What are these spooky structures in the hills of Santa Fe? And a new contest next week...

Next post will be my 100th blog post so I'll give away a couple of mice in a contest I'll announce then.
There will be two ways to win. One mouse for winning the contest, another mouse for mentioning the contest (with a link) on your blog, so stay tuned, especially if you (or a friend) also have a blog...

OK, back to this week.
Meridee went hiking up near the Santa Fe ski hill with her friend and author Elizabeth Gilchrist.
They went a bit off the beaten track and encountered some strange structures. Each was made of many tree trunks assembled teepee style around a living tree. They look like they took some serious effort to make, and they kept finding more, ever larger ones the further into the woods they went.

They got a bit spooked and turned and left!

I went back there with Meridee for a look, and snapped a few pics. They really are a bit of a head scratcher.

As you can see they're quite large, completely impenetrable except for a doorway, have bits of chopped off log to sit on inside, and there's several of them.

After a few beers we decided we'd probably head back there on the summer solstice and see if there's any curious shenanigans going on, since our imaginations got the better of us while we wondered what they might all be about!

Any ideas? I'd love to hear them!

Sculpture news!
Here's Lee Wilson's mold making handiwork in progress for my tree frogs on a vine sculpture.
Hopefully we'll have that piece all finished up and photographed in a couple of months.
His artful molds look like abstract sculptures.

I've been working on a couple of other things, one of which will combine some elements I haven't seen done before.
Which probably means every one has done it, but I just haven't noticed!

I'm being a bit coy about it until it's further along, but I showed some of the elements to Lee who will be making my mold, pulling waxes, and what have you.

Here's Lee in 'action'.

I enjoy running things by him since he can suggest practical considerations to make them more efficiently.
If they can be done without infringing on the integrity of my idea, I'll go for it.
In this case, he suggested slightly thickening the sides of a rectangular part to ensure the bronze will flow more freely and create fewer failed castings, which I took care of.

With many years of experience in all aspects of the casting process, he is a great source of 'insider knowledge', and I like take advantage of it whenever I can!

OK, what's the mystery critter in this pic? I snapped it at a nearby gardening nursery that has a pond...
(by the way, this is not the contest, that's next week!)

So don't forget to stay tuned for next weekend's contest announcement...


Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Go ahead email, make my day...

I've had a couple of emails this week that more than made my day!
Norma Evans won the bonus prize in my guess the length of the snake contest and she had this to say...

'Thank you so much for Alfie, my rabbit, I really love him.  Thought you'd like to see where Nosey and Sprightly are spending their time lately getting an education.  I made the books out of wood for them, they look like real books and fool everyone.'

Stunning! I can honestly say I never expected anyone to carve wooden books to arrange their mice around!



And then I learned that Gordon Lutz from Pasadena had bought one of my life sized laying down rabbits, Maxwell, from Manitou Galleries here in town during a recent visit to Santa Fe.

He contacted me and had this to say...

 'He now sits proudly next to my reading chair.  My wife and I volunteer for several local (Pasadena, CA area) rabbit rescues (mybunny.org) and have been rabbit people for quite some time.  We curently have 18 house rabbits along with a couple of fosters, all rescues, so Maxwell is very much at home here.' 

'BTW...the housekeeper came into the living room and saw Maxwell on the table next to my reading chair and she literally jumped.  She thought one of the rabbits had escaped and was resting on the table.  She could not believe how realistic the sculpture is.  I think that is a nice compliment of your work.'

  'I am attaching two pics of two bunnies that in a way remind me of Maxwell.  they are not desert cottontails but are domestic rescues living with us.  There is somewhat of a resemblance in the look I think.' 

Thanks Norma and Gordon! And thanks for letting me quote you as well!

The best thing about being a sculptor is feedback like this!

It's left me feeling quite puffed up this week!





Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Chubby mouse faces terrifying odds...

I stumbled around online into Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing fiction (they're HERE).
So I thought I'd put them to the test and immediately wrote a very short story starring Chubby mouse.
How do think the rules worked out?

Chubby and the waste disposal.

Chubby couldn't reach the cheese.

Chubby Mouse was made of bronze but more than anything he loved to eat cheese.
Real cheese. Not some kind of metal or wooden cheese, or nasty cheese made of clay.

Two sinks are what separated Chubby from his cheese. The first was filled with water in which he would drop like a stone.
And beyond that was the sink of certain death.
It had the black hole of no return at the bottom.
Anything that went down there would never come back.

Chubby stood close to the edge, wondering if he might be able to swim across the first sink.

But just when he was deciding to give up on the cheese, a giant hand came down and scooped up Chubby.
Chubby seemed to be flying now.
He flew right across the water, as the cheese grew larger in his vision.
Chubby was excited, even though his vision wasn't very good.
What excited Chubby the most was the wonderful pungent odor as it grew stronger in his nostrils.
He was so enraptured by the overpowering smell of his favorite cheese, he didn't notice the black hole of death yawning wide beneath him.

Down he went. Now he was sitting alone in the dark, and could barely make out the large blades pointing up all around him.

He wasn't sure what would happen next, so he sat and waited in the dark.
It didn't smell very nice down here...

Chubby mouse had heard the click of a light switch many times before.
So when he heard it this time, his first thought was of getting a better look around him.

But the only lights came from sparks as the blades leaped into action, tossing Chubby about inside the dark hole.

Chubby was smashed into the sides again and again, thrown from the wall, back into the whirring steel and then back to bounce in to the glittering blur again.

The sound was horrendous.
Eventually the grinding spinning torture stopped.
Dazed, damaged but otherwise OK, Chubby looked around to see the once upright steel blades laying in pieces around him.

His damaged body was still and quiet once again, as the giant hand fumbled around, feeling the broken blades, and eventually hoisting Chubby back out into the light.

Ahh, the intoxicating aroma of cheese filled Chubby's nostrils, and this time he was in luck.

He was set down next to mouse heaven, where he tucked in to let the cheese fill his soul and do its healing work.

Tough little Chubby would go on to see another day.

......................................

Oh, here's the little critter that was hiding in the photo at the bottom of my last post...
a baby garter snake of some sort. For some reason I keep bumping into snakes!

Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

Outsmarted by a rat?

My childhood fascination with traps resurfaced recently, and had me wondering if I'm even as smart as a rat I had a recent run in with!
It's not like my interest in traps has led me to curate a trap museum or anything like that, but I've always admired the elegant simplicity of the ways people have found to catch things.
Especially if they involve trip wires, or teetering foot plates that send doors swinging shut and all that sort of thing.

Of course I'm not saying I like what a lot of traps do to things, it's just the ingeniousness of the designs and mechanisms which for some reason always caught my interest.

Well anyway, I caught a rat in the back yard with a Havahart live trap. It only catches one critter at a time (unlike the mouse trap we used to catch the fiendish paint-eating mouse in the car), but it has the whole footplate/doors snapping shut stuff going for it!

I don't know what kind it is, although I suspect it might be a pack rat, but as you can see it's very cute with its light belly and black beady eyes.

 Here it is next to Sprightly my hoodrat.

So after driving it a couple of miles away I let it out.

It ran straight under my car.
I peered underneath just in time to see it climbing up the inside of my front wheel.
Damn.

I started the engine, hoping to scare it off. I didn't see it run away, so after a minute I started to drive home anyway.
I was expecting to see a furry face come poking out through an air vent, or magically appear by my foot pedals at any moment.

My driving was a bit nervous and quite slow, just in case I had to contend with a furry companion running up my trouser leg.

There was no sign of it under the hood when I got back, so did it hitch a ride home, or not?

A couple of days later I caught an identical rat and released it (a bit further from the car!) in the same place as before.
I figured if it was a buddy of the first one, they could hang out.
Or it could have been the same one.

It may just be viewing recent events as bit of an annoyance: 'Oh, not THIS again', sort of thing.

Well this time at least I made sure it went away from the road, so I could drive home relaxed!

Besides that, I'm excited to announce that my Sumo Wrestling Toads will be on display in San Diego as part of the Society of Animal Artists 50th annual show, called 'Art and the Animal'.
And who knows, maybe they'll be selected for the following museum tour?

Last up, see if you can spot the critter lurking in this picture (I'll show it close up in my next post!)

Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille
Still no news since my post regarding ......of........ Galleries who still owes me for bronze sales made around the new year. (Edit-issue resolved after 1 yr thanks to Goldman, Evans and Trammell)

Winners of snake contest...!

That's right, winners as in plural!

It was actually a pretty big snake.
Since people always over estimate snakes they've actually seen, I guessed a conservative 5 feet to myself.
I couldn't help notice how its pattern changed from anaconda like blobs at the back end, to more typical bull snake patterns at the front.

So how do you measure a snake without killing it?

Last weekend I went back with printouts of my snake pics, a long cord, and an extending tape measure (25 feet long, just to be sure!).
After a little while finding the exact spot, I laid out the cord (which used to work our blinds before they broke and needed fixing), adjusted its wiggles to match the snake's position exactly, picked up the string and measured it.

It was a bit tricky finding the exact placement at first, but I noticed as I was matching tufts of grass and stones that there was a groove worn in the ground, so either the weight of the snake did that in one pass, or it's a regular route it takes.


The string was 6ft 3inches, or 75 inches.

So I've been saving emails and making notes on who was within 2 inches either way, since I reckon I might have not been super exact.

I had guesses ranging from less than three feet to more than nine!
Quite a spread.
What really amazed me was that not only did someone nail my exact measurement, but a whole bunch of people guessed within my self imposed margin for error.

Sara J Ingle got it on the nose!
Congratulations Sara, you've won a little bronze turtle!
Best email me your address (no impostors please!).

But I felt it wouldn't be fair not to give the others who were so close a shot at a prize too, so I assigned each either odd or even status, rolled a dice to eliminate half so the numbers were small enough for a single dice roll, re-numbered everyone who was left and bingo, number four it was.

So Norma Evans is the bonus winner!
She emailed her guess of 75.5 inches.
I'll send a bonus critter your way Norma (might be a tiny bunny!)

Thanks to everyone for your guesses, that was fun!

I'll no doubt do something similar sometime, so stay tuned (or just sign up for monthly email alerts. At the start of each month you'll get the last month's posts, and also any contest alerts. There's a link in the sidebar if you want to sign up).


Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille