace, crowds moving along the sidewalk concertgoers tuning in to the sounds awash around them. These are examples of fields. Spaces filled with discrete objects always ready, always waiting to react to move energy along a path from you to me, me to you and beyond. 

I will talk about fields more as time goes on.

that, yes, it’s all right, I understand that, I’ve been there too.

When I sit down with clay in my hands and make only a single mark there, just one touch to move the clay I can look at what I’ve done and it triggers a memory or a feeling that makes me see another mark to make and one step follows another and a world begins to take shape that brings me into those childhood fantasies,

those dreams of the infinite world of god. All I have to do is follow the forms that lay themselves out on my canvas and I can gain access to an understanding of god. Now I wish to share it with you.

The Sacred Ground Project is a collection of cast stone sculptures. They are like ancient slabs of stone that hold a message from the earth, a message from bygone worlds.

What you see in this image is a fragment of the rich surface of the large slab sculpture. The surface is crowded with all kinds of images, words, patterns and forms. This is my rendition of the “field” of information and energy that fills the invisible world all around us. The phrase “You are Standing on Sacred Ground” is rendered in many languages, all moving though the space in many layers.

Near the center of the image you see a kind of explosion. This is an intersection, the coming together of energy or information. The bubbly forms represent the organic world, us, the human element. The crystal-like forms represent the earth and energy opening. Energy or information moving though the field has collided or joined with other energy, new particles or information has been released. Emerging from the explosion, moving off to the left you see a figurative form, the creation of the human. I call that a “genesis” moment. As if we are born of the earth itself.

Take the time to dip into this world I have created. Let go of the time pressures you live with every day and stop in your garden to look into the window I have offered. You are standing on sacred ground.

The way to see the sculpture is to imagine you are looking through a window, a circular window into an invisible space. The sculpture is making visible the energy field that we all live in, a field of moving information and energy. You can actually read some of that message. Like your cell phone “reads” the electromagnetic field around us. The sculpture says: “You are standing on Sacred Ground” It says this phrase in many languages, all of them moving through the field in different ways taking different paths.

This disk is part of a collection of sculptures designed for the outdoors. They can be used in gardens, on walls of all kinds, at home entries and also in the home. They are the product of a long fascination with fields of all kinds meeting spiritual ideas.

As a kid I was fascinated with electricity, my parents often wondered why the fuses would blow when I was down in the basement in my “laboratory” It’s a wonder I didn’t electrocute myself down there. I was fascinated with electron flow but I was not satisfied seeing it through meters. As I got older and began to understand that I was an artist I could imagine what these tiny things could be like and was amazed to learn about the vastness of the invisible world. In college I was a physics major and worked nights as a test engineer.  As my life unfolded I began to have visions of interconnected events and ideas and made art about these ideas. A concept of god emerged.

I believe that god is the glue, the magnetic attraction that holds us all together, the stickum itself that brings one person to another, one idea to another and my sculpture speaks about these ideas, these interconnections.

I’m creating objects that speak about energy, time and space. Imagine you are walking in a place sacred and find there on the ground a stone with curious marks on it. You prop it up and find that you can actually read words on the surface of the stone, like some ancient Rosetta stone that brings you into that world understanding that you are touching something from that other world and yet it is your world.

As time goes on I will introduce the rest of this collection and show my other sculptures to help explain my concepts and their connection to you.