Title: Receiving the Runes: Day 6
SOLD
Year: 2013
Size: 11″ x 14″ (excluding frame dimensions)
Receiving the Runes: Day 6 was created using polymer clay, glass runestones, aluminum, and acrylic paint on canvas board.
The Story:
I’m writing this story in 2016, the piece was created in 2013 so I’ll do my best to remember.
Receiving The Runes: Day 6 has a long and crazy history to it. The tree was not originally created for this piece nor was it gold. I created the tree to mount in a box (similar to the boxes I’ve used for my two of my Steampunk pieces). It was silver when I first ‘finished’ it. I had planned on reusing the cherry blossoms I sculpted for Falling Petals. I accidentally broke that piece but all the flowers survived. Clearly that project never manifested.
The tree is made from tiny balls of polymer clay. Rolling all those little balls makes your fingers hurt after a while LOL. The trunk of the tree has an aluminum backing for stability. The entire tree was created separately and then glued to the canvas board. I originally painted it silver but after a year (or more) of it sitting in my studio unused, I decided something needed to be done with it.
Shortly before I created this piece, I redid one of the rooms in my house. That room happens to have some of the items from the gift shop I used to run. One of those was a bag of glass rune stones. The bag had arrived at the store missing several stones. The manufacturer replaced it but told me to keep the bag that as missing some. So I did. I found the bag during my renovation of the room and took it down to my studio.
I was fiddling with the tree, trying to come up with something to do with it when I saw the bag of rune stones. In Norse mythology, it is said that the god Odin hung from Yggdrasil, the tree of life, for 9 days and 9 nights. At the end of that period he received the runes, the form of writing used by the Norse (the Vikings) and also a system of divination. I painted my decorative tree gold since silver didn’t seem right for this, especially since the runes themselves were written in a gold paint. I ‘hung’ (glued) my partial set of runes to the tree. The clear one at the bottom is part of the set, it isn’t just a clear piece of glass. Since my set was incomplete, I added “Day 6” to the title to indicate the runes hadn’t complete been ‘received’ as of yet.
The canvas board was painted in a variety of brown acrylic paints. I’m sure I was influenced by the leather bag I had sitting in my studio. That bag holds a full set of pewter rune stones, which I toyed with using one this piece at one point. That’s really more of a hindsight observation though. I honestly can’t say for sure what caused me to paint it that way.