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.

More from the "Requiem for the Peten"

This last weekend the weather was amazing. The stuff that makes Erie very liveable if not an actual paradise. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take advantage of it to work on the beach as I was in Greenville, Delaware hanging a show at the Twin Lakes Brewery...the George Weymouth Gallery. Weymouth is a well-known painter/portraitist in the tempera tradition. Apparantly the gallery used to be his studio and the brewery owner is his grandson or something along those lines. The show is with Brian Pardini and includes his driftwood sculpture and 27 of my paintings from the 100 Views. The weekend was a bit tainted because right before I left I discovered that my beach sculptures had been damaged by the remnants of Hurricane Ike and then vandalized as well. Some of the stone was then stolen by a local guy. Upon returning to Erie on Sunday night I retrieved some of the stone, but there will have to be a reckoning of sorts so that this doesn't happen again. So with no new images from the Beachworks, I will revisit the Requiem works. The above piece is a 30"x40" watercolor of a felled tree, possibly a ceiba. It has been laying on the ground by the Great Plaza trail for years now. But in its initial felling the bole was a beautiful orangish-siena when wet and when set off by the greens it was particularly impressive.

This is one small panel from a larger painting called Root/Stone/Bone from the Requiem series.

The image comes from a child sacrifice placed in lip to lip plates and then cached in a building. The point of view makes it even more disturbing I think and the earth tones were a bit exaggerated to stay in keeping with the larger painting that it was a part of.

This is the most recent addition to the Requiem series. I particularly like the leaves which were taken from a little sketch that I did right outside the lab at Plaza de los Siete Templos while waiting for Oswaldo and the truck to head back to the casita. I had a small bottle of India ink and I used a twig to sketch a couple of leaves lying on the plaza floor. The sketch had to be quick before the leaves blew away. There was a wabi sabi feel to it and it was fun to translate it into color...Recumbant Figures.

I have to say good-bye to this piece. It sold in the Glassgrowers show. It has always been one of my favorites. It is a stucco mask from the North Acropolis and it shows up in many paintings, but I particularly like this one. The third mask over, the reddish one was painted shortly after visiting the Modigliani exhibition at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo. I was blown away by this color that he used in a couple of reclining nudes, so I stole it and used it on this mask and it made the painting as far as I am concerned. I will miss it.

So these are some images from the "Requiem for the Peten" exhibit. It has been shown in Pittsburgh, Ashtabula OH, Erie, and Jamestown NY and I was getting ready to retire it, but the other day I put a few pieces up and now I think I want to try to get it out at least one more time. So I will send out another round of proposals.

Out of the Ashes the Phoenix Rises...

So, the canvas couldn't stay blank for long. I couldn't resist playing around. So I started a small stack of stone with a bit of a curve in it. I liked it enough to continue and.... so it gave birth to a second stack in which I wanted to experiment with leaving a small gap between them to see what the light would do with it and so...
the stack got a dance partner, which turned out OK. One morning I came down to work and somebody had crowned the work with a small plastic cow. The cow did not last long. A couple of days later someone laid claim to the cow or it wandered off of its own volition. Now I'm adding a third stack to see what it has to say. So far I like it.

Another project I started to work out was with the ubiquitous flat stones that come in all sizes. I've done a couple of versions of this, but I seem to be getting better at it. It is currently much larger than the photograph shows. The photos show it on its side. I can't seem to get it to rotate.

So there is still plenty to do. Plenty to learn. Plenty to see. I look forward to the fall when the beach becomes a bit more deserted and work can go on without beiing damaged unless it is the hand of weather.

Four Miracles

After years of working down on the beach and walking at Presque Isle I've become familiar with these places in the same manner that one is familiar with a wife or a significant other or a favorite sweat shirt. The smells, the sounds, an awareness of seasonal and daily cycles, the affects of time in the long and short term. One can often predict what will happen next based on the signs, like body language these spaces are always communicating something. If you listen and watch you can begin to see the system at work, but no matter how familiar it all becomes there are always wonderful surprises. A week doesn't pass that the lake doesn't produce a curiousity of some sort. Its one of the reasons I keep going back. I want to see the surprise ending. From ice dunes to Turneresque sunsets...there is never a dull moment. Plenty of peaceful moments, but never a dull one.