Curious feet, AKA How to make an art room floor
I wrote last week’s blog post exploring a different way of looking at Time a while back...before I bought a glass fusing kiln.
Unbeknownst to me, this was an old-style kiln, needing to be constantly in the not-too-far reaches of consciousness while being fired. As the manual cheerfully explains, ‘at settings above 4 the kiln temperature can continue to rise and could permanently damage the brick and the elements.’
So, I come full circle, intermittently dominated by clock-time and making sure I don’t ‘lose track’ of it...but happily so, as I get to continually play and experiment and be part of the wonderful alchemical process of disparate shards of cold, sharp hardness melding and becoming one.
Rather than being a post about glass, though, I thought it was a good moment to share a part of the creation of my studio - in Rennaldburn’s back entranceway which, though it still manages to be a powerful mess vortex, is becoming a more ‘real’ creative space all the time.
Creating the studio started last Summer, as I finished making a mini gallery in Rennaldburn’s dark and dingy back hallway by painting the floor green. (It’s still waiting for daisies, just as the ceiling is still waiting for butterflies. Girly? I don’t know what you mean :)
The obvious next step for the left-over green paint seemed to be to continue it out through the junk-attractor portal/would-be studio, so I did - happy with how the gloopy gloss covered over the irregularities of the rough, cratered concrete underneath.
Aware that I had small and interested visitors at this time, I locked the door leading through to the wet floor, safe in the knowledge that my bedroom was now the only one which led through to it.
You’ve probably guessed where this story’s going by now - deep in divination môde with the mother of Brennan, the one with the most curious feet, they pattered past us unnoticed...not just to the beginning of the wet floor but all the way to the very end and back into the carpeted room, turning round and round in little circles of wonderment at the steadily increasing indelible green marks magically appearing around him.
Later, I had a look and confirmed that, yes, all along the footprint trail the tacky paint had pulled up to reveal small but numerous patches of powdery, lumpy concrete. So, having used every last scrap of green, I mixed some more...but without the same palette, it was a very different green.
No matter, I thought, I’ll make it a feature - and ended up with a solid trail of huge polka dots which still seemed to be undeniably following in Brennan’s footsteps.
No matter, I thought, I’ll just paint them all over. En masse, the sickly-green polka dots now looked like a swamp dinsosaur’s back covered with bunions.
No matter, I thought, I’ll add a better colour on top. Finding another tin of paint store-labelled as dark green, I mixed it up well...to find it was bright red.
Well, I spent all that time mixing it so I may as well try it, I decided, and dripped thin circles of red around each bunion, giving a 3D, oozing effect.
Feverishly, I cracked open another can and tried to cover up this new disaster, now going for a full Pollock-splatter technique.
After a few more hours and a few more tins, I finally felt I had an art room floor worthy of the name. Standing on it now gives a palpable feeling of creative liberation; a space where anything goes and that’s alright!
And it’s all thanks to Brennan’s small but vastly curious feet, without whom the floor would be a dull, un-marked expanse of green.
I’ll share more about my studio and what’s happening in it soon...but first, starting tomorrow, I’ll be starting another serialised post - of my article on Dream wisdom paired with the Zhouyi and African Dream Root, in the current Caduceus magazine.
