Category: Lucky Valley Press

I build Shrines to the Divine entirely for my own enjoyment. There is no goal, no show in mind, no beginning, middle or end of the project. I am just creating temples, exploring the skills learned, both as an artist as well as a human. And what amazing discoveries I make along the way. So far with the Tibetan construction, I have learned how to: make a tiny tile floor out of polymer clay, a

Even though I did not complete this Buddha head out of Basswood, I am posting the idea to show the sacred geometry of drawing  a Tibetan Buddha. Just the geometry itself is beautiful to me. These images are posted all over my studio. They calm my spirit. I have been attracted to Tibetans and their teachings, as well as their good-natured selves, since the early 90s, when I first heard Lama

Charles Osborne’s Boss is just in time for the Pebble Beach Centennial  “Without Sam Morse, Pebble Beach    would be a West Coast Coney Island.”                  – Bing Crosby
“A newspaper dubbed my grandfather “The Duke of Del Monte” and although he pretended to be embarrassed by the title, I believe he liked it. Del Monte was more than a chunk of some of the most beautiful land on the planet

 When I first met Sharon Mehdi, I thought she was a stand-up comic. She made me laugh until  my jeans burst at the seams. Then I discovered all kinds of interesting things about Sharon: labyrinth walker, healer, teacher, writer, public speaker. She told me she wrote a book, so I ordered it and, after I read A Curious Quest for Absolute Truth, my respect for this woman grew. Not only was she

I am not well-set, nor do I have the bandwidth for, taking pictures of my hands while creating. Following are all the photos of my Buddhas over the course of three days. All the facial features are exaggerated, not on purpose. The top not and hair aren’t right proportionately and you can see from this side view, he has a flat face. This guy looks like a cross between a British

Just Buddha’s Head. In the interest of keeping my self-imposed sculpting lessons simple, I scrunched up a ball of foil and rolled out some clay to cover it for a head. (I learned the hard way not to bake any polymer clay thicker than about 1/4 inch; it takes forever, you’re never quite sure if it’s baked all the way through and it smells if it gets scorched.) I stuck a quilter’s straight

In typical DIY style, I took up the challenge of building my own Buddha for the Tibetan Shrine to the Divine. Ah, well, more of a dare, really. It was my girlfriend, Eunice. She said, “You’re going to make it yourself, right?” I laughed. “No, no,” I said. “I draw the line at sculpting a Buddha.” “I dare you,” she said. Well. To the left here is my very first attempt at modeling polymer

From The Once and Future King by TH White: “It is God who keeps the price secret, Uther. Not I.” “God? God? What god? I have heard you speak of so many gods. If you mean Mithras…” Says Merlin, “Mithras. Apollo. Arthur. Christ. Call him what you will. What does it matter what men call the light? It is the same light, and men must live by it or die. I only know that God is the source

Each of the Shrines to the Divine has a 12 x 12 inch footprint, for uniformity and to fit on shelves for display. The Zendo on the left is the first true completed shrine. By the time I built it, I had made several single walled messes before I figured out how to do tiny double wall construction. The Japanese Tea House to the right of the Zendo was my first foray into tiny construction. The

I rediscovered polymer clay after a 20 year hiatus. Back in the early 90s, I made beads and pins and jewelry items. This time around, I had in mind the tiny lumberyard and all my little itty bitty constructions. For the Zendo, I formed a little platter, a bowl and a vase. In the midst of the experiments, I fell in love again with this versatile medium. There are a bunch of useless polymer