I drown in petroleum distillates.

I do a lot of different things to make money. This is one of them. I am fabricating soapstone counter tops for a couple in western Mass. Soapstone is relatively soft as stone goes but cutting a round edge with a straight blade is never easy. And water and cold never mix too well unless you want to go ice skating. I think it got to about 30 today, I had to go inside four or five times to warm up my hands. Some soapstone you can cut with wood cutting tools in fact I used a jig saw to cut a small notch in this large slab. But for the curve I used my hand held wet saw. This slab has some veins in it that are very hard and made using my jig for this part virtually impossible. This slab is almost 29 inches wide, 10 feet wide and an inch and a quarter thick. It weighs somewhere in neighborhood of 800 pounds. After I finished with the wet saw I used a belt sander to smooth down the edges and then a router to ease the edges. Once that was done Terrence and I decided we would move it into the house and put it into place. 800 pounds is heavy!! We set up a series of joint compound buckets about every ten feet so that we could maneuver the stone into place. After picking it up and putting it down five times it was finally in it final destination. Tomorrow I finish off polishing it and bond it the cabinet it is resting on.

On very few occasions I feel like I am making art at my job.

Sometimes the best work is made under the most adverse situations. I had gone to bed at 11:30 and was woken up at 12:30, half an hour later I was well energized and tossing and turning. I can’t really remember why I went out to the studio, it was cold, about 12 degrees, at first I just looked around at the massive amount of stuff I have accumulated over the past two years. The drawing was sitting on the floor, I had cut it into strips weeks before. I started twisting and folding the pieces and found the shapes to be very pleasing. It didn’t take long before my fingers were aching with the cold so I blew some time building a fire in my little stove. For the next two hours I sat on the floor a couple feet away from my stove twisting and weaving this piece in on it self. (I usually have a very hard time translating images that I do on a very large scale to smaller versions but in this case I am very pleased with the outcome. It makes me feel much the same as my large tapestry pieces.) At quarter till five I tacked it to the wall, turned off the lights and went back inside to bed. At 6:30 Izzy woke me up. I went downstairs with her and made coffee. I felt exhilarated.

“Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there.” Ani D