Since I have been pretty good about documenting the carving process of the current sculpture, I’ll post a few more photos to help catch up to where I am currently with the piece. The piles of woodchips and sawdust in the photos are actually long gone by now – carted off by my shop leprechauns. Ok. Not really. But I can’t help my Disney World fantasy of elves or leprechauns that whistle and clean the studio when I’m in bed at night so that I can enter each morning to a sawdust free work space, chisels sharpened and the smell of one fresh cinnamon roll next to a hot cup of tea.

Maybe I HAVE been ingesting too much sawdust?!

The other clean shop fantasy involves shirtless shop boys and was actually started by a video of Louise Nevelson I watched while attending school at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts many many moons ago. She had handsome shop boys who handled all the heavy labor of creating her large steel sculptures. She was pretty old; wearing her long fake eyelashes, hair in a scarf, a flannel shirt and holding a cigarette in a long filter which she used to point with between dramatic drags of tobacco. The shop boys (ok - they were young men - remember Louise must have been in her 70's or so) - the young men would look to her for direction. She would nod or shake her head and point with that long filtered cigarette. I vowed then and there to have my own pack of shop boys when I'm too old to do the tough stuff by myself. Shirtless is my addition to the plan. I'll skip the cigarette but maybe false eyelashes...?