The Ice Dunes Cometh II

Sometimes, the waves push the sand around up on the littoral and it creates little troughs. These troughs will get filled with shallow pools and when the temperatures drop overnight, the surfaces freeze in thin sheets. One night I went down for sunset and there were a few of these pools frozen over, but the sheets of ice on the surface had fragmented so they were reflecting light in an unusual way. When I went over to look a little more closely, I picked up one of the plates and held it up and the surface had this wonderful texture. I set it up on its edge on the jetty and looked at the sunset through the ice. A little bit of magic...beach glass from the lake gods. (When you click on these images they're breathtaking)

The Ice Dunes Cometh

The beach in the winter is an otherworldly place. When you stand on the ice dunes and look out to the north you can see this vast ice field stretching forever. It's as if the lake is more vast when it is frozen than when it is in the liquid state. It appears to be more expansive and even though there is much more to be seen on a frozen lake, it still seems to be emptier as well.

In the view looking directly offshore, somebody has walked out on the ice and planted a stick. When I see things like this, a little defiant gesture by the stick to challenge the lake on its own turf, I recall the black monolith of 2001:A Space Odyssey and I understand how it triggered the response in the ape-people. The stick calls out "Contemplate me you damn bloody apes! I'm not from this world and yet I'm here...look on my works ye mighty and despair!" Now, I don't mean to be putting words into the stick's mouth, but I can almost hear him saying that...or perhaps it is just the wind.

Genesis IV

Winter comes to the Stonewave. This year the ice dunes formed late, but they made up for that shortcoming by being spectacular. Great forms. I spent a lot of time down on the beach this winter. One of the most amazing things about working down there in the winter is the sound, or absence of sound. No surf noise. Just quiet. All year long you hear the incessant pounding of hissing of the surf, but in the winter it is locked up and you are down there alone with the wind. When you look out over the lake it is an unworldly view. The surface of Europa or the Arctic. A good place to spend some time.

The one view is from out on the surface of the lake looking back at the first ice dune with the Stonewave behind it. There is about thirty yards between the dune and the stones, but the dune still dwarfs the structure.

Genesis III

In the Spring of 2007 I was able to reume work on the Stonewave. It survived the winter storms and ice dunes kept some of the early Spring storms at bay. The scraping of the dunes and the heavy storms also uncovered an extensive new crop of stone and I was able to start adding several courses of stone every time I went down to the beach and the result was the wave nearly doubled in size from May to October. This is what the wave looked like on the Autumnal Equinox of 2007...these two bottom shots. That day the light was beautiful and the stone lit up like gold.

When it ended the season before, the back of it arched out a bit so I thought I would experiment by placing a hole in the wall. There was no plan. I didn't align it with anything and in fact I didn't even think it would work, but it survived and in retrospect it would have been nice to align it with the setting sun or something. However, I didn't and it just looks out over the water when you stand behind the wall and look through it. It has however served an interesting function as time went by. People keep leaving things in the opening. I had starting placing interesting pieces of driftwood in the opening, or cool stones and then the next time I would go down they would be gone. Offerings to the gods. Then other people began to do it as well. Many years ago I went to Chaco Canyon and back then you were able to go down inside Casa Rinconada...I don't think you can do that anymore, but it was really awe-inspiring. In the niches around the interior of the wall, people (I assume to be indigenous locals) left offerings of tobacco or liquor in small bottles. So the opening seems to have taken on that role at times. This Spring some idiots started a fire in the opening causing some of the stones to explode and shatter, sending fragments shooting out of the niche. Other people have utilized the opening for target practice...trying to throw cobbles through the hole...by the looks of the number of marks around the hole they are not very good at this exercise....more later.

stonelines

This is the first of several stone line sketches. This one was 100 cobbles in a row with a lone cobble set off to the surf side part way down the line. I lined them up on the edge of the surf and I wanted to watch as the water washed over it and realigned it, but right about the time I finished, the surf died down and the line remained unmolested. Despite the fact that the row of stones wasn't very long it had a lengthier feel to it. The way the light was coming in that morning, hitting the water, it made the organic edge of the surfline seem more substantial and the relationship between the kinetic line of water and the static line of stones was enjoyable to watch. Nature's calligraphy...especially noticeable in the picture second from the top....Thanks for stopping by Jonathan S.

Scales on a Circular Fish

This is the second of the stone disc pieces. It took about an hour or two to get the right kind of stones and put them together. If I remember correctly, the disc was about five feet in diameter. I like the photo with the water in the background. The small strip of grey-blue at the top offset against the darker band of sand and gravel and then the disc in the foreground feel very right. This disc didn't last very long before somebody took it apart and then the surf reclaimed the pieces. I wish that I could be down there to see the water deconstruct one of these things, but it always seems that the big storm surges are always at night...patience, I suppose.

Sidetracking for a moment

I just wanted to see what this looked like. When I'm not playing around on the beach I'm a painter. This is one of the pieces that is a keystone piece of an exhibition entitled "Requiem for the Peten". This is the first major work of the series based on time spent in Guatemala at the Classic Period Maya site of Tikal between the years 1993 or so and 2007. There is also a close-up of one part of it. This is an ongoing project that consists of at least 70 individual pieces. Part of it is currently being exhibited in a small gallery in Erie called Glassgrower's.

Genesis II

So in the Fall the tower starts to take this undulating form as an accidental response to the previous collapse. It gets up to about 11 feet tall and has some nice curves. At that point I was pretty much done with this project, but I kept finding these great slabs of stone so I started to build a little tail on the end of it. It kept growing, but then a storm washed the tail away. I restarted the tail just as a way to store the stone over the winter and as the season for going in the lake came to a close I had this tall wall sloping off of the tower about ten feet long and about 6 feet tall at the lowest point. I had planned on using this stone for a different project, but that is not what ended up happening.

Genesis I

I'm going to backtrack a bit. A while back I was taught how to use a Blog and I thought in the end it would be forgotten, die of attrition, but I have decided to keep it alive as an exercise and see if it serves any useful purpose, perhaps take on a life of its own. The previous entries have been in relation to a series of sculptural projects I have been working with on a beach on the south shore of Lake Erie, not far from Presque Isle in Erie Pennsylvania. So I will put that into context first.

Beginning about five years ago or so I would hang out on the beach near my home. I don't like just lying there so I would go to read or putter around and I started making little stone works on the beach and they would be washed away the next day. Around that time I started to become familiar with the work of Andy Goldsworthy. Like other artists who played around with "environmental" art I was impressed with his work (I liked a lot of R. Smithson's work...Anna Mendieta-great stuff). After seeing some of Goldsworthy's larger stone "seeds" I thought I would try something on a larger scale. The first big piece I did was actually on a beach in the Grand Canyon. I enjoyed myself so much that when I returned home and the weather changed from spring to summer I decided I would start a work on the beach by my home. This photo is a view from the beach that was to become my workspace for these projects. The first attempt was acairn of about 11 feet tall that survived the winter locked in an ice dune, but was destroyed in the Spring by a storm. I began a second one moved back a bit from the surfline, but it went down that Fall. The third attempt was a 10 foot conical tower with a wall jutting out of one side. A Spring storm took it, but I began a fourth one almost immmediately from the wreckage of this tower and although an early stage of it was wiped out the base survived and the current "Stonewave" grew out of it. Next time, I'll go from there.

Here is a close-up of a stick sculpture that was about 2 feet high, about 7 feet in diameter and constructed by laying the sticks out in a radial pattern from the center. The outer edge was defined by a "rim" of thicker sticks with the spokes layered over top of one rim, another rim placed on top and a second level of spokes. This lasted about two weeks and then somebody set it on fire one night. The photo above shows the first level of spokes and rim.

In response to Bob...yes I've known of AG for a long time, particularly liked the Time and Tide CD. I had been doing little beach pieces for years and when I started to see Goldsworthy's work it just made me want to work larger and eventually I began these bigger pieces about 4 or 5 years ago. I really enjoy the tactile quality of most of his stuff.

sketches in sand-stone-sticks

Here is another little project from last month. I'm pretty busy right now with a show that just opened last Friday, but I plan on organizing this thing a little bit as soon as I get some spare time. This is about a 16 inch square hole lined with little pieces of driftwood sticks and surrounded by some flat stones. Last Saturday I was able to get into the water for the first time this year. Its only about 45 degrees, but it was calm and I went in up to my knees with little or no screaming. There were several good slabs right along the shore.