Busy Spring, Part 2

OK, Part 2. Picking up where we left off, which was in Oslo or something like that...

All the while, even as we were going on these various trips, we were also working on the renovation of our workshop. As that project creeped closer to completion, we began in earnest to look for metal-working tools. At some point Christina responded to a classified ad for a good-looking belt sander, and when we drove to the seller's location, only a few minutes from our homestead, we were surprised to walk into one of the largest machine shops I've ever seen, boasting the largest lathe in Skåne! 

Kodiak next to the largest lathe in Skåne

It turned out that the proprietor, a really nice guy named Farhad who emigrated here from Afghanistan a decade ago, was selling a lot of equipment, and we ended up buying the belt sander, a plate roller, and a beautiful metal table from him. Not long after that, Christina managed to find an old USSR-built pneumatic power hammer in Lithuania which she promptly painted fuchsia and named Ludmila.

But with all these heavy tools slowly making their way to Spitfire Konstbruk och Smide (the name of our newly-formed business) we were in need of a way to move these tools into our shop. That meant two things: 1) we needed a forklift, and 2) we needed to make a big door in our shop that the forklift could get through, where there was none before. I know that it must be only a small portion of this blog's readership who gives a shit about heavy equipment, but I can tell you that I was quite excited to find this Swedish-built Stocka 3-ton forklift at an auction. 

Unloading my new plate roller

Although it's rated at 3 tons, that fact that it can move the old babushka Ludmila, who weighs in at a hefty 3.3 tons, proves it's a conservative rating. 

It was around this time, as spring started to poke through the gloom, that the waves of house-guests started to wash up onto our shores. The first to arrive - and almost the last to leave - was our dear friend Brian Malley from Canada. Brian spent almost seven weeks here with us, mostly helping us build the shop and the other spaces, but also having fun adventures like bicycling in Copenhagen and camping in Portugal (more on that in a second!)

BRIAN!

I mentioned that Brian helped us build the 'other spaces.' Immediately upon his arrival, Brian, Christina, our friend Kryzs and I transformed a crappy and mostly empty space into a cozy and comfy self-contained guest apartment in only 2 weeks! 

BEFORE

AFTER

The apartment was put to good use; over the last few months we have had the pleasure of visits from Brian, Matt and Richard from Taos, Amy Westphall from Santa Fe, Cedar from Taos, my mom from Greece, and Eileen... also from Taos. 

Once the apartment was finished, we shifted focus back to the workshop. 

The workshop, early in the renovation...

After sorting out the ceiling and walls, the final hurdle was to cut the aforementioned door into the end wall of the building, big enough to move materials and tools in and out. By this time we were joined by Cedar, and all those capable hands made the job a success. 

Brian beginning to cut through the brick wall, and...

...the (almost) finished result.

And the shop today.

Of all the spaces we have renovated in the last few months, though.. the one that excites me the most is probably my art studio. I had been working on this space, slowly and by myself, over the months as time allowed. Once the shop and the apartment were finished, however, Brian and Cedar gave a huge push of energy and helped bring it to completion. I think that, of all the spaces we've renovated here, the difference between beginning and end is perhaps the largest in my studio. 

A series of photos showing the evolution of my studio space. As I write this, I have now mostly moved in and I am so excited to start working in there.  

When the building was finally done, we found ourselves in a strange situation. You may remember that Christina's sculpture, the Flybrary, was purchased by a young entrepreneur in Portugal. The purchaser decided at some point to build a new sculpture park in eastern Portugal, and the primary purpose of Brian's and Cedar's visit to Europe was to help move move the sculpture from the private estate where it now resides to the location of the new sculpture park. My mother had also arrived here in Sweden to look after Kodiak while we were working down south. However, in the weeks leading up to our departure on this scheduled work trip, there were problems with engineering documents, building permits, and equipment rentals, and the whole plan to relocate the sculpture fell apart. Everyone had taken off time from their busy lives to make this happen, and in recognition of this fact the purchaser of the sculpture generously agreed to pay us all almost 50% of what we would have earned on the job. So here we all were, in Europe with pre-purchased plane tickets to Portugal and a little extra cash. As a sort of farewell to Brian and Cedar and a closing of this chapter, we decided to rent a camper van and take a tour of Portugal! The highlights were the beaches...

 and the charming town of Porto. 

Probably the best thing we saw in Porto...

And the series of ridiculous 'band photos' we took! 

After 5 days in the van together we said bittersweet farewells and went our separate ways.

After Portugal, with no more house-guests, Sweden suddenly felt lonely. But there is never a shortage of things to do around here. And even after almost 2 years, we are in some ways still in the process of arriving. I have recently applied for the extension of my residency permit (which is a cumbersome process involving a period of time after the expiration of my first permit but before the approval of my second permit in which I am therefor quasi-illegal here). And, as of yesterday, I am finally the proud holder of a Swedish motorcycle license! It's actually kind of a big deal because, while the test for the car license is offered in Swedish, English, and Arabic, the motorcycle test is only offered in Swedish. I had to learn a lot of new Swedish, but about 10 days ago, I passed it!  My actual driving test was yesterday, which was also not exactly easy, but I passed that too and so now I can ride here!

This entire winter and spring, with all the building and visits, has felt a lot like a chapter in this story of moving to Sweden that we are writing. To mark the end of this chapter, and hopefully the beginning of a new one, we decided to have a party! We invited pretty much everyone we knew, and even with 10 or 15 of our friends not showing up, we still had a little over 40 people come see our new setup. Technically it was a 'shop-warming' party, but really it was a bit more than that. The shop was clean and well-organized, the tools were all out and on display, and the party functioned - or at least I hoped it would function - as a sort of flashing billboard, advertising to our nascent community that we are here, ready to start working, hoping to do cool stuff and integrate. (Or to put it another way, as our friend Benjamin recently did... Now that we've finished the hard work of building the spaces, now comes the even harder work of working IN the spaces.)

Party!

If you find yourself reading this blog and thinking that we must be running out of money by this point, you would be correct. Everything we have done up to this point has been fantastically expensive, and the resources we amassed by selling sculptures, cars, and even our house have now been more-or-less depleted. So yes, it's time for us to work. I have submitted proposals to a few opportunities for building new sculpture; so far none have been approved but I will continue submitting. With the skills and resources at our disposal, there must certainly be many ways that Christina and I can make an income from our own shop, and we are hoping to find those channels before we are forced to take hourly jobs. Speaking personally, I would like nothing more than to make paintings and sculptures and be able to earn a living doing that. Fingers crossed.

Speaking of which, here's some more art...

A pencil drawing done with no visual reference... harder than it sounds!

Another drawing. I continue to be inspired by the structural and conceptual overlap between tree branches and the female body. I recently proposed another sculpture on this theme to a sculpture park in Oslo. Here's the proposal image:

If the people in Oslo reject this proposal, I think I will just build it anyway. This whole construct of waiting and hoping for some curator or another to say YES to your idea is totally fucked. It kills the spirit of the artist, and the art-making. I've made some of my best work just because I wanted to.

And here's a sculpture that I'm close to finishing, which I will likely cast in bronze...

Kodiak and I will be going back to the States on Monday. We will spend a week in New Hampshire with my brother Trevor, and about three weeks in Taos, where we will be joined by Christina. As with my previous trips to Taos, I am not too excited about this one because it feels like a disruption to the flow of things here. But I imagine that, just as I did on my previous trips, I will find being in Taos unexpectedly enjoyable. It's always fun to see old friends and visit old familiar places, and Taos is a magically beautiful place after all. 

If you made it all the way through to the end of Part 2, thanks! I hope to see all of you soon.

Hugs,

Christian

Busy Spring, Part 1

OK, yes it's been a long time since my last post. A little over six months, actually... which is a long time for this blog. I have done SO much in these last six months (most of it with Christina and/or Kodiak) that I have made the unusual decision to split this post into two parts. At this very moment, you are beginning to read Part 1. In a few days I will post Part 2. You can blame this on me... for having paused so very long between posts. I'll do my best to keep abreast of things better in the future! Let's begin...

As of my last post, I had just returned from Rome and we had just begun working on renovating our workshop. Knowing that we would need tools when our shop was completed, I drove down to Berlin in December to take advantage of a good deal on a nice TIG welder being sold by a friend, and I had the pleasure of staying with my old friend Guy and his family. Guy's help in building With Open Arms in Berlin in 2018 was invaluable, and it was lovely to see him again.

Not long after that we escaped the dreary Swedish winter by spending the New Year in Athens with my brother Cles and my mother. 

In Athens with Cles

Cles and his wife Kelly had just welcomed a pair of baby girls, Kyveli and Elektra, into the world! It was so fun to see them! We then in turn escaped Athens for a few days on the Greek island of Hydra. I've written about Hydra before... about how ridiculously charming it is, how unspoiled it is by the modern world. It's really an amazing place. No cars, no roads, just donkeys and cats. So many cats! 

The feeling I had this time was really one of being transported back to a simpler time. There is something that I find so seductive about the idea of living a pared-down, simpler life that I even started fantasizing about trying to buy a house on Hydra one day. Oh well, one can dream!

The simple life

While on Hydra it become so obvious to me (in case I'd forgotten) how much I love cats. In fact we all fell so much in love with one particular cat (which Kodiak named Calypso) that I even started researching how to take her home with us. 

Calypso

In the end, that wasn't such a good idea... but we returned to Sweden with the clear goal of finding a cat for our new farmhouse. My only criteria was that I wanted a black (or dark-colored) cat. After quite a bit of searching, we found a mother and daughter duo who we named Stella and Luna. They are not black... but they're tough little farm-cats and they're a perfect fit for our family.

Stella and Luna

In February Kodiak and I again escaped the Swedish gloom by spending a few days in Oslo, the capital of Norway. OK, maybe we weren't actually escaping any gloom, but Oslo was really fun... full of good museums (really good museums, including a military museum that Kodiak Loved, and a museum of polar exploration where you can wander around on board the actual ships which they took to the north pole a hundred years ago!), good food, beautiful views, and lots of sculpture. In fact Oslo is home to the world's largest sculpture park featuring the work of only one artist, and it was precisely that park which drew me there. Gustav Vigeland is Norway's most famous sculptor, and with good reason. He was fantastically prolific during his long life, and the park which (informally) bears his name and the accompanying museum are full of literally hundreds of monumental sculptures executed by him or by his assistants. Actually the fact that he had an army of assistants tasked with carrying out his designs brings us to an interesting handful of points to make about him. 1) Because he was so well-loved in his native Norway, and because he was working in the years before and after the turn of the twentieth century, an era which was characterized by industrialization, optimism, and cultural investment in Europe, he received a tremendous amount of support and assistance from the Norwegian state. This support took the form of financial assistance which certainly helped retain all those assistants, but also resulted in a unique deal in which the city of Oslo not only gave Vigeland an amazing city park to fill with his work, but also gave him a spectacular and huge building in a great part of the city to serve as his home and studio, in exchange for that very same building eventually reverting back to the city upon his death and subsequently serving as a museum of his sculpture. What a deal! I don't think that sort of state sponsorship really happens anymore... 2) The second point to make about the assistants is that, although on first glance it might seem like an antiquated arrangement, especially insofar as the Norwegian state might have helped him retain those assistants, a working arrangement like that is not so different from what we see with today's billionaire art stars. People like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst need only sketch something on a napkin... and then their minions do the hard work of realizing the idea as an actual object. During the construction of Vigeland Park, Vigeland was working in much the same way; he would make a small clay 'sketch' of a sculpture (these clay sketches are all in the museum), and his assistants would execute it in full-scale from granite. A lot of people like to shit-talk artists who work in this mode (and I'm sure there are major disadvantages to being 'distanced' from the actual production work), but it doesn't sound that bad to me!

A few of my favorites from the Vigeland Park and Museum.

The centerpiece of the park... Vigeland's monolith. Look closely to see what the tower is 'made of.' Remember that you can open any of these photos in FULL SIZE by right-clicking (or Command-Click on a Mac) and opening in a new tab. (Not my photo)

2 more sculptures from the streets of Oslo. A diver near the harbor (cast stainless, nice!) and a monument to those affected by breast cancer. The sculpture is modeled from a real person and her story, as detailed on a nearby plaque, was intense.

On the topic of Damien Hirst, on our last day in Oslo I discovered another, more contemporary sculpture park which featured one of my favorite sculptures by Hirst, Anatomy of an Angel. 

The piece presents a medical-style cutaway of an archetypal angel from the Christian faith. By drawing attention to the fact that angels share most of their exterior anatomy with mortal women, and presumably therefor their interior anatomy as well, I think the piece attempts to question the idea that they could somehow be immortal. Or at least that's what I take from it!

While in Oslo we also discovered a really super unusual store which calls itself an 'army-surplus store', but was really so much more. You could buy everything from knives and uniforms to dried insects to animal skulls in there. My kind of place. Kodiak went nuts in there!  

At some point not too long after our return from Oslo I attempted to purchase a genuine Jassans sculpture at an online auction... 

....but the bidding quickly eclipsed my purchasing power... and I failed. Despite all my fascination with Hirst and Vigeland and all the other amazing sculptors of the world, Jassans is my favorite. It's been a few years since I wrote about him, the great Catalan sculptor who I discovered while living in Barcelona, but my love for him hasn't diminished. In the 8 years that I've been a fan, that was the first time I saw one of his pieces come up for sale, and I was heartbroken for days after losing that auction. I've got to figure out how to make some money so I'm ready if another one ever shows up! (Ironically there's a strong argument to be made that one of my best shots at making enough money to buy sculptures like this is just to start making sculptures like this...)

I'll finish up Part 1 with a little update on my own art production. To be honest it's been a busy few months - a fact which will become even more clear in Part 2 - so I haven't exactly been cranking out the work. But back in February I did start a figure drawing group, and that has kept the nerve fibers between my eyes and hands in good shape. You might remember that back in Taos I was enthusiastically involved in such a group, and I figured that it would be easy to find a local one here in Sweden to join. But after a few months of searching, I came up empty... so I started a group. We meet on Monday evenings in Malmö, and I've gradually started to produce some decent drawings. I have lately begun experimenting with drawing directly in pen, which is so much more of a commitment... but also signals, I think, a bit more confidence. Here are a few drawings...

I have more of my own art to share, of a different and slightly wider variety, in the next post.

OK, stay tuned for Part 2 in a few days, in which I discuss our awesome new workshop and all the fun adventures we've had with all the fun people who have visited! It's already written, so I promise it will really happen! 

I'll end with this great picture taken by Cles, in Athens' First Cemetery...

C