BLOGAHOMA

For a long time I have ruminated about my monocular vision. Should I feel somehow cheated or is it a blessing in disguise. On top of one-eyed I am farsighted with astigmatism. Eye doctors are my best friends. Every two years my prescription has changed since I was 4 years old. That’s 30 eye exams and new prescriptions. I have memorized the eye chart. My left non-functioning eye sees only the top letter. The right does considerably better though with out glasses vision is blurred with halos.

One-eyedness has not stopped me from being an artist. It has stopped me from driving. I took drivers training years ago but when I took the test I didn’t see all the signs I should have and felt the roads would be safer without me behind the wheel. I failed driving twice but passed parking so I have remained parked.

Although I have read novels my preference is short stories, poetry, articles or nonfiction which I can ingest a little at a time. My right eye gets tired. Sometimes I prefer to put on the headset and have the articles on the web read to me while I scan which acts as a double sensory retention. And I love being read to. I have had the opportunity to hear the great ones…. Toni Morrison, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Alice Walker among them.

I know from reading about monocular vision that I do not have the usual depth perception.

Monocular cues are cues to depth that are effective when viewed with only one eye. Although there are many kinds of monocular cues, the most important are interposition, atmospheric perspective, texture gradient, linear perspective, size cues, height cues, and motion parallax.

Unlike most of the movie audiences I am not looking forward to the age of 3D movies since they are set up for those with binocular vision. When an object is coming toward me it is another story. An sport where a ball or object is directed toward me immediately puts me in harms way, baseball, basketball, tennis, volleyball etc. etc. Those have hit me in the head way too often. Those sports are ones that I suck at, really. Swimming is also a problem as it requires taking off of the glasses and I am left in a blur. On the other hand if I am aiming at a target, lets say bowling, I do not suck quite as much. Actually I like bowling for that reason. My high game…. 167!

So what is the upside of monocular vision? Hard to say. I have a keen memory for what I see. I can draw/ sculpt from memory. Once when I was on a jury I came home and drew caricatures of the jurists from memory. I am also hyper aware of colors and patterns. It’s possible that similar to how ADD processes information, objects in a room all come into my sight at the same time without executive order of importance allowing an more interesting and creative view of my world. In addition I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t a tetrachromat.

“A tetrachromat is a woman who can see four distinct ranges of color, instead of the three that most of us live with.” It seems I can see the subtlest of variations of a color sometimes to the annoyance of others and to myself.
I would assume my my monocular vision has rewired my brain,  to wish for the use of both eyes would probably be a mistake.
The song Spider Web by Joanne Osborne says it best…

The world is made of spider webs
The threads are stuck to me and you
Be careful what youre wishing for
cause when you gain you just might lose
You just might lose your…
Spider web

Stapler Attachment
I started collecting staplers in earnest about July 28th 2009. At first it was ohlala look at this cool EM 230 Paris agrafeuse on Ebay and it’s so French! There was an identical one up but in red and they were asking $99 so I went for the one that was $8! Really! (Note the red one is still sitting there a year later.) And that is how it all started. I had bought staplers in the past then resold on Ebay wanting the whole time to keep them but then who needs more than one stapler? So how do I justify collecting them? Who wants to know? There are so many layers to collecting staplers. I love layers. Here are the dozen layers I have discovered: Maker, Type, Country, Year, Style, Inventor, Patent, Size, Material, Rarity, Color, Variation. So of course I have a database because I can. I use Bento for its visual appeal. But when all my best rationalizations for collecting stapling machines fail I pull out the art card. That’s right art doesn’t need a reason. I create Photoshop images and 3D animations and am currently working on stapler coveralls and a “This is Not Stapler” t shirt. Happy tangents to you!

I like the surprises doing a new thing brings. I now have invented ways to clean these little buggers. I have passed on this knowledge to other fledgling collectors when asked. Stapler collectors, I have discovered, tend to be detail and design fanatics which is ropes me in. Another enlightenment to me is their mechanical workings which, unlike newer gadgets like ipods and cellphones that leave me in the dark, the stapler can be understood one spring, one plunger, one anvil at a time. I now have stable of staplers numbering over 50 almost enough for a Stapler a Week (a great non-threatening stapler website BTW). I might just stay at 52. I have sold off ones I didn’t particularly like for various reasons. Not just dupes mind you. I like some staplers more than others like the Jakyneuf Agrafeuse which I just have to say “aucun merci” the next time it comes up for auction.  I’ve learned stapler in German (Hefter) and French which is pretty useless but fun nonetheless. And have come to realize that a package shipped from France can take 2 months but it will arrive. I’ve taken my staplers of interest to the Park Tavern for show and tell and on Facebook for the socialization. Because it’s NOT true “If you seen one stapler you’ve seen them all”.

“Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”
Robert Motherwell

A side benefit of being an artist is knowing and being friends of other artists. It is a source of joy for me. Artists are brimming with ideas of the plausible, the possible and the impossible. They can be in the midst of fright/ delight, frustrated, frustrating but very rarely bored or boring. It is always show and tell with artist. What is inspiring them, their new direction and what they think you should tackle next. My artist friends need to be reassured that what they are doing is at least good and appreciated. That’s right, an artist may seem to have a healthy ego but under the top coat there is some level of self doubt. The art is the easy part for most of them, the marketing the most difficult. In return they never mock my ideas or ever let on that they think I’m whacky. In my circle of art friends I never have to explain myself.

Stapler Jam

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
Scott Adams

I have all manner of artist for friends, sculptors, draftsmen, graphic artists, naturalists, photographers, assemblage artists, painters, craftsmen, ceramicists and performance artists. I try to applaud and encourage honestly as often as possible when I am not being held captive by my own art. The last show I attended was the reception for Debby Kaspari and her “Drawing the Motmot” exhibit at the Sam Noble Natural History Museum in Norman, OK. Not just a walk through once exhibit for each rainforest painting or drawing was accompanied with beautifully penned journal entry. The show “glowed” thats all I’ll say. “Drawing the Motmot” will be up into January 2010, so go. Then there is Marilyn Artus in Oklahoma City who heads up “Dr. Sketchy” a life drawing extravaganza night out and the “Girlie Show” a showcase for Oklahoma craftswomen as well as finding time creating her own brand of collage images. Her vitality screams “I am Artist hear me roar”.

I have held creative positions in three corporations and have picked up creative friends in every job. And then I have left but thanks to Facebook and Twitter I am still connected to them because of our shared artistic vision, drive, whims and qualms.

Some of my best artist friends are family. A husband Michael who finds the beauty of the surrounding Wichita formations in his oil paintings and gets lost in the clouds in others. Son, Colin Fahrion, whose witty art is visual, written, performing and organized as well. His wife Nifer felts her wooly way with uncommon critters.  Daughter Kim in Tulsa captures places and people through the camera lens, while sister Susan Trentel ambidextrously schemes and seams.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Thomas Merton

A lot of my artist friends are on Facebook so I can see what they’re doing on in their art life. I am there to peek at the amazing undercurrents of creativity some of which make it to create great waves of art.

“Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art”
Konstantin Stanislavsky

Quotes from ThinkExist.com

So what’s my passion? Now it is staplers. It’s everything I can find out about them. The who, when, where and how. A litany of names, Arrow, Ace, Bates, Bostitch, Neva-Clog, EM, Hotchkiss and all. I know it will take a while but eventually I will become a real “know it all” about these feisty little machines! And then what? Then I don’t know. I learned a whole lot about American arts and crafts tiles, the who, what, why, how, when and where and now I am selling few of them moving to new owners so they can learn. Oh I am keeping many of them but some are going. And then the offshoots, lateral thinking will begin. Obviously 3D work/ play. I am starting to formulate a way to display the staplers and how fun it might be to build a velvet lined box. Right now I am thinking the Neva-Clog, because it cost me a pretty penny and has great curb appeal.

Pictured here is the Hotchkiss Nº 1 from 1924. Their earlier models had more engraving but I like the no nonsense look of this one. And yes at $7, postage and a lot of elbow grease it is quite presentable.

First you have to love the name. I takes confidence to call your device the Neva-Clog but of course being that it was made in 1936 there was no fear of being slammed in a blog or on Epinions. But here it is 2009, this deco darling is now 73 years old and is still hanging in there. It’s particular on what staples you feed it. It has smaller than standard staple which means that it might not ever clog since it will run out of staples before I could ever lodge a complaint. And since the company is no longer in business it is moot point.

Creating art of the Neva-Clog is like reinventing the staple however I started on my 3D rendering before I actually owned this machine. A few details I was not aware of was its head came to a point (I’ll call it the button but I don’t know the real terminology), it appears to have nickelplating rather than chrome and what I thought were photography distortions in the angle of the base were not distortions, the base is actually slightly askew. I followed up with few tweeks to my art after buying the Neva-Clog.

I am somewhere in midst of series of anatomy of the stapler. More to come.