Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Curiosity


“Curiosity is essential for progress. Only when we look to worlds beyond our own can we really know if there’s room for improvement.”
                                                            Simon Sinek

I’ve always thought that curiosity is the best characteristic of our brains. It’s the ‘what if’ that expands our world in any endeavor that requires innovation to thrive and grow—art, science, cuisine, philosophy, whatever.
Most of my best ideas come out of a curiosity to know what would happen if I combined this with that or tried this process differently from what everybody else is doing or used a product that nobody else uses on polymer clay. I’ve just never been a follower of trends. If everybody else is doing it or wearing it or buying it or listening to it, I probably won’t.

Sometimes my curiosity prompts me to think “if everybody is doing THAT, what would happen if I do it this way?” That’s how I got started painting on polymer. It also helped that Sculpey decided to discontinue some primary colors in their Premo polymer clay range, so you couldn’t count on your blending formulae always being consistent. So thinking that the only consistency is the one you create yourself, I started using Genesis heat set oil paints on polymer, which I still use to this day. I’m not sure what got me started on applying texture but flat and super-shiny was never my thing. I hate sanding! Early on I set up a bead polishing system that involved a vibratory tumbler and plastic media which I learned from Grant Diffendaffer’s book.

So maybe innovation is a combination of curiosity and personal preference (or aversion). You hate sanding so you find some way to do your art without having to sand. Your supply chain is compromised so you find a way to get consistent color without having to depend on the whims of a manufacturer.
2014 may be remembered in the polymer clay community as The Year of the Hollow Bead Tutorial. Everybody seemed to be creating their own unique method of making hollow beads. Given how light the medium already is, I couldn’t see changing the way I made large beads using aluminum foil cores. Polymer beads are practically weightless so I just kept doing that. I was more concerned with what you do with the surface of the enclosed void (hollow bead) that you now have—how do you make THAT interesting? After covering a number of beads with veneers made with my newly-created, ‘super-textural’ texture sheets, I asked the ‘what if’ question and decided to make molds of some my most-favorite shapes. I’ve always done one-of-a-kind beads but I wanted to see how the same bead shape looked with different colors of base clay and a different color palette.

I’m still working on perfecting the technique but it mostly worked. I made a necklace up with two identical beads—one with a black clay base, one with white—and used them together. In the piece below they are the beads closest to the wire rings connected to the chain. They add a bit of symmetry to an otherwise very asymmetrical piece. And I’ve once again progressed a bit through the exercise of my curiosity.
 
 
'Attitash' -- polymer clay, acrylic, crayon, African copper beads, vintage copper chain, carnelian chips

 Azo Gold Bead - Polymer, acrylic, crayon, heat set oil paint - same bead as above with a textured layer sandwiched between the halves
 
Azo Gold bead, flip side
 
 
'Planetfall' - polymer clay, found amber piece, acrylic, heat set oil paint
 
If any of you have had a similar experience, I’d love to hear from you about something you did last year that curiosity caused you to discover about your art.


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