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.