Writer or Artisan?

Gentle Readers:

Talk the Talk - or Walk the Walk?

I often find myself caught between a desire to DOCUMENT and a desire to CREATE. Obviously those reading this have some hope that there will be documentation (!). It is so often true, especially with smithing, that many who have created the best work in terms of objects, may be almost completely unknown in terms of writing about that work.

What brought this to mind has been my own labours over the last few weeks. As many (most) of you know, I am currently deep into the background organization work for two major events. DARC at LAM 2010 (August 2010), plus CanIRON 8 (July 2011). Regardless of what you might think about my artistic work, there is no doubt I do have some talent and experience for such things.

Its deep winter, and its pretty hard for me to drag me old bones out to what is basically an unheated workshop. One task that does fit well to staying close to the wood stove (and the glow of the computer) is the annual re-vamping of the web site. I did never seem to get all the 2008 work into the gallery last year, so there are a lot more bits and pieces than normal. This past year saw me work almost to exclusion on two larger projects, the Richards House Railing and the much larger Maxwell & Reade House project. (You could search the blog for many posts related to either).

So - I'm compelled to document and publish my work. (Maybe thats the problem - a foolish drive for justification?) Go take a look at what I just finished for the web site, which is the first instalment of the gallery information for the Maxwell & Reade Project on the Wareham Forge web site.

....

(back yet?)

Thats two full days work.
One day to crunch and prepare all the images from the originals. One day (today) to write the text and format it for the web.

And people wonder what artisans do with all that 'spare' time? I've been at just that for over six hours (straight) and my eyes are going buggy.

(So why the frak am I spending ANOTHER 20 minutes drafting this blog post?)