Assembling and taking apart

I had a few adventures in cooking and art breaking-down yesterday. Destruction precedes creation.

The cooking was about a veggie mix with a blue cheese sauce 

Steamed broccoli, the remains of the roasted cauliflower, microwaved fingerling potatoes, which were very good, the blue ones a pale color inside. And I made some sort of sauce with crumbled Gorgonzola, bit of mayonnaise, whole milk, Worcestershire sauce, dry mustard, salt, pepper, minced garlic. It came out pretty well and there's enough for today, too.

I think this would be a good dish with roasted chicken or hot sausage added in, too.

But it was fine just with the vegetables.

Then I was wandering about upstairs looking for materials to complete the current figure and found a piece, an assemblage of molded handmade paper, from long ago, exhibited, some sold, the rest came home, eventually hanging on the second floor stair.

Sorry about the angle. It was hanging high up.

Not being a conservator I thought these would be great raw material, having served their purpose. 

They were great fun to make, molding wet paper pulp over various tools, pliers, knives, spoons, rollers, cookie molds, and, once dry and, the tools removed, spraying the molded paper pieces with gold. Hung it looked like a weighty metal piece. Men liked this, men often seem to like metal. But it's not heavy,  very light in weight. And this was long ago, so it's time for it to move on.

And I took the pieces off the background, I noticed that one was already repurposed.

It was a print I pulled off a wood engraving, which I had already exhibited in a show of prints of all kinds.  So I reused it in this piece. And it may be used yet again. Handmade paper is tough stuff. In fact the paper I used here was my earlier paper which I repulped.

Here are more. You'll notice human forms and faces seeming to show up, from the molded impressions of tools. A trick of the brain I think.

This is the front of that printed piece

I assembled a few pieces just as rough drafts. Nothing decided yet, but I thought you might like to wander along with me 

The background of the work is a piece of foam core, which I will probably cut into to make a base for the current figure to stand on. And the lath I made the frame from might be internal supports.  There will be more fabric, too. 

I'm now thinking about reusing the molded paper piece from this work for a future figure.

Several of the pieces from this series were bought out of my exhibit, then eventually left to me, so I inherited them. and now they're getting another life.

As always, we'll see!