TBAI Gallery Piece – WIP: Reservations

I’m back again with more WIP photos of my gallery piece for TBAI. I almost hesitate to share these photos because of the reservations I had at the time. Let me explain.

I had an idea for this piece in my head but only a vague notion of how to go about achieving it. Now whether I was right or wrong, I began to think the way to go about it was using a grapevine wreath. It was easily obtainable, inexpensive and I thought I would be able to manipulate it in a way that would serve my purposes.

I will describe the next step because I failed to photograph it. Sometimes I think so much about the process I forget to take pictures. I needed the vines to be bent to a certain size arch. After much research and thought, I decided that soaking them overnight in the bathtub might be the ticket. So for a day or two, we had the vines from an unwound grapevine wreath submerged in the bathtub. I live such a weird and ‘exciting’ life.

Then after determining the exact size I needed, Jay hurriedly built me a box in which I could dry the vines. And there they sat and dried for a number of days.

I began to attach them to the base one by one using whatever method was appropriate for the size of the vine: glue, screws, wire. It was a crazy-making process.

Not only that, after having invested a lot of time and effort, I thought it looked really, really bad. I mean really. Nothing at all like what I had in mind.  What to do? What to do?

I decided I had to stick with it, hoping that eventually it would morph into something not quite so disappointing. I had hopes that I would be able to turn it into the vision I had to begin with.

I will leave you with one of my favorite photos of Sebastian recently.  He was trying out his new float in the pool near my son’s house in sunny Florida.  His analysis: excellent.