Ye Olde Sea Dog...At Least For Now That Is What I Am Calling It.

Last time I taught sculpture at Northwest Missouri State University (2015-2016), I began working on this sculpture.  From nearly the beginning of its creation, I planned to pair the sculpture in a show with a separate piece on canvas which is now being called Skinner Box II: Lessons Unlearned (you can check out a post regarding that piece by clicking HERE).  Since Skinner Box II is going into Pop Culture Palimpsest, it's high time I finish Ye Olde Sea Dog...

Here are a few images of it in the woodshop at Northwest Missouri State University shortly before I moved back to the QCA.  If you want to see what it took to get the piece to this point, here is a LINK to an earlier post from 2016 (if you look closely in that post, you'll see a quick shot of that pointing figure with arrows coming out of its head dude that I used in another piece I am working on called Countdown (Here is a LINK to the Post about the early stages of creating Countdown).

I cracked out my trusty Dremel Tool to carve this area out.

Anyway, it has sat in storage long enough.  It's time to re-engage the process...

The first thing I had to do was track down where I had stashed the various components for the sculpture.  At one point, I had sections of the piece stored in three different buildings around town.  After a brief treasure hunt, I have everything I had completed united under one roof.

I then assembled what I did possess in order to see what I still needed to fabricate.

In addition to making new components, I went back into the existing stuff to cut, sand, paint, and clean then up slightly.  I'm not trying to make this piece the Taj Mahal or anything, but I feel it is essential for it to look/feel like a 3-dimensional version of one of my painted constructions.  That will go a long way to unify the show.  First step is to apply several layers of paint to seal up the surfaces, fill in some holes, and spend some time reacquainting myself with the piece.

Then I deal with the top portion more in depth by wrapping select areas with jute.

Then I hit the jute and crescent areas with several layers of paint in order to change the textures of both the fabric/canvas, and the jute.

I have some more wrapping and priming to do to prepare/complete the top crescent shape.  Ultimately, it is going to have three heads sprouting up from the top portion.  All of these endeavors and more will have to wait for a future post.

Next time we're going to get a little patriotic...