so in terms of how my many anxieties go during this process--the last two weeks of bending and gluing and trying to fit things together--i think i am in okay shape. there are times when i look at what i am building and it gets filtered through the Lee Valley filter of good joinery, polished edges, and nice details that only very tiny, very expensive tools can create. When this happens, a momentary feeling of madness and a fleeting personal implosion occurs. I start to envy anyone with a proper job; I fantasize about not having to put on the same pair oily pants to the studio every day in favour of wearing something with, I don't know, a pleat in them. I start to exaggerate the thrills there must be in carving wildlife animals from tiny blocks of very expensive wood.
And then, luckily, the feeling goes away. I spend the bulk of my time deeply immersed in the rough-hewn, knotty, but still somewhat ordered aesthetic that drives the building of this project. There was a point in the design of the monotheatrum where it started to look too symmetrical, too engineered, and other times where it seemed way too farmy (you can see by the two rejected designs posted above). Even the design I chose to use seemed way too sterile on paper and computer--only in the process of fabricating the structure with reclaimed wood did a feeling of wildness instantly crept back in. And this balance between design and improvisation, between engineering and art, measuring and eyeballing, finishing and unfinishing, blah, blah, blah, -- it seems to be the thing which maintains my interest and my energy.
In other words, as long as the thing looks a little bit like it was made by wolves, I feel good about it.
