Airplane hotel in Costa Rica, hostel in Stockholm 1 May 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Architecture, Interior design, Restoration, Salvage.add a comment
File this under just for fun on Friday: Costa Rican Airplane Hotel Takes Flight. Fits right into my [lagging] commercial flight fetish too.
The two-room Boeing 727 suite is part of the Costa Verde Resort in Manuel Antonia, Costa Rica. Rates range from $300-$350 a night.
In February, The inhabitat blog reported on a Boeing 747 turned into a hostel for visitors to Stockholm. As if I needed another reason to visit the land of my (and my wife’s) ancestors,m a land full of good design, generally speaking.
The retired jumbo jet rests at the Stockholm-Arlanda airport. Tthe Jumbo Hostel’s offers a variety of rooms ranging from 350-3300 SEK (~ $40-$400). A conference room is available for rent as well. I think the next Mission Data International board retreat should be held there (in case my boss is reading this).
Anna Keiller smoked ceramic sculptures 27 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Artist profile, Ceramics, Found objects, Salvage, Sculpture.1 comment so far
Via Twitter (and thanks to searches I’ve set up in TweetDeck) I’ve become internetly acquainted with ceramic sculptor Anna Keiller. The most recent post on her blog, Fire and Earth, details her smoking process, which is much more exciting than using an electric kiln (as I do).
She also has an older post that talks a little more about smoke firing titled Smoke Firing. I talk about my process in this post from last July. The following is one of her recent works titled The Abduction, after a Swedish fairy tale. I quite like the coloring on the piece, and give her props for the use of salvaged materials in the base and post.
I think I’m going to have to find myself a barrel and try this smoking method out. It looks much more fun and is probably cheaper than running the kiln to smoke. The only trick to barrel smoking for me could be locally enforced burn bans we suffer from in Northwest Arkansas on a fairly regular basis.
New Work: Thunderhead 21 January 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Salvage, Sculpture.1 comment so far
I finished a small wood sculpture I’ve been working on for a number of months today. A friend wants to buy it as a gift, or it would probably still be sitting in the garage studio collecting dust. I had been toying with ways to apply it to a sort of base for some time, not liking any of the ideas I’d come up with so far.
It’s crafted from a salvaged board, a very crooked board, of unknown variety. My best guess is that it’s sycamore, although it really seems too heavy for that. Can you say a lot, a lot of sanding.
I really like the little guy (about seven inches tall), although when I applied a beeswax finish a couple of the laminated joints showed up more than I wanted. The form and finish are beautiful nonetheless, and I sense that similarly abstracted storms will be forthcoming both in wood and clay.
Gifting Don’t: Wrapping like crap on purpose 22 December 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Beauty, Christmas list, Modern culture, Salvage.add a comment
I just learned about a phenomenon called crapwrap, where people try to wrap things crappily. They’ll even do it for you, for a fee. The local news spot showed boxes wrapped with gaudy reused paper and brown packing tape.
The interview included a crap-wrapping employee talking about why they do what they do. He suggested it was a great way to present a package in a one-of-a-kind way.
He’s wrong. Really, the boxes just look like your four year old took a crack at the box. There are soooooo many creative ways to use ordinary objects to embellish beautifully instead of elementary-like. Crumpling up ugly paper, poor technique and using bawdy tape are just that, and they are not beautiful when combined. They are simple and ugly.
There are so many more so much more interesting textures and materials around your house that can be both recycled and unique. Think brown paper bags, foil, spray paint, old t-shirts for wrapping. For joining think clips, rivets, thread, thumb tacks; for tags use the inside of Avon boxes, last year’s Christmas cards (heck, use these for paper!), etc etc.
Of course, if you actually want an ugly gift to give to someone, be my guest. Just don’t say the the best way to make a gift unique is to make it ugly.
Entitlement, affluenza and we’re spoiled brats! 6 November 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Affluenza, Art, Christianity, Christmas list, Entitlement, Etsy, Handmade, Intentional observation, Modern culture, Salvage.3 comments
Christmas is coming! My friend Amy, on her blog Growing Like Trees, talked yesterday about gift giving. Or, in her case, not gift giving. Her post inspired the following.
I really love the Christmas season, but I’m terrible at receiving gifts. I only realized this a few years ago. If I get something that doesn’t pique my interest, or that I wasn’t expecting, I’m not very good at hiding my disinterest — or feigning interest. No one’s ever told me that I was being a jerk, I just happened to realize it after looking back at how I’ve handled Christmas gifts in the past ten years.
“Jerk” might be a strong self-accusation, I hope. I’m not the kind of person that gets giddy about things very often (to my wife’s chagrin). Even when I’ve received something I really like, I fear my thoughtful countenance risks appearing ungrateful after I tear through the tape and wrapping paper.
Then again, maybe my countenance doesn’t look anything like I’m imagining it. Thankfully, no one in the family owns a video camera. Regardless, I know that my heart has been ungrateful when it should have been giving thanks.
I am one of a very spoiled generation. Many of our parents and grandparents live comfortably, have expendable income for luxuries — luxuries that didn’t exist even 25 years ago — take vacations at will etc. etc. Little do we realize as youth that a lot of these people lived very modestly when they were our age. By our age I mean in their 20s and 30s.
In a culture super-saturated with objects to be bought, in a culture ubiquitously and unapologetically inundated with advertising, in a culture where we are referred to (and might even refer to ourselves) as “consumers,” we expect to have what we want now. Credit makes that possible.
And then causes the economy to collapse (when misused).
Frankly, I could go without any gifts at Christmas. The food, family, [good] decorations, mystery and so on are enough. Further, I tend to buy things I want, if I can afford them (i.e., not on credit), when I want. My father-in-law is the same way. It makes it difficult, I’m told, for others to buy gifts for us around this time of year.
On the flipside, I very much enjoy giving thoughtful gifts. Thoughtful gifts are generally not iPods and laptops. Sure, the tweens in the house will think these are great when wrapped, under a tree and tagged with their name. But thoughtful gifts are usually not LCD televisions and barbie dolls or Tickle Me Elmo.
Thoughtful gifts are one-of-a-kind, unique and tailored to an individual. An original painting is a great example, and yes you can afford one, especially if you’re already thinking of spending $300 on an iPod Touch or $900 on a Sony flat screen TV. You just have to know where to look. Handmade scarves or teapots are other examples, which you can find a plethora of on Etsy.
I’m just learning that I like to find or create thoughtful gifts, just like I’ve just learned that I’m a jerk about receiving gifts. One of the better examples of a thoughtful gift was an advertisement I framed for my brother. Three years ago my home group — cell group, life group, Bible study, call it whatever you want — spent a day helping a diabetic woman clean out her garage. The garage was full of a amazing stuff, a lot of which was moldy and falling apart and went to the dump. The rest went into a garage sale.
There were all kinds of decorative things she used years ago in a shop she owned in California. There were enormous boxes of outdated clothing. She kept saying there was probably a bong out there too. The friend orchestrating the cleanup wanted to find it and take it home, which I thought was hilarious since he was an elder in our church.
We didn’t find the bong.
Being a dumpster diver and prone to salvaging anything I find interesting enough, I kept a keen eye on the stuff headed for the dump. A large stack of catalogs, of all the things to keep around for 25 years, ended up being the golden ticket.
I took home a 1979/1980 retailer’s catalog. It was full of things like VCRs and Camcorders listed for ungodly amounts of money, and the back cover proudly presented an Atari 2600 console. I had one of these growing up that grandpa found at a garage sale. My brother was and is an avid gamer. The page displaying the game console was in great condition. I held onto it for months before the holidays rolled around when I cut the page out, framed it and gave it to Daniel for Christmas.
Opportunities like that have to be made, sought out, and even when you’re looking out for them they don’t always show up. It also helps to know a person well. Finding or devising the perfect gift for that second cousin you met ten years ago at a reunion will probably be exponentially more difficult than for your nuclear family members.
Two things in conclusion. First of all, to any friends or family who may have felt slighted by my spoiled brat reaction to a gift you gave me in the past, I’m sincerely sorry. I pray I’m a more gracious person in the future, starting this year. Secondly, this post introduces a two month series where I will recommend ideas to readers for unique and one-of-a-kind gifts.
The series will be titled Gifting, and will be published whenever I come across a good idea up until Christmas.
In the Studio: Saturday smoke and salvaged oak 19 October 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Ceramics, Disposable culture, Northwest Arkansas, Restoration, Salvage, Sculpture, Siloam Springs.2 comments
This weekend I made a complete disaster of my studio as I began sorting and cutting boards for my dining room table project, so help me God I’m not biting off more than I can chew.
I salvaged the rough sawn oak planks and 2-bys three years ago while working as a sub, helping remodel houses. The planks came from a wreck of a house in Gentry, Arkansas, that probably should have just been torn down. Apparently the man who lived there had made his living at a saw mill. The 2-bys — ranging in measurement from 1.5″ to 3″ thick — were used to frame a ceiling in an old farm house on south Elm Street in Siloam Springs. We vaulted the living ceiling in the house, and I saved these from the dumpster.
I need to borrow a friend’s planer to work the boards into a more furniture friendly state of mind before going much further. The gist of the plan is to use the planks as the tabletop, with their wonderfully warm aged color, the quartersawn 2-bys as an apron around the planks and the rest as the base.
While I was arguing with my radial arm saw — which apparently died as I cut the oak yesterday — I smoked a few of my storm forms from last weekend’s successful firing.
I started with the least successful form, that also cracked last week, with very low expectations. I failed to apply terra sigs to these, and in my experience so far clays without sigs don’t take smoke very well. This clay, a mid-fire Texas white, does as you can see in the photographs.
There are some incredibly subtle and beautiful variations that I haven’t gotten in any of my other smoking attempts. After this one turned out so well I worked on two others. I wrapped the works in newsprint and then foil and put them in the electric kiln for one hour, with the lower element on high. I tried something a little different with a thunderhead, where I wanted the top to be white (since it’s in the sun) and the updraft below to be dark. So I wrapped the bottom only. This worked, in that the color was only where I wanted it to be, but the variation in the color wasn’t nearly as interesting.
My wife still like the results of that one though, which is saying something.
New Work: Storm at night 3 October 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Abstract art, Art, Ceramics, Found objects, Salvage, Sculpture.add a comment
Here’s a new mixed media work combining the the smaller and more abstracted clay forms I was working with earlier in the year with the carved wood platforms that I started giving attention to during the summer.
I’m calling this Storm at Night on account of the dark blue glaze on the top. White low-fire clay body, salvaged cedar with a red oak stain. Probably about 14 inches long.
New Work: Hanging funnels 25 September 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Ceramics, Found objects, Mixed media, Salvage, Sculpture.add a comment
These have actually been hanging in my studio for a few months now as I get a feel for them. They don’t have names yet, but I like them. I have more funnels and more wood, although I wasn’t nearly as satisfied with the compositions of the remaining pieces so haven’t assembled any more than these two.
I’m quite fond of the one above. The funnels are finished with a cobalt glaze and a smoked terra sig. They were formed from a block of clay and hollowed out, leaving a bridge to hang them from. The piece of wood is from a salvaged antique chair, quartersawn oak finished with beeswax. The rest of the chair parts aren’t nearly as dynamic (i.e., they’re straight). This piece has an aesthetic that reminds me, for some reason, of Japan.
The second one is nice as well, but not quite as interesting. The wood is myrtle, which my brother picked up on his honeymoon in Oregon, again finished with beeswax. There is a nice crevice of sorts in the block which adds visual intrigue. The funnel is glazed with some of the leftovers from my line blends. The dark brown is a manganese gloss; the other is probably titanium, but I don’t remember for certain off-hand. The latter finish crazed like crazy which was nice.
My friend Joel suggested I hide the knots. I do this on my strung out works whenever possible, but it didn’t work like I hoped on this one. I will, at some point, tuck the knots on this piece away by seating them into holes in the block.
New Work: Cloud over Siloam 20 August 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Art, Ceramics, Mixed media, Northwest Arkansas, Salvage, Sculpture, Siloam Springs.5 comments
This is the first finished work in the new series of clouds. It’s a low-fire white clay with a clear matte glaze mounted on salvaged, laminated cedar. I’m moving, as necessary, to different clays with more grog. This piece made it through the bisque firing OK, but — strangely — cracked profusely during the glaze firing. It stayed together though and I thought it presentable.
The cedar is sanded mostly smooth on top and textured on the sides. Epoxy joins the two pieces. I like the broad grain in the wood, stained with a dark walnut color, and its contrast to the clay. I’m not too fond of the angle at which the clay rests on the base, although this isn’t something you can see in these photos.
It was intentional on my part to let the cloud hang over some of the edges of the terrain, so where the wood is affixed wasn’t sanded completely level. Either I wasn’t careful enough, or I just don’t like the idea.
Time will tell.
Disposable day 31 March 2008
Posted by pcNielsen in Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Furniture, Salvage, Siloam Springs, Sustainable living.1 comment so far
Today is one of two weeks of cleanup performed by the city in Siloam Springs. Place anything you want to dispose of by the road and by Friday it is supposed to have disappeared, carried off either by the official crane-truck or by citizens hunting for treasures.
And there are some treasures. Two houses down from my own were two pieces of furniture that caught my eye, one a decent looking table top. Both were gone within hours of being placed roadside. I didn’t even wander down to examine them after thinking about the storage nightmare they would create — this on a weekend I spent cleaning and organizing. In fact the pile in front of that particular house dwindled down to almost nothing before being restocked this morning with a beastly, legless pool table among other odds and ends.
This post, however, refers to the darker side of the twice annual junk-fest. I couldn’t help but think of the wasteful society we live in as I passed by pile after pile of stuff. Regular readers know this rant already. In our mass-producing, mass-consuming culture little consideration is given to how many of these trinkets will end up in landfills. With the environmental movements of recent years this is changing to a degree, but very slowly.
Take the chair in the above photograph for instance. We’ll ignore its lack of aesthetic appeal in this particular dialogue. First off it’s not in that bad of shape. Why is it being thrown away; did the owners trade up? The dog got a hold of one corner and the fabric is a bit faded, but most college students would love to have this in their dorm room. So it might be missing its feet; what are bricks and two-by-fours for!
I can imagine, just by the looks of it, that is a cheap chair — like so much factory fare in our day and age. The company’s bottom line drives design and choice of materials. Everything has to be as inexpensive as possible in order to maximize profits to pad the CEO’s bonus and keep the shareholders happy. Further, the shorter the life-span of a gadget or appliance the sooner it will need to be replaced, thereby ensuring future sales for the company — so long as they can create brand loyalty and/or attract new buyers.
Can’t companies come up with ways to create more enduring products and still make money (Or do we first need to get them to agree to make less money?). Do consumers need to be convinced it’s worth it to spend a little more for a chair or dining room table (or house, for that matter) that possesses some staying power?
