A New Part to a New Piece

I've been working on a new piece that is 36" x 24", consisting of several seperate images mounted puzzle fashion on a big aspen board. Continuing explorations of elemental beach furniture, like sticks, cobbles, skipping stones and dead fish, this piece is probably the most complex of the bunch so far, that I refer to as Pattern Recognition. One piece of which is currently hanging at Mercyhurst College and was on one of the earlier posts entitled Asteroid Impact, another is currently down at Glassgrowers Gallery and a third is in a private collection. This version is a couple of days from completion and I'm really liking the balance between the repetition of simple forms and the complexity of their interaction. The fact that the forms are all organic but are painted on clearly delineated quadrangles also creates a nice dynamic. I'm also enjoying beating certain color combinations to death in the painting. The image above is one small section of the painting about 10" x 10" and is derived from a big fish skull I found on the beach and some photos of a few of last Spring's more impressive dead fish offerings from the lake. Now that the 100 Views project is over for the most part, and the Requiem for the Peten has yet to find a new incarnation, this Pattern Recognition project could keep me busy for a while and I suppose it is time for a change. Next week or so I'll try to photograph the completed work. In an unrelated matter, I don't know if I know who Sara Olive is, but thanks for the kind words.

A Hard Snow's Gonna Fall...

Winter has been gnawing on us since 2010 opened. Snow every day and temperatures have reduced themselves to a single digit at times. With that said, it's been a pretty mild winter...and beautiful. The snow shovelling has been made easy by the fact that it has been coming down in its light fluffy state, so that even though it might be 8 inches deep it weighs no more that the arm-pit feathers of angels. The beach front is now locked up in ice dunes now, but I must admit, I thought the pounding that Boreas was giving us would have resulted in some monumental ice dunes, but this year's batch appears to be pretty modest. Once the lakefront is stilled by the ice, work on the beach sculptures becomes more ethereal. You can spend a couple of hours working and not hear a singel sound. No surf, no gulls, no people and every potential aural disruption is muffled by a two foot blanket of powdered snow. It's like I imagine space must sound.

Here are a couple shots of the last remaining wave crest rising from the snow. It reminds me of Hokusai's great wave. This was the first and only day in the first ten days of January that we saw the sun. It was worth the wait.

With the destruction of the end of the wall, I salvaged the larger stones for resetting in the spring when I can put the retaining wall/bench back up

This is what remains of the Stonewave as of this week. I am taking down the section that was undermined by the storm. When it is down. I hope to get a sense of what will be born out of the ashes.

With the "junk" stone I have been building a small wall at the outlet of a gully eroded into the bluff to keep the soil from washing away into the lake each time it rains. We'll have to see what it turns into by the end of the winter.

So this is the first two weeks of the new year, in stone.