Heartbeat – SOLD
- Heartbeat View #1
One of the things I’ve been experimenting with lately has been taking pieces that my have boring grain and giving them a boost of color. That’s how Heartbeat got started.
One of my more popular pieces is roughly the size and shape of a large onion. Being from the south, I would say it’s a Vidalia Onion. It’s just a nice pleasing shape and fits comfortably in the hand. It is familiar, even if you don’t handle onions very much.
This piece had spectacularly boring grain, so I wanted to cut it and paint it a bit. This time I used I took my Automach and a wide slightly carved spoon chisel and sliced along the equator of the piece as it sat on the lathe. I then finished hollowing it out and gave it a good sanding and set it aside to dry. Then coated it in the Brick Red Milk Paint. Taking a claret piece of sand paper, spun it on the lathe and cut back as much of the surface paint as possible. Then pared off the bottom and set the piece aside for a few days to dry.
My signature cracks came along, but this really wide split opened up. Since I was growing to use cyclone fencing to fasten belly staples the scale was fine. But for the smaller cracks the cyclone fencing was out of scale. So I rummaged various hardware stores until I found some black upholstery staples. Perfect!
But I was a little worried about the red color. It just didn’t have the contrast that I wanted, but I decided to go ahead and finish the piece and hope for the best. The upholstery staples worked great, but I can’t fashion them as well as I can the cyclone fencing, so I had to be a lot more exact with my marking, drilling and hammering. But I was pleased with the result. Still the lack of contrast between the red and the subtle red tones of the natural wood were bothersome. That is until I hit the piece with a coat of shellac. As I layered on more and more thin coats, the piece began to pop, and became lustrous and aged at the same time. My daughter said that it made it look really old, like it had been around since ancient times.
Alternate View Showing Chiseled Equator
So Heartbeat was born. The reds became redder and the aging of some of the other wood tones really make the piece look like it was recovering from quite a battering. Battered, but not broken.
In the process, I learned not to give up too soon on a technique and incorporating different scale of staples to bind the cracks was a great new addition.
