Chlora's Tinkertoys

What I remember most about playing with Tinkertoys is their woody smell. That, and the frustration of trying to jam a stick into a hole on a humid summer day when the wood swelled up. Plus the sound of the tumbling parts out of the big bucket. Tinkertoys were fun, but you had to lower your engineering standards, since anything was guaranteed to come out wobbly.

A few in-process shots here of "Chlora's Tinkertoys". Nothing fancy about this technique, just a large coiled cylinder smoothed down with a fake floor to hold the spools and sticks. I had an assembly line going for awhile there. What this piece required was a lot of playfulness and painting. Here's my model, a cannister of Tinkertoys from the early 1970's, I think, when they began to add a few plastic parts.






Early on, I knew this piece would be about building bridges, and it'd go in the August Chlora story (which like all 12 Chlora Books of the Month, is continually in process). Essentially, Chlora is playing with Tinkertoys at her Grandmother's after having a close encounter with a pack of dogs near a small bridged creek. She's recovering in the air conditioning, flipping through her Grandmother's set of bridge cards. She begins sticking them on the Tinkertoy bucket with chewing gum, and one thing leads to another.

Deciding which paintings would be the "bridge cards" and go on the tub took as long as painting them...I googled "paintings of bridges" and got lots of hits. Then I printed out small reproductions and stuck them on a trashcan to get a continuous flow of lines from one composition into another....in a top and bottom row. One of the first paintings to come to mind was Jacques Louis David's The Sabines,that gargantuan, complicated one that holds sway in the Louvre's grand gallery. Why? Because the woman in the middle has planted herself squarely between two warring tribes, and she loves both sides. It is not easy being a bridge.

Midway through I suddenly thought of the Crystal Bridges Art Museum opening this fall in my neck of the woods in Arkansas. So I borrowed their big beauty, Asher B. Durand's Kindred Spirits, which has NO bridge, but a huge gap in the woods. Below it, a Redon Crucifixion situated
itself, as if spanning the gap. Once all were painted and fired, they got stuck onto the bucket.