"we're not sure exactly what we want, something lovely... that'll keep deer out."
we agreed a rough budget and that it should last for a good number of years.
a dream commission even.
these garden gates are to be to the side of an extraordinary house being built to a design by palladio, something that was never actually built at the time and that he, we can surely presume, never envisioned in the cotswolds.
something lovely... where do you begin?
i looked at the sort of metalwork that accompanied palladio's buildings; i thought of cool, post modern twists; i pondered on the meaning of lovely; i even toyed with deer scaring imagery...
animal traps and hunting rifles began to sour the dream.
then one of my brothers pointed out, in the straight thinking genius way he has, that it was the perfect opportunity to make the sort of thing i'd always wanted to, or at the very least it was a good place to start.
... well obviously... i'd have thought of that in the end... probably sooner than in the end, actually...
for years i've been filling sketchbooks with doodle like squiggles, swirly shapes i thought would be paintings or something one day.* i'd more recently began to wonder if they could be made in metal, i am supposedly a metalworker...
anyway, a few late nights later i ended up with this.
it isn't in fact that much like the doodles.
it is though what i presented to the client and was given the deposit for just before christmas.
since then i've been gearing up to make them, this isn't quite as flakey as it maybe sounds.
i bought an english wheel which i'll explain another time... it shapes metal, will do for now. i also made some of the sort of shapes and lines i want to use, basically trying to ascertain how i'm going to do it. i have found in the past that i get halfway through making something before realising how i should've done it at the start but then not being able to change now because i'm already halfway through and it'll look odd if one end is done differently... so, i've been mucking about a bit getting the hang of the lingo.
this became a shelf bracket that i've decided to get a couple of casts of. two being the usual number required to support shelving, and me having taken long enough to do the one...
if anyone's interested i'll happily cast more to order but they ain't going to come out cheap. must remember to do smaller stuff...
(*re-reading this i suspect it conjours up an image of a bookshelf sagging under the weight of a huge, varied archive of work. to reset this somewhat closer to reality it should more accurately read, it's taken me years to fill a few sketchbooks with...)
so, the next thing is to draw the gates to scale on the floor so i've something to work from.
til next time...
