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...