Piscean Fellowship

I think it is because I am a Pisces that I feel drawn to fish. I don't particularly like to eat them, mind you, just look at them. There are few things that nature has manufactured that are as beautifully put together as a fish. What amazing forms!

In death they may be even more amazing. The streamlined qualities are even more intriguing when the substructures are revealed. Every now and then one of them washes ashore, or sometimes a shitload, and its like having a beautiful piece of sculpture delivered to your doorstep, but after sufficient admiration one must put a stick in their mouths and lug them back to the brush line and heave them in the bushes, otherwise they will create a stench that hangs around the beach like an intangible oil slick.

Stonelines II

The beach in the late fall or early spring is a perfect space for a long project. Nobody really comes down

because of the wind and cold and between storms you can get a week or two of calm surf so the work is not disturbed by man or nature and one can get a piece to last for a while before it is erased. This serpentine line of cobbles was one such sketch. I've always liked nature's serpentine images like the view of rivers from a plane, etc. Goldsworthy's serpentine images always look right. The first one I tried was on a beach along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon about six years ago. This one started out as a small wandering line and at the end of the afternoon it looked like it wasn't finished, so the following weekend I added to it and it doubled in length and really started to look like it belonged. I was toying with some additional work when a midweek storm erased the serpent. So it goes.

During one winter weekend, I went down and for lack of other options I made a little ice dune serpent that crawled from the shore up and over the ice dunes out toward the lake.

This series of sketches hasn't played itself out and I'm hoping for some time and conditions to allow for a summer version.

Stone Circles-Two Sketches

There is something to be said for circles. I'm not sure what it is, however. Neolithic stone circles, petroglyphs in spiral form, kivas in the southwest, burial mounds etc. etc. Even small in scale there is an elemental power to them that pulls the viewer in and creates a visual as well as "spiritual" tension between the circle and the environment. In stone, this seems amplified. There is nothing quite like standing in the midst of a stone circle, like Stonehenge, or enclosed in one of the tholos tombs at Mycenae or a great kiva like Casa Rinconada in Chaco Canyon. It is understandable why the circular form is connected to the "sacred" in so many cultures. Perhaps the more difficult thing to grasp is why it isn't in every culture. Even in two dimensions, the circle sucks me in. Adolph Gottlieb's "Blast" images and the Japanese flag...how can you walk by them? We could go on and on, I'm sure, but.....

would I feel the same way if the sun and the moon were shaped like "Good-n-Plenty"?.......

Three Door-Window Sketches

June 1-Went down to the beach for about two hours. Conditions were perfect. The steady winds out of the NW had built up a shelf of sand that was pretty level and damp and held shape well. The sky was clear and it was probably in the low 60's. There was a good feel to the afternoon. I salvaged a bunch of small flat stones from an earlier sketch and made a "door" with a window excavated out of the middle. That is the top image. Then I lined the edge with a bunch of small sticks that litter the beach. The second image is the stick lined version. The cast shadows of the sticks were pretty cool as the sun dropped. The third phase was to gather up a bunch of light colored cobbles and place them in the window. The end result was like a nest for a square assed duck.

I liked the result. There were some good light affects, cast shadows and surface variations. The textures got picked out nicely by the raking light. I would imagine that its lifespan will be pretty short but it was interesting while it lasted. There are some more things that need to be done before that mule has been sufficiently beaten