Cosmo's Factory

One of my dad's hobbies was woodworking, and when I was a kid I had my own bench and tools as well, as I did later in the various houses we lived in in Massachusetts. In Hawaii we had a condo, so no room for woodwork. When I first moved to California one of my hopes was to eventually put together a little workshop in the garage. I had brought some tools with me, and had to buy some others for various reasons as we were setting up house. I found a guy down the street selling a table saw on Craigslist, bought that, and got it assembled. I recycled a damaged table top into a workbench. I put some more pegboard on the walls. I bought some clever plastic braces and some 2x4s and used them to put together some rudimentary but extremely strong shelving. I moved my easel down to the garage, and got some scrap wood at Fairfax Lumber, which has an area in the back that sells all kinds of gently and not-so-gently used building materials and furniture and random interesting stuff for short money. I had noticed that underneath the big saw they used for ripping wood for customers there were a lot of little end pieces, most no more than four or five inches long, and so last week I went back and asked the guy if I could toss some of them into a bin, and he said okay.

So over this last week I've been conducting my own private kindergarten class, with myself as chief instructor and sole student, just basically gluing things together out of scrap wood. I have long admired Louise Nevelson, particularly her amazingly ambitious and polished assemblages, and some of what I have been doing has been by way of preparing myself eventually to play a bit in her sandbox. I'm also interested in translating some of what I like about regular 2-D collage into 3-D collage. Now, as small experimental 3-D pieces (of the kind shown in the admittedly cheesy snapshot below) are starting to populate the shelves, the garage is beginning to feel more like a studio, and I'm starting to spend more time out there. Just in time: Winter is Coming.