Create The Art You Want To See In The World
Wherefore Art Thou, Fellow Romantics? The World Awaits Your Talents Yet Fulfilled!
Welcome Back Reader!
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Here is what’s been happening in the Neoteric art world.
The Manor Opens
More Frames For You, So Let’s Get Creative!
A Trip Down The Memory Drag Strip
You Were Born To Create
The Music Will Get Real - Really!
Who Knew, You All Like Memes?!
My Very Own Bread Machine Recipe You Will LOVE - Or Your Money Back!
☀ O, HAPPY DAY! THE MANOR IS OPEN! ☀
¯\_(•̩̥̀‿•̩̥̀✿)_/¯¯
Classes are happening now, click on Marvelous Mosaic to find out more and sign up. These are loads of fun with overnight accommodations, food and adult beverages. My cheerful and capable wife Kathie is usually there, even to assist during those messy grout days.
It’s Frame-O-Licious, Baby!
In anticipation of the high turnout for these classes, I have toiled away harder than a dentist at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory to bring you frames, LOTS of frames for you to start arranging glass with surgical precision onto a pristine surface, or not… maybe you just want to hurtle glass like darts during a tippling binge at a Dublin Pub. Either way, come on over and have fun!
ヘ(* 。* )/
Pictured below are 20 each - 14” X 26”, 14” X 17” and 14” X 14” pine frames that I carefully crafted so they can be in your talented hands when you show up for those classes or by ordering them as a kit. NOTE: I am always willing to build custom frames from any available wood and any custom size.
Mortise and tenon pine frames sanded and ready for you! Get ‘em while they’re hot!
Please keep in mind; if you would like to be featured here, send pictures of your art, music, or ideas on recycling to me here: dave@neotericwoodart.com
Double Exposure - A Beautiful Story
My Darling wife has a brother Ron. He and I go back long before I ever met Kathie. Once upon a time, Ron owned a new 1968 Dodge Barracuda. In the late 70’s and into the 80’s he and I ended up as room mates. During those crazy days we worked on turning this old Cuda into a bad-ass 1/4 miler. He rebuilt it tip to toe, even the transmission he took apart into a thousand pieces and reassembled it like a watchmaker.
[WARNING: Guy-speak here - We removed the 225 C.I. “bent-6” and dropped in a normally aspirated 383 C.I. Chrysler V8 with a tall Edelbrock® intake manifold and headers, bolted to a “Rock Crusher” manual 4-speed and hooked to a narrowed 411 rear-end with stabilizers, air-shocks and ladder bars. He had it shot with a deep luster micro-flake pearl-white. She was a peach!]
Translation; it was faster than a scared cat over water and looked great! I was passenger the only time it went down the track. It was a blistering hot August afternoon at the Woodburn dragstrip. We were as excited as a dog with two tails, and just a little nervous as we had never taken it up to speed before. He revved it up at the Christmas Tree (starting light), it turned green, dropped the clutch in first gear and threw me back in the seat like I was strapped to a rocket - bang - second gear, man we was flying - third gear… and, third… gear… dammit! It wouldn’t get out of 2nd gear! We coasted through the traps at 92 m.p.h. I still have the track time slip.
Well, the years go by, life happens and he sells it. Fast forward to a month ago when that dream of popping the front wheels off the pavement in this beautiful street pounder came racing back from what had, by now, faded into a distant memory of what could have been.
Why am I saying all this? ヽ(•_•)ノ
A few weeks ago whilst my darling Kathie was shoveling through her mountains of otiose paperwork, she discovered the original bill-of-sale! A week later when Ron happened to come visit, she showed him the paper. Now, Ron is a big old boy. I’m the size of an overstuffed futon, he makes me look like a freshly shorn Pekingese. He BIG! So when we showed him that piece of paper…
I’m here to tell you big boys DO cry. He was deeply moved and tried not to show a tear, but his voice cracked as he asked me to make a frame for it..
ˁ(•́ ‸ •̀ )ˀ
How the heck could I not do my best work for my old pal, brother-in-law Ron? The problem was that I wanted to display both sides, so I came up with this…
I made the document viewable on both sides by cutting two pieces of old window glass to identical size, cleaning them REALLY well and then used small oak scraps to sandwich the bill of sale so that both sides are exposed. After sanding, I rubbed in three coats of Minwax® “Maple” wood stain, masked the glass and sprayed a light finish of Polycoat® “Satin” clear lacquer. I left the feet removable in case Ron decides to hang it instead. Ron has been working in Colorado and hasn’t seen it yet, but I think he will like.
Raison d'âtre - A long Tale Of Triumph
Nearly every artist has trouble finding the time and space to be creative. I’m not saying anything new, but now that 2025 is passing you faster than a rocket surgeon driving a rented BMW, are you ready to dive right into making your next cool thing?
Yes? / No?? / Perhaps???
Do you need a swift kick in the afterburner? Do you even have a project idea, or are you still looking for inspiration? Hey, we all need a reason for creating art, even if it is to merely make money, we still need that fire in the belly.
Without a motive power we remain uninspired and rudderless and risk putting together something that, at best, will keep you only half interested and the work will end up feeling sterile and meaningless. When starting something from scratch, I will ask myself;
Take A Step Back To Refocus
Look at the bigger picture. Have you ever worked a job that you disliked but it kept a roof overhead? Maybe you still do. I sure have, and how! At some point you had to have noticed at how others can preform the exact same mind-deadening job as yours, but they are happy and you aren’t? It can make you want to throttle them!
To be sure, maybe they are at the top of their goal in life and they’re fine at being a cog in the wheel for some soulless corporation making widgets until the bitter end when they finally retire and kack out from heart failure a year later. I’m not here to judge.
But maybe they are different than you and I, fellow artist, maybe they don’t find being confined to a box during a beautiful summer day a form of insidious torture. I dunno, maybe, perhaps, just posssibly, you want some meaning in your life!
The day I knew I was different happened to me in a funny way. When I was nineteen years old, I got an entry-level job working at a sheet metal plant. My task was to take stacks of steel, copper and aluminum parts (that’s aluminiumiumium to Brits) and run them through a giant belt sander, or spend hours each day standing in front of a grinder tediously blasting the rough edges off metal parts. Nasty, dirty, work.
Long story abridged, since I loved sheet metal work, and as bad as that job was, I dedicated myself to improving and moving up the chain to bigger and badder machines, some of which stood sixteen foot tall and shook the ground each cycle. That’s some serious POWER! It didn’t take long before the managers noticed I wanted to go places (plus I kept badgering them). Soon I was running big metal sheers, punch presses and other cool stuff. The work was dirty, noisy, potentially hazardous and freakin’ heavy! Damn near every tool and die weighed more than me. The material I fed into these behemoths was difficult for a young scrawny kid. Everything was a workout.
A workout? <◔̯◔>
I decided that I could be miserable and skate by with minimal effort, or I could turn the place into my personal weight-training gym. I opted for the latter and glad I did because a year and a half later, I was getting some serious muscle. Then they let a troublemaker go and hired a totally green kid to run the orders that were piling up.
The poor bastard was pasty white, skinny, pimpled and bitter. He hyper-hated the job and every day he was seething with rage at having to do such “menial” work. It was killing him.
His problem was that the work was not fulfilling, it was anything but, until one day at lunch I walked over to the machine he was on and looked at the huge stack of four foot wide, fourteen foot long sheets of 1/8 inch steel. Those effing things are brutal. So I said to him, “Bloom where you are planted and turn this into gain, not pain. Look at these sheets of metal as gold. To me, these are my barbells, my bench press and the key to physical fitness.”
╭(◔_◔)╮ …are you serious bro?
He was incredulous at first, until I rolled up my sleeve and popped a large bicep. Whoa, he had to admit that it just might work. Before long, he got into it, even challenging me to move more tonnage than him! We started taking our lunches together every day, began packing nutrient dense foods and, drank some beer. Yep, we pounded beer at lunch, popped vitamins and went back to kick ass! Later as he began to fill out, we would then go to one of our homes and lift weights, drink loads of beer and party like animals. Girls are aplenty when you are fit, confident and drive a fast car. This was the 70’s after all. I loved my work and life was great! Good times.
Until they closed the plant. Outsourced.
I got transferred to a chemical plant - nasty poison all around, coworkers who were living in a world unlike mine. Now *I* hated my work. The building was sick, not even a window. I lost my mind and after about nine months of hell, I awoke one morning to say - no more, turned off the alarm and took a dark path for a couple years.
Fast forward to 1982. Enter my love, Kathie. We married and got an apartment in Beaverton. Yeah, it was awful then too. I was working a dead-end job and living in a noisy, crowded city was not my ideal situation, but now with this lovely woman, I had purpose. But the fact remained that I still hated my work and where we lived. Then one day as I was driving a company truck, I stopped to eat lunch on a hilltop and watched the sun go down on my twelve hour long graveyard shift. I watched as a perfectly clear, cloudless evening settled in for the night as the sun made its way over to the Pacific ocean some ninety miles west.
At that moment I had an epiphany. (ノ^‿^)ノ
That perfect sunset is setting over that beautiful ocean and I’m sitting in a truck in Hazeldell working for idiots. When I got home the next morning I said bluntly, “Why don’t we move to the beach?” I figured that even if I find another job I hated, we would be fifty percent better off than we were at present. Kathie agreed and my mind was made up. I found a job as a maintenance guy the first day and that set in motion the skills that were essential for starting my construction business a year and a half later.
The moral of this story is that I had to have purpose. I went from a skinny, unsure and aimless nineteen year-old kid, to a man with a business where I could design and build homes with my lovely bride at my side whilst living on the beach and enjoying life as I never imagined. And it happened in the twinkling of an eye!
Maybe you are like me and need fulfillment in order to stay sane. I know that I can’t have it any other way. We must have meaning, us artists, without it we shrivel up and die a little inside every day, and when we run to that job that leaves us empty and unsatisfied, we can feel our life blood drain away.
Yes, it takes courage. Yes, there are big risks, but what is the alternative? For someone with a dominant right-brain, making art as my life and work is the only way, and because Kathie also believed in herself, we keep close to home in our golden years as we find new ways to express ourselves through art. I have my music, my wood craft and enjoy tapping out story’s for you on my tiny Substack. It turns out that Kathie is a natural at teaching others as well as making her own mosaic art.
If you enjoy reading this, like my music or have purchased any of my projects, then I must be doing something right. If you know Kathie, she is the type who will help you find your creative spark, and there is nothing like her company, everyone loves Kathie. We found happiness in our work, live for our art and feel that we have most certainly been blessed and thankful that we took control of our own lives.
If a paid subscription is not for you, how about buying me a coffee?
“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”
— James Baldwin
My New Essential Music Periphery!
What may look to some like part of a jumbo jet cockpit, is really an integral part of fine-tuning music production.
Meet my gently used Makie mixing board! To those of you who follow my musical efforts such as my latest Will I See You, you probably are acutely aware about the dearth of sound quality since the beginning. Things have slowly evolved for the better, but now, this, THIS is a huge leap forward! Stay tuned for more.
Memes
Just a quick note about my Christmas post that was all memes. It was the most liked post so far and the poll I took says that 75% of readers got a good laugh, whilst only 25% of you said you would like more. Fortunately nobody actually disliked the meme post, so there is that. Perhaps I’ll do another one during a period when I’m too busy to write.
Which brings me to something you all should know; if you have read this far, you are probably aware of my less than optimal health. Yessiree Bob, I have more medical issues than JAMA. I have to deal with some pretty gnarly pain that prevents me from getting anything remotely close to a full night of sleep. The lack of sleep blunts my ability to think and kind of makes Dave a dull boy. But last night I managed to get a solid four to five hours, so I’m good! End of rant.
Bread - The Stuff Of Life
I have updated the Recipe section on this site to give detailed instructions with photos, measures and my irreverent babble. Click HERE to turn your bread machine from a useless brick maker and into your favorite kitchen appliance.
In case I haven’t said it enough, Thank You for your continued support, be it moral, coin, or donuts, it is all cherished!
Ron is going to love your gift.
Dude - the soundtrack in my mind won't stop due to all car talk. This got me going this morning.
Thanks for sharing your great attitude on life, Dave! You are very inspiring.