Winter Solstice Human Sacrifices...or not.

The WINTER SOLSTICE has come and gone with the proper sacrifices made. The victim was appropriately George Bush, whose trussed body was lain upon the altar stone and beaten with a sock full of frozen Tootsie Rolls until Dick Cheney's hand popped out. They were then both painted red and sent north across the frozen lake to meet their fate. Eight years too late, but a satisfying image nonetheless.I went down to the lake on the solstice to see what nature had in store for me on this shortest day of the year. It was a stunning revelation in grey. High winds and cold temperatures beginning early on the 21rst and running through the 22nd had piled the surf up on the beach 40 feet beyond the normal waterline and then froze it in several rows of dunes. Now this is a yearly phenomenon, but the surprise here was how quickly it happened, how far inland and how high. The dunes were already about 10 feet high in places and were made up of ice balls of various sizes, from ping pong balls to volleyballs. The end result was an unearthly Jovian vision. A grey-white corrugated icescape for as far as the eye could see. The ramparts of ice blocked the view of the lake, but if one were to climb up a bit of a dune, the brown waves topped with white crests could be seen making their way shoreward. They could not get far, as a shelf of ice has formed along the shore and then a skirt of frozen floating iceballs beyond that would absorb them as they tried to make their way home.The above photo was taken looking down towards Presque Isle. Of course it can't be seen through the snow and gloom. In fact you can barely make out Baer Beach. Now one of the truly amazing things about this place is that three days ago I was down here on the beach working in a T-shirt in near record temperatures in the 60's.The following three photos are of some of the stone cairns covered in ice and snow. On this day I couldn't work as the snow covering made it too hard to find the proper stones for laying the new courses. So, I waited a few days and by Christmas the conditions were much improved for working and I have been able to make significant progress since these photos were recorded. I will post those images next time. Until then, I hope that the new year is an interesting one for you all. Good health...

Shiftiing Stones and A New Form

The year is coming to a close and in Erie it has been a grey end. Already the sun has become a stranger. It looks like we are in for a long cold haul. The solstice approaches and with it some time off from work that might lead to some extended hours at the beach so I have that to look forward to.

I've started a new large scale project out of the ruins of last summer. I 'm not so sure where I'm heading with it just yet, but I began with this square of stone above. I began to push the top off of the vertical a couple of inches in each course until it began to lean. I liked what was happening with the other attempts at leaning forms and gapped forms.

Unfortunately every day that I worked was either rainy, sleety or otherwise slate-colored so that the photos look like they were taken without the benefit of sunlight or color. It has just been sucked out of the landscape. It's a convention of earth tones around here right now. In the background you can see the storage wall for the stone which will slowly become smaller as the project grows.

After the initial square was planted I began a second platform that was quadrilateral, but the south line of it was bowed a bit. This platform was spaced about 4 inches from the original square and it followed the lean of the original square.

I don't know for sure where this gap is going to go just yet. Whether it will recurve or bend back I can't say for sure. I suppose the final height of the platforms will determine that. I like the way the tree on the bluff behind the sculpture bends along with the gap in the picture below.

Since these photos were taken I have added a few more courses, laying in the seat stones. These are long stone planks that are relatively flat on the upper surface that make a pretty good surface for sitting. I am toying with the idea of having a sitting space incorporated in the form.

There has been some significant stones wash up in the last week or two, so I've benefited from donations from the lake both stone and stick wise and I hope to integrate a bit with this piece.

Here is a view or two of the second platform. The next time I go down I'll begin the third platform and by that time I'm hoping the final shape and scope of the thing will become more apparent. In the mean time, have a nice solstice.

Back to the Jungle

Along with the 100 Views and the Beachworks projects I occasionally revisit the Requiem for the Peten project. I've been sending out proposals to galleries around the area trying to drum up some interest in exhibiting this installation. It has been depleted by sales over time, but I have steadily filled the gaps so that it still stretches over 50 feet and includes about 45 paintings and 6 drawings. The show at Glassgrowers Gallery in Erie worked out very nicely. About 25 pieces made up the mural, but that was last year's news. I am hoping that I might be able to find a space for 2009 or early 2010 (if I'm not making my second Space Odyssey at that time). Things don't look good for that at present, but serendipity can not be discounted.

The piece above was finished two years ago and has become one of the main segments of the mural. It is joined to the panel below with a small, narrow painting between them. Altogether it is about 6 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide. It depicts Temple IV of Tikal from a high point on the west end of the Great Plaza. This is a monstrous structure that has gained some fame in popular culture as the rebel base in Star Wars. The butterfly images were derived from sketches and photos taken from walks down the old runway away from the ruins out into the scrub forest. At certain times of the year, that space is so densely populated with butterflies its like the souls of all of ancient Tikal are on parade. And a beautifully dressed parade it always is. I have walked that trail for a couple of miles without finding a terminus, but it is always good for a surprise or two.

The lower panel is a painting derived from a number of different burials found during the excavations at the Plaza de los Siete Templos. To contrast with the greens of the jungle I began to play with sienas and ochres and getting these warm earthtones bordering in some places on warm-blood reds. The stone bone textures counter the plant patterns from th upper panel in an interesting way. This is one of the nicest paintings in the installation.
The above piece is a tangle of aerial roots or tendrils that occasionally fall out of the trees or perhaps are tossed out by the monkeys. I'm guessing they grow at the ends of branches and are knocked off more easily. You can see them from the ground up in the branches, but I never looked closely enough to figure out what they were doing up there. This panel is inset on a larger painting of a ceiba trunk and root system with bones. I love the complexity and the Jackson Pollock frenetic energy.

This is a small panel of a tree trunk with some impressive thorns. The tree grows along the walkway between the aguadas and the ticket booth at the entrance to the ruins. Every time I go down there I'm amazed at the variety of surfaces on the trees boles. Even though I've seen them time and again, it is still an impressive array of textures. Sometimes, I wonder if I will ever go back. So many things pull in so many different directions, but it was a long strange ride regardless.

Dancing Stick Sketches

Well, it has been a while. Much energy has gone into building the studio. I finally have the roof on and tarpapered, so that has cut down on beach time. But calm, windless days with no rain sucked me down a couple of times over Thanksgiving weekend. I have begun a new stone project but it is still in the nebulous stage. I am waiting for the stone to tell me what it wants to do. But I took a break from it and worked with some sticks. There are a lot of sticks on the beach right now. Because there is nobody to burn them and swill beer, I have quite a stock. So I gathered a bunch of them up. The sand has not frozen yet and a new layer was layed down with the last storm. I was able to poke the sticks into the sand a couple of inches deep. Normally that would not be possible as there are so many stones in the matrix. But today the layer was fairly stone free.

So I just lined them up in a kind of random fashion. If one wouldn't poke in I just left a gap. There was no attempt at controlling for height or length. I just pushed them in. All of that other stuff can wait for future sketches. For a first sketch, I liked the results.

The line worked well with the setting, working off of the shore line and the horizon. I think the tension had a lyrical quality to it. When you walked around it, it was doing different things with the tree line and the peninsula. It was only 101 sticks, but it seemed that they had a lot to say.

I even liked the way they looked when set against the stone wall and the remains of the friendly jetty. I can see this having some interesting future manifestations. I hope things stay temperate for a couple more weekends so that I can try some things out.

The 100 Views project is still rolling along. I have almost finished the 25 fall views. The last one is on the board right now. It is an image of frozen puddles with sheets of leaves encased in them. I don't know how this one will turn out, but so far I have liked most of them. Next imae I will probably be far enough along to post some new images of the stone work. By then hopefully everything we'll feel proper and the stone will be ready to go. Until then...

Big Surf and the Obliteration of Art

The dull slate grey Fall has arrived and with it the wet cold that goes through you into your joints. This is my least favorite time to be on the beach as there is always a wind and it is always a damp cold one. I went down to work on my "friendly jetty", a low sloping wall running down towards the waterline. It was friendly because I left a gap to walk through at the midway point, unlike the big concrete variety that dot the shore here. This picture you can see it at the end of the day. I worked another day on it, but then before I could photograph the latest manifestation two days of high winds and surf obliterated it...back to the drawing board. Fall is a time of change and the beach is certainly dynamic around now, unfortunately it is also dull grey. Here is the long view of the jetty before she was washed away. I was kind of liking this little thing, but so it goes.

I had made a set of colored stone circles a couple of weeks ago and last week added a new circle or reddish stone. I thought the bottom photograph was interesting with the circles juxtaposed with the shelf of washed up cobbles to the lakedside of the circles. These circles were also casualties of the high surf this week. Amazingly the surf had to be high enough to wash over about a two foot high rampart of these cobbles that had been pushed ashore a month ago by similar conditions. I thought this rampart would protect things until the ice dunes arrived. Wrong again.

A lot of stone has washed ashore in these last two storms and a shitload of construction material as well. Bricks and concrete blocks and that kind of thing. The place looks a little shaky right now, especially in this light. This week a snowstorm also blew in to the tune of about 8 inches. I haven't been down to the beach to see the results, but it was certainly a beautiful snow. It was accompanied on Sunday night with a pretty impressive electrical storm. That's something you don't see every day. The lightning flashes were incredibly bright, reflected off of the snow on the ground and in the sky...God's camera flash.

100 Views-Four for the Fall

Not much time to talk today, but I wanted to post a few more paintings. I am now in the 60's for the 100 Views series and trying to finish up the Fall paintings during this, the second Fall of the project. This first image is from last year, but the following three are recent works and there are a few more new ones that I am liking currently. Some new work down on the beach with the stone circles but I'll hold off on posting for a bit.

Beach punctuation.

In the last couple of weeks the dust has settled from the Delaware show, I've been able to catch up on all my work and the weather has cooperated so that I have been able to get down to the beach to do some work. Last weekend the beach was illuminated by that magnificent October sunlight. Cool and clean with a blue sheet of sky. I continued to dismantle the stonebench and started a new little piece using cobbles.
Right now the beach itself is lined with a rampart of cobbles. Washed in by several days of heavy surf prior to the weekend. This low wall of stone may actually keep some of the smaller sculptures safe from unruly surf for a while. It has also supplied me with an inexhaustable supply of cobbles. So I began to gather some black stones, white stones and blue stones and place them in little circular piles.
These piles are about 2 feet in diameter and are about 6 inches apart. When they are placed next to each other it is amazing how the contrasts of their color/value is apparent. When you are looking for them it isn't so obvious that they are that white or black. The blue ones are pretty obvious though. Unfortunately, the sun doesn't get over the bluffs to light the sculptures up until the afternoon and I was working in the morning, so the photos don't pick up the colors so well, but regardless, the end result is interesting.
The white stone in the circle above is particularly affected by the lack of direct sunlight. There was a nice feel to this little sketch and if it survives, I can see a couple of different directions to go with it.
The blue stones are quite beautiful when they are dry and they glow with an inner coolness. They are quite plentiful in the piles of cobbles. They are also the most regular in form and are really very pleasing.


The black stones are the most difficult to track down and here they are photographed wet, because without the sun they don't quite have the same charm. One of the next steps may be to add some or the oranges or reds to the picture. We'll see how it goes.
This weekend I went back down and was surprised to see my circles still there. So in the two hours that I had, I took a little more of the bench down and dressed up the circles a bit. They had been rained and winded on a bit. I also gathered up a bunch of little sticks to put around the black stones to see what would happen. I don't think I have enough. The end result wasn't quite what I was looking for. But it does lead to other possibilities. I also worked a bit on the passage. The end had been washed away by the surf so I put it back together. And I am building up the layers on it a bit. If it doesn't get wiped out by today's big winds I have a plan for it. You can see the rampart of cobbles on each side of the passage, by the way.

I have no idea if anybody actually looks at these images on the blog. I have no idea how to find that information out. But every now and then a comment shows up and the last time I checked I had a nice note from Jen from Florida. All I can say is thank you. The people who stop to chat while I am working and the comments like these are a big help. After dealing with vandals destroying the works every so often and the people who keep taking the stone and the absentee landlords it is the timely positive comment that makes it easy to keep playing Sisyphus. Thanks again.

Passages

Went down this weekend in near perfect conditions. Fall colors exploding. Crystal blue sky. Did some work dismantling the bench and made this little piece. About three feet wide and 30 odd feet long down to the waterline. A quick work, stone sketch as it were, but I like it. It has some potential. I like the way the horizon melts in these pictures...

Here it is lengthening out a bit. This was the second day on the job and I took it down into the water. I don't expect this to last long, but it will be interesting to see what happens after a couple of days of surf.

The peninsula in the distance with the stone passage mirroring it.

At the Intersection of Wallstreet and The Beach

Well, what did you expect? When the blind lead the blind everyone falls into the ditch. The fact that the blind elected the blind doesn't help those with sight much. Saying "I told you so" doesn't really balance things out. So what is one to do when all about you are losing their heads? ....Go down to the beach... The light was perfect and the sun was just trying to vault over the trees that top the bluff, but couldn't quite free itself, its beams being tangled in the upper boughs of the taller trees. The light that made it to the beach was that pure golden light. In the shade it was slate blue-grey. In the water it was cerulean and green and a deep blue in places. I found a log and set it up in the shallow surf only to have it fall seconds later when the water undercut it. After a dozen tries I got it to remain for a minute of two, a sentinal on this empty stretch, like the black monolith in 2001 A Space Oddyssey. Then I sat around and waited for intelligent life to evolve....still waiting.

100 Views at the "George Weymouth Gallery"

I went down to the beach the other day and began to reconstruct the stone bench and the other sculpture that had been vandalized. I should have some time this weekend to get them back into shape. The flower was completely obliterated by the surf whipped up by Ike's remnants. In the meantime I'm posting 4 paintings from the 100 Views Project. These are currently being exhibited at Twin Lakes Brewery's Gallery space, dubbed rather spontaneously, the George Weymouth Gallery. It has a nice ring to it. I think they should make it official. Anyways, the gallery is exhibiting 27 paintings and 6 photos of the "beachworks" along with a number of Brian Pardini's sculptures. When I left after hanging the show, things looked pretty good. We'll have to make a few adjustments on opening night, but I thought it looked pretty good. This is an image from the Winter portion of the 100 Views. The hope is eventually to finish 25 images for each season. I'm a little more than half-way through right now.

This is a Spring image of fish cadavers washed up on shore. It was a cold wet day and they glowed a pale white against the earth tones of the beach surface.

This is also a Spring or late winter image just short of Gull Point. I think this is the part of the beach where they were shooting The Road. If not it should have been.

A Fall image, one of several leaf images. This day while walking on one of the trails I felt like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road or it was a scene from Hero. A beautiful day it was.

So there you have it, 4 more of the 100 Views. The Show opens on October 4th. I hope it is a beautiful day as the light coming through the gallery windows can make a lot of difference with these images. More stone sculptures coming soon.