Welcome to Medullary Ray

Recently I was reminded of one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous lines "I have a dream" . "So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream" Can you hear it? "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream, I have a dream" . I hear it in my head just the way he said it, don't you? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking into one of those old fashioned microphones with passion and conviction and  eloquence. He kept repeating that phrase " I have a dream ". What would he say today? I was almost 2 when he gave that speech in August of 1963. No, I don't remember hearing the speech live. But all my life I have heard it in movies and documentaries and radio. Do you remember how you felt hearing his words, listening to his speech? He dared to challenge a long held institution to free a group of oppressed people. Do you recall feeling like your own dreams were within reach? If only it were possible...

Creativity is like riding a bike. Y ou might be a little rusty at first, you may even fear falling off, but then you feel the wind through your hair, you find your balance and wonder why you haven’t ridden in years! More and more people are embracing creativity in some way because they feel the need for connection, expression and the acknowledgement of who we are. The act of being creative requires us to take risks. Most of us learn by the time we are in middle school that we had better stay comfortable and safe and not take any more creative risks. Somehow, transitioning from stick figures to realism is a daunting task. Go figure! We Americans want successful results right away. Do you know some people spend their lives drawing the figure? Somehow, as our brains develop, we never make it back to the drawing table and we continue playing it safe. Making furniture is already a bunch of hard work, why make it even more difficult by changing the design? I could be mak...

I NEED TO SYNC MY iPHONE WITH THE DESIGNS IN MY HEAD. They have finally figured out the wireless sync, so why not? I’m sure someone is working on this right now. I know it may require some intense filtering but sometimes I wish I had this feature. My screen may look like this at times:                                           by Thorsten Nass   Beautiful isn’t it? See more of his work here: http://www.videodraws.me/ I ALWAYS HAVE SEVERAL WOODWORKING PROJECTS GOING AT ONCE One is a jewelry box, or at least that’s what I think it is going to be. I have decided that I will make my own hinges for this and I want them to be sculptural accents made out of the hardest wood in the shop, Vera Wood.   Its green and blue and amber which will accent the fir box nicely. HOW DO I MAKE IT ART? The way I go about ...

This is an updated photo of Portland where I live now. I work close by the river, the same Willamette river I wrote about: On my walk this morning I paused to admire the Willamette River. It is wide, and this morning, quiet, peaceful and full. As always it was flowing past me, underneath my footbridge.  The body split apart and came back together again with grace and ease.  After admiring it’s awesome beauty I was reminded of my work and the feeling of running in place. On the surface the river looks so peaceful so laid back like nothing is really going on. It’s so full that rapids aren’t even showing where they usually highlight the rocky substrate.  This river has a powerful underbelly. The current that lies beneath is hard at work making smooth the rocks that nest on its great gut. It seems so much like my own work. I work and work and sometimes it doesn’t look like anything is being done. But I know what is going on, even if underneath.  I am th...

Self portrait Life size, profile view private collection I view sculpture and furniture very similarly. Shapes intersecting, overlapping, and carrying the line for and with one another. It is my hope that the eye is taken on a journey, finding the story of the piece. This is one of my favorite sculptures to date. It is the result of the convergence of many factors in my life. I had been self-saturated with African art for many years and I was studying art at a time when the curriculum focused on the changes that had occurred in art since “The Academy”. I’m talking about the early 20 th century with Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism etc. We studied realism, extensively. This head, in fact, was sculpted as a realistic head.   I had been doing realistic sculptures since 9 th grade and I was quite good at it. After a while, I found it to be boring. So what if I could make something look exactly like something else? I didn’t feel any satisfaction from capturing a ...