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In the Beginning:
The idea behind Ice Cube Head the
picture and Icecubehead.com was completely unplanned and serendipitous. It began like this:
I have two large dogs, Louis and Grrrl. They are mostly outdoor dogs and their water dish is a five-gallon plastic bucket. In the winter, when one bucket starts to freeze, I switch it out with a fresh one. The water in the bucket freezes from the top down and along the sides. Given a certain amount of partial freezing, followed up by several hours indoors thawing, you can get a perfectly formed hollow ice cylinder out of the bucket, open on one end, like a giant glass or a vase. Just the right size to fit snuggly over a man’s head.
Shortly after making this discovery, I was playing a game of winter bocce with an artist friend, Jim Kelly. I asked him to take a picture of me wearing the ice helmet. To make the image more humorous, especially given the below-freezing temperature and my pathetic physique, I stripped to the waist. The result is a slightly disturbing image of a half-naked grown man whose head appears to be frozen inside a giant ice cube.
There is a group of bocce players who regularly congregate at my house, several of whom are artists of one type or another. We decided that we would all draw, paint, whatever medium, a version of the photo, then gather them all together and have a little party. The initial results, particularly the work of Jim Kelly and Sean Gelarden, were so impressive and fun that we decided to invite others to participate. The group expanded beyond our bocce circle to include a wide spectrum of contributors, from trained art professionals to people who hadn’t drawn a picture since early school days.
Jim, Sean and I then decided we would print some of the best pieces and offer them for sale at a gala party at my house (Friday, June 5, 2009.) To complete the project, we started a web site, Icecubehead.com, to display and market these and future images created by a hardcore group of artists from among the initial participants.
Jeff Ayers, April 2009
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