Scratching at the Surface

This week we're back to the old "Weather Goddess" dance where she steps in to remind me that she's in charge of my outdoor activities. Temps will be around 105 all week, so I'll adjust my plans to suit her whims. Knowing this, I got up around 5:30 this morning for a run before the heat made it's way into the neighborhood . It was beautiful & almost-----chilly. I can handle a few more days of midday/evening desert heat; once autumn gets this close, all other climate-related snags along the way are nearly negligible.

The desert heat & sun can be merciless to most surfaces. Unfinished wood splinters and generally gets a pale gray sheen. Thin plastic will crumble after just a  month or two of summer.  Paint will flake, peel, & blow away. However, one plastic has captured my attention: PVC pipe. Years of landscaping & sprinkler repairs left us with stacks of old PVC pipe. After a few years of holding onto it in my studio lot, I noticed it had taken on this warm, reddish-brown patina from summer after summer of sun. I began to scratch the surface of a piece one day because that's what artists do, i.e., we scratch at the surface of things to reveal what's beneath, what the true nature of things are both literally and figuratively. I eventually began to assemble pieces I had cut, scraped, scratched, sanded, and glued into small 3-dimensional sculptures. I find the plastic looks a lot like bone when "processed." Most importantly, the sun helped me to do something interesting with a material that would've otherwise ended up in a landfill. Today is a day of scratching at the surface.

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