Southside Pole

The name of this site is a shout out to my heritage: my south side Milwaukee upbringing and my Polish ancestry. We value honesty, simplicity and hard work and I hope my work reflects those virtues. The purpose of creating this site was to hold myself accountable creatively and stay motivated to put out new works.

[joshjalowiec]

I'm making some water well hand pumps i.e. "pitcher pumps" out of porcelain, my take on a fountain, drawing from childhood memories of camping with my family. I have not attempted to construct anything with this many parts or so many things that can and will go wrong, so it's important to document this before it all goes to heck. #porcelain #handpump #waterwell #fountain #ceramics #sculpture #camping #memory #wheelthrown #handbuilt #spout (at SMU Meadows School of the Arts) https://www.instagram.com/p/BuiodN5Hjvw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=hw1a8elizavg

[joshjalowiec]

Finally posting some pics from the show last December (2016). 

[joshjalowiec]

I cast this iron sculpture at Mesalands Community College, Tucumcari, NM, in March this year. It’s based on Peter from the Ezra Jack Keats book A Snowy Day. In this scene, he is out exploring when he notices his footprints and takes a moment to admire his tracks in the snow. The sculpture is 8″ tall and weighs 12 pounds, and has a Testors enamel finish with a rust patina.

[joshjalowiec]

Progress on this painting of an out-of-business tire shop in Farmersville. The double stripe in the road will be a crisp, deep, rich yellow, and I may work in some kind of pattern into the gravel-y area (tbd).

[joshjalowiec]

They poured bronze at school this morning, so I started freeing these castings from their dusty prisons. This will be a mashup of the Olson farm, as pictured in Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World, and Ironman Triathlete Julie Moss who crawled her way to a 2nd place finish in 1982. I'll post updates on further progress...

[joshjalowiec]

Progress continuing on this diptych of Mayer Foods and Hughes Insurance. It’s kind of my take on Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, but mine is Late Wednesday Afternoon. And barber poles are mostly history now, as are these businesses.

[joshjalowiec]

10-minute painting of artificial flowers. It looks like watercolor because I thinned the paint a lot; it's actually acrylic.

12" square (approx), acrylic on paperboard

[joshjalowiec]

This comes from the same class project as the flower painting that I recently uploaded i.e. a stylized magazine shot with a predetermined color palette. I liked the golden/yellows and reds together along with the gooey, shiny, syrupy goodness. In other words, it looked like fun so I did it as a side project even though it wasn't required...

8" x 10"h, oil on canvas

[joshjalowiec]

I made these nail clippers in Sculpture I. The assignment was to take something small and scale it up or something really big and scale it down. I picked nail clippers, a tool of which I am very particular. You're about to make a cut that requires precision so you want a tool that's going to be 1. easy to control 2. predictable and 3. safe i.e. you want a wide lever that's contoured to your thumb. NOT flat. NOT pointy. DUH. But I digress...

Anyway, these are made of sheet metal (about 1/16" thick...I think 16 gauge, but honestly I have no idea) and are approximately 30" long. To scale the thickness of the components accurately, I added a 9/16"h edge. The tops and edges are welded together, and there is a false bottom i.e. no bottom piece on the lever, nor the nail file, nor either of the cutting plates.

The pin is made frame a 2" diameter steel pipe I found at the local hardware store, then cut with the plasma cutter, then fitted with additional carefully-planned pieces of sheet steel. It's quite a little Frankenstein's monster, I must say.

The welds were all squared away with the angle grinder, or in some cases various air tool attachments. The pattern on the nail file was accomplished by sawing with a triangular file along a straight edge.

The clippers disassemble into three components – base, lever and pin – just like the real thing. This project really afforded me the opportunity to practice my newly acquired welding abilities as well as to brush up on my math and geometry skills. I know this isn't high art, but it sure puts a smile on someone's face when they first see it – especially when I press down on the lever and they see the cutters bite down. It's pretty great and I'm excited to share it with you!

p.s. I decided to add a rust patina. Look, these things aren't chrome. The edges and surfaces were never perfect or buffed nor were they meant to perfectly resemble real-life clippers with 100% realism. And even real clippers eventually experience some wear and tarnish and rust. So let's not kid ourselves about what we have here...a cute little lawn ornament (which I will mount with a heavy-duty chain because you know some enterprising little dudes will one day scheme to lift them). My homemade patina consisted of approx 16 oz. peroxide, 8 oz. vinegar and a couple tablespoons of salt, applied after heating the metal surface with a blowtorch. I barely used 4 oz. of the solution.

[joshjalowiec]

Moment of truth: the Yellow Phone 10-part homework series is complete as of last weekend. The last painting (the one at the top of this post) turned out better than I hoped or expected. Initially I expected the big cord "coil" to be the showpiece if there was one. Instead, I'm drawn to the ones with the heavy shadows and looser brushwork and the ones where I pushed the colors from what was "known" to what was seen or felt. 

Do you have a favorite?

[joshjalowiec]

Last update on Godzilla/Tankman project i.e. "Godzilla's got your back, little dude." A few weeks ago I applied the patina and paste wax, but I finally got around to taking photos this week which is actually pretty good timing in light of the new Godzilla film release this weekend. I already know the scale is wonky – bronze isn't cheap – but other than that, let me know what you think. 

[joshjalowiec]

In Painting class, we chose an image from a pile of food or garden magazine pages. These editorial shots were all very "styled" with a very specific, predefined color palette. This one features peonies. My goal was to paint some of it realistically – a triangular arrangement in the center – and paint the rest flat. Personally, I prefer the flat areas...they speak to me. They're not perfectly flat, which actually helps it in my opinion, and I like how some of the overlapping color blocks darken, creating an unintentional border. I think the realistic parts are just "nice". I really like how the yellow "billy balls" turned out. 

Coming to the end, the consensus was that the flat areas were too flat and it was lacking depth. The addition of the polka dots helps "push" the foreground from the background. Agree or disagree? I toyed with the idea of doing more dots (like black dots) or other patterns on the red peony on the right, but ultimately I restrained. It's telling me it's done.

If I could do it over again, I might have done the whole thing flatter. :)

p.s. the template for the polka dots was cut by hand using tracing paper and an X-Acto knife. I tried various methods to create a template. This one was the winner, but next time I will probably try a few other methods.

12" x 16", oil on canvas 

[joshjalowiec]

This Saturday is the Spring Iron Pour at Collin College. Solid iron goes into Sputnik, the nickname of the school's cupola furnace, and melts at temperatures in the neighborhood of 3000 degrees. We'll capture each batch of molten iron in a yoke to transfer to ceramic shells. Once cool, the pieces will move on to the last few steps toward becoming a finished work of art. It's a great spectacle I first got to see last October. But what y'all probably won't get to see is the preparation that goes into it i.e. breaking iron bathtubs, iron sinks, radiators, iron pipes, etc. -- any iron we can get our hands on -- into potato chip-size pieces so we can melt that junk and give it a new life. Here's a glimpse of that part of the process. The chips on the ground are maybe 10-20% of a 300-pound iron bathtub. Smashing success!

[joshjalowiec]

The TIG welder left some happy happy color color on my bronze ice cream cone. Thanks professor! (no seriously, how cool!) They don't let us amateurs near the TIG. Pfft!

[joshjalowiec]

Update: Sculpture 1 Godzilla/Tankman project. We fired the casts and poured the bronze a couple weeks ago. Before the break last week, I broke off the mold, cut off the sprues, sandblasted and ground down some of the flashing and other bits with the angle grinder. Yesterday, my professor TIG welded Godzilla's "belly door". It's coming along. I just need to do a little more grinding/polishing, add the patina (I know it looks very "golden" right now...just wait...) and arrange it on a simple concrete foundation I selected.

[joshjalowiec]

Update on my homework series: 5 of 10 paintings are complete. I also went back and updated the first painting (see before and after photos above) to tone done some of the browns and to rework the reflection.

9" x 12", oil on stretched canvas

[joshjalowiec]

Our most recent Painting I project is called Facts and Fictions, or Illusion and Allusion. In a nutshell, the goal is to take a high contrast image, or set of images, and re-present them to create a more dynamic set of visual information. Make it interesting; make it clear to the viewer that this is a flat surface; use a limited or achromatic color scheme.

I chose a personal photo of my son and an image of a swing carousel found online and I combined them in a way that is personal and [I hope] interesting. I contemplated incorporating a pattern subtly over parts of both images, but I opted not to when I started feeling like it was going to cheapen the overall work.

Looking at the finished painting, I imagine the carousel being a flat backdrop at the photo portrait studio, like they offered the zoo or the amusement park, and he was like, "meh" or "whatever."

He and I are both inspired by the paintings of JMW Turner. I really love Turner's motion and chaos and sense of atmosphere, which inspired me to transform the original image of the sky into something that better speaks to my own vision and emotions for this work.

16" x 20", oil on stretched canvas