Winter Solstice Sketch

This weekend I went down to the beach for a couple of hours. The mid-week storm promised some impressive results in the ice-dune crop for this year and I was not disappointed. There is a lofty and varied rampart of ice running down the beach and just at the base of the path down the bluff, is perhaps the most interesting dune. It is actually an ice arch that spans about twenty feet and is at least four feet above the waterline. The roof of the arch is lined with little icicle teeth. I'm curious to see how this formation will change as the winter progresses as the lake is still at least a couple of freezing weeks away from total lock-down. While down there, the conditions were good enough to do some work, so I did a little sketch. It was a spontaneous response to the material limitations of a snow covered beach. With the ice dunes up, all of the sculptures on the beach are safe for the duration of the winter, but if we don't get any additional snow between now and the weekend, I'd like to expand this work a bit.

Thanks for stopping by Josh (unfortunately time constraints kept me from playing with ice this time), Anonymous and Janice K. (a while back). Happy solstice and now the days get longer, so enjoy.

Dinner for Dante

It happens on rare occasions, at that liminal moment when the lake or the bay transitions from liquid to solid, as the bay did this weekend, while the wind gods are breathless and the water's surface becomes a mirror. Before it has a chance to become a permanent fixture, the wind comes up and the water tries to regain the upper hand and the surface shatters into a thousand, thousand dinner plates of ice. And as if to push the evidence out of sight, the wind plows the dishes into each other up against the nearest shore. They fold and slide and stack up with each wave, accompanied by this magical sound of chimes rubbed with velvet.

You can't help but marvel at the confluence of conditions necessary to pull this magic off.

November Paintings

In November I was working on a couple of pieces from the Pattern Recognition Project. Some earlier works appear a few posts back. These pieces are based on images from the beach. Sticks, stones, water and now fish parts. This piece looks much better in real life from a color standpoint. I am fascinated by the forms that these fish-things take. The dried out carcasses with their angular surfaces and sharp edges countered by the soft aerodynamic forms of the recently dead, the bones and bony forms and the organic amorphousness of flesh. Fish are to me what bones were to Georgia O'Keeffe I think. I never get tired of painting them. While trying to finish the painting, I was at a bit of a loss as to how to pull it together, when for some reason I got Marc Chagall's I and the Village in my head. In particular the circular shape by the goat's head and the green man and it seemed to be right. The bottom piece I was playing again with water surfaces on a smaller scale, but from a closer point of view.

Sketches in the Wind

The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of wind and high surf. We've had a couple two-day blows that stack the waves up in pretty impressive fashion. Surprisingly it hasn't resulted in any big lumber deposits on the beach. Sometimes these blows wash enough wood ashore that you could refloat the Spanish Armada, but these storms have been unusually sterile. So not only have I been denied any new materials to work with, but they keep washing my sketches away. I would lodge a complaint with the proper authorities for these breaches of etiquette, but there aren't any proper authorities, so I work on in silence...but it is a prickly silence. Isn't "prickly" a great word? I applaud its inventer.

October Apologizes

So, after a miserably wet and cold start, October appears to have been in an apologetic mood this weekend. It presented us with a couple of those truly magical days that are referred to around these parts as Indian Summer. I am ignorant of the origin of the terminology, but I love the concept. These are the days that the leaves seem to glow from within. The birds are collectively taking one giant breath before they launch themselves on their migratory voyages. And everything has the quiet that accompanies the act of getting down to the business of preparing for winter. In good years you get two or three of these weekends between the end of September and Thanksgiving and every time you get them they are cause for celebration...so I went down to the beach and celebrated with sticks and Staghorn Sumac leaves.

A New Painting

I just finished a new painting the other day. It is part of the group of "Pattern Recognition" pieces that I have been playing with. This particular piece revisits the colored stone works, but now on a bigger scale. I will not get the fourth piece done in time for the Mercyhurst College show, but I'm OK with the first three pieces. In real life the tactile quality of this piece is an improvement on the earlier works and I think matches what I wanted in the earlier paintings. I also think the colors turned out quite nicely. I'm working on a smaller piece that I'll finish this weekend or sooner, which will be the last of the 10 or so pieces in the show. Then we'll see what happens from there. I still haven't had any luck finding an exhibition space for this new body of work, but I'll keep plugging away. Hopefully the weekend will be dry enough to get some beachwork done as well.

I Went for a Walk

Fall forms and colors.... October tries to make up for playing the miscreant. Thanks October.

Fall forms and colors...

The Equinox in Review

The Equinox has come and gone and we are well into a particularly dreary October. It is the kind of October that helps you understand why the movie, The Road was filmed here. A great movie, by the way, very powerful images and questions. Although it doesn't quite reach the book's level of raw, it was a good effort.

Anyways, the equinoctial celebration went off as planned, despite less than favorable weather. A steady wind coming off the lake made cold beer on the beach less of a pleasure, but it didn't stop us from trying. Thanks to everybody who came for this year's edition. It was a pleasure sitting around talking and equinoxing together. When I got down to the beach that morning, I was greeted by the staring eye on the stone (the second picture) and I knew everything would work out despite the weather. A sign from the gods, or Kris Risto, as the case turned out. I'm going to plug his show right now which opens at the Urarro Gallery here in Erie, Friday the 15th, 7:00-9:00. Go see it, I guarantee it will be good for your soul.

Back to the Equinox...I finished this year's Beachwork actually on the Equinox, the party was on the weekend two days later. I'm happy with the end result. There are, of course, some things I would do differently now, but erasing a section of stone sculpture is not an option, so I will just live with my mis-steps. The third picture is the first photo of the finished work, taken at the moment of completion.
At the bottom I did an Equinoctial flower for the event and there are some pictures of it before the rains came. I have to go now. I'll finish these thoughts later.

Variations on a Theme-More New Work

I'm continuing to work on this "Pattern Recognition" project, utilizing heavily textured material as a subject matter. It is a continuation of earlier experiments with the ambiguity of depth in relation to surface textures. I plan to have four pieces in this series, each 20" by 20". The first one was utilizing the small sticks that wash ashore regularly in slick-like masses. The second piece was an expanded view of the surface of the water that I had done a small sketch for earlier. I'm currently working on the third one which will have stones as the subject matter and the fourth will make use of dead fish that wash ashore in a variety of states of post mortem deconstruction. Along with breaking up the surface with the textures of the materials, I'm also artificially breaking it up with inorganic divisions that are not intended to relate to the materials or the subject matter, just interrupt it somehow. So far I am liking the results.

On another note, the Equinox is coming up and if the weather permits we will be having the annual celebration on the beach, so if you are around and want to stop by, it will be Saturday, September 25th anytime after 2:00 until sunset. The beach is just west of Baer Beach or accessed by the steps at the end of the road that is just west of Blackstone, it is called Shorehaven.

In the last two weeks the lake has also coughed up enough stone to finish this year's version of the Stonewave. I suppose that this would actually be the third in the series of big sculptures. I have about two to four courses of stone to lay and it will be done...as much as these things can be done....That's all for now.

New Pattern Recognition Pieces

These are some pieces I finished in July, a couple of small stone studies and a water study and the first piece is a small finished work that has led to several small pieces that I've been working on this month and one big piece. Try making sense of that!

Playing with texture and the ambiguity of depth using natural forms from my beach, also trying out some new colors. So far I am liking the results.

A Regrettable Lapse

It has been a long while since I posted anything, but it can be blamed on the fact that I have spent a lot of time this summer making. Now that I have been sentenced to hard labor, I will be able to catch up a bit on what has been going on.

Last night I went down to the water to spend some time on one of my last days of freedom. It was a pretty bizarre set of atmospheric conditions that evening. Offshore several miles out was a rainstorm that stretched across about one third of the horizon while the setting sun, wrapped by this rather etereally spooky shroud of haze worthy of Joseph Turner or Casper David Friedrich was on one side of the storm and blue sky on the other. At some point the storm came ashore right where I was working and gave me a bit of a soaking, but the whole time this strange gold sunlight was shining on everything. Once it got wet, the result was quite interesting. So here are two photos of this gilding. The first is the current state of the new stonework and the second is an image of a little sketch I was playing with when the rains came.

I nice gift from the lake on my last night of prodigality.

A Solstice and an Earthquake

This week was a rather interesting week for cosmo-terranic phenomena. Not a word, I'm sure, but maybe it could be, someday. The first event was the summer solstice. This one comes as no surprise as it has happened with great regularity for as long as I can remember. This particular one was a pleasant enough one, as solstices go. A large bank of cloud sitting on the horizon blocked the view of the actual sunset, but the previous two nights had really nice sunsets, so I'm going to pretend that the two sunset photos posted here are official solstice sunset photos. A lot of nice colors.

The second event of interest was an earthquake. These occur with a little less regularity in Erie, but it is the third one that I have experienced since living on the lake. This one was the strongest and longest of the bunch. I would guess that it went for at least a minute.

Now I'm not an apocalyptic conspiricist, but I find it a little alarming that an earthquake could occur so close to the solstice. If the solstice is the 21rst and the earthquake took place at 2:00 and you reverse 21 and you get 12, drop the zero from 2:00 and you put the 2:0 in front of the 12, get rid of the colon and you get 2012. If that is not proof that the world is going to end, I don't know what is. Coincidence you say? You would have to be blind not to see the portents. You see, the epicenter was in Ontario. What? you can't see the connection. Look at the word...O-n-t-a-r-i-o. What does the first syllable sound like to you? Ont...ant..ent...end...End! now do you see? And that isn't all. What about the rest of the word? Tario...right! Get it? Tario...terio...terrio....terra...earth. Ontario-End earth. I rest my case.

With doom impending, I just want you to know that I am not giving up on my futile efforts to stack stones in some interesting configurations. In fact, maybe I will watch the end from atop the new project.

Here is how things look as of the solstice. I don't know exactly where it goes from here, but what stands at this point are two towers of stone about 8 feet tall. I've left a little gap between them and leaned the right stack in a bit.

The circular tower from previous pictures has now fed the project as has most of the old stonewave. There is a four foot tall wall about twenty feet long that is all that remains of the previous manifestation. The beach remains very thin, with most of the sand sitting about fifteen feet offshore. We'll see how the summer progresses.