Ventura Art and Music Scene

I got some great video clips of the art and music while visiting Ventura. Here’s a great performance by Grove Session I’ve put on youtube without editing.

 

 

And i have some footage of a surreal performance by Kevin and the Art City Playas that i’m trying to use to piece together a movie.

Henna stone carving progress

Just a note on my progress carving the henna stone into a wavy form. In an earlier note I was musing about the significance of the inflection line and how it influences the shape. Today gave me another perspective with regard to how to actually carve the form efficiently. Essentially the challenge of this particular form is to carve cone shapes. There are four characteristics to capture. The tapering shape, linear in one direction through the center to the opposite side, and rounded waves in the other direction, joined smoothly at the inflection line.

Tricycle design for the Henna stone – and curious properties of the inflection line

The inflection point is where the path of a curved line changes direction:

Finally, I settled on a design for the henna stone which i blogged about earlier. The design has some very nerdy geeky aspects to it, a mathematical sculpture with a sort of invisible feature, something that isn’t normally consciously perceived, the inflection line. The point at which a curve inflects must be carefully carved, else it looks weird. So here’s an account of this curious property of curves because it extends the idea from inflection point to inflection lines, which in turn divides the form into distinct regions where the boundary is not normally consciously registered.

Here, in the picture below is the carving where i am just starting to form the wave. It turns out that there is a reference line every 30 degrees, every ridge, valley, and inflection. If those lines are carefully drawn, then it is relatively easy to cut the stone to a close approximation. Then the final stage is done more freehand to get the best final expression, and is much easier if the overall three cycle, tricycle, symmetry is maintained at each stage of carving.

The idea is to imagine a thick plate having a wavy surface, a simple sine wave with three cycles like in the pictures below of a stone sculpture i did long ago based on an idea by Ron Geity.