Earth Day at Teaneck Creek

For those in Jersey, I'm going to be carving at Teaneck Creek Conservancy's Earth Day Celebration. Free breakfast! http://www.teaneckcreek.org/
10am-12am for breakfast, other events throughout day, I'll be there till 6 or so.

Celebrate Earth Day at TCC’s Fycke Lane Entrance 

Located Opposite Thomas Jefferson Middle School
Sunday April 22nd 10:00am-12am

Highlights of the morning include:

• Come and view our new 350’ wall made from recycled stone affixed with ceramic bricks with native fish reliefs created by students as well as narrative art collages outlining the environmental and cultural history of the site.

• The International Banners exhibition featuring banners by Teaneck students and selections of environmental art banners by students from Peru and China.

• Guided hikes beginning every 15 minutes

• A complimentary breakfast catered by Whole Foods Market Edgewater

• Musical performance

• Arts and Crafts demonstrations

• Anthony Santella wood carving demonstrations in the labyrinth.

• Opening of Windows on the Park III in the Black Walnut Meadow.

WE GREATLY APPRECIATE THE SUPPORT OF OUR EVENT SPONSORS;
PSEG
Holy Name Medical Center
Wholefoods Market Edgewater

20 Puffin Way | Teaneck, NJ 07666 US | (201) 836-2403

Rooted in Carmel

The Carmelite website ran a Q/A about my ongoing Mary carving project. Thanks to Bill McGarvey for putting the piece together so nicely and to Fr. Bill O'Malley for the photo above. The large project has been a challenge (I'm still putting together the roof of the shelter, and realized I underestimated the number of shingles I needed by a good 30%).  The Q/A was its own challenge since I usually prefer to have images talk for me, rather than put subtle and somewhat personal things into words.

But check it out here:   Rooted in Carmel

Housing Mary, We Are Vertical for Easter

So it feels like forever that I've been playing around with these branches that came down in last October's freak snowstorm, trying to build a shelter to go over the now complete statue of Mary at St Anastasia's in Teaneck. I think every single joint has come apart and been put together at least two, typically four or so times. It started out a good 10 inches wider and was narrowed in stages. The pitch of the roof changed several times as well. Finally today however, I got an unusual sold afternoon's work in and it is upright, and looking promising... It needs some cross braces, and some stakes to hold it anchored or it will go over in the first wind. Hopefully with just one more day I can finish it off. You can see I have applied a test row of my none too professionally split shingles, which will hopefully not provide enough lift for it to take off before next week when I'll get to add the anchors. 

While working I got the added entertainment of a visit from a wild turkey, which wandered through the church parking lot. Not insanely rare, but uncommon for Teaneck.

Untitled Work in Progress

 Carving finished, still in need of finishing and a base. This has been another side project small enough to work on at the apartment when I can't get into my studio (most of the time lately). This is a pretty ambitious piece for this scale; the whole figure is under five inches. The piece is done in quince wood, which has a fine enough grain to hold the detail even in the face. I enjoy the speed with which you can see a piece come together when working at this scale, but there is a funny effect by which small pieces feel like they look better in photos than in real life, where unless you lean in and look at them closely they tend to get overlooked...

Side Project, Completed

 I’m actually pretty happy with the way the carving came out. This leans a bit more toward realism than I usually attempt but I think it worked. Unfortunately, it was meant to be something else entirely (can you tell it was supposed to be a bear?). Really,  this is the second time I’ve finished a carving with the same plan for transforming it, and then decided against the final step (which I’m purposely not revealing). In the first case I decided the color was wrong and it wouldn’t have worked, this time I have just lost my nerve, maybe I’ll summon it the next time…

Three is the Charm

 

You see above my work in progress for Frenzy Into Folly, a show which will go up at St Paul the Apostles church  in NYC this fall.  From right to left. Attempt one: mulberry wood, a giant rotten blind void  (and several rusty nails) at ankle height. Attempt two: Osage orange, a medium sized blind void at chest height (I’d never tried Osage before, that’s some hard stuff). Attempt three, basswood, a weird knot at the ankles but I’ll work with it…

Work, work

 

For those who have wondered what I do by day, here's a video created in the course of my 'real' job. What you're looking at is basically a fly around of a fairly late stage zebrafish embryo. The orange and purple are nuclei within the embryo proper and the grey is a layer of cells that envelope the yolk.

I work on the image analysis pipeline, Starrynite, that goes from volume data of developing embryos to segmented cells moving over time (or in this case not moving).  I also built the analysis and rendering scripts that segmented the cloud of detected nuclei into layers based on geometry and cell density, in order to create this movie highlighting the structure of the embryo and the correspondence between the image and segmentation.