On the Beach:The War for the Oak

So here is what the lake is capable of when it wants to make a point. Below is a photograph of the front end of  the Beachwork from last year. Notice the oak tree embedded in the wall. It is about 15 feet from the front of the Beachwork . Notice how much stone there is to the left of the tree. In the next photo you can see the front view of the structure complete with a bench and the staircase leading up to the tree. The stack of stone to the left of the tree is about 18 feet high. A pretty impressive stack of stone...now the photo next to it is what was left after April storms. All of the stone from the tree forward is gone. The oak is now the front of the wall.

The restructuring has began. A wall/bench is being placed down in front to try to protect the oak from the next storm. It is in a pretty precarious spot right now. My goal is to get it through the summer.

Two consecutive weekends of laying courses of stone along the front have resulted in a modicum of protection, but we have yet to get a serious blow.

 The wall is becoming more substantial as the second weekend passed. The next step is to integrate that wall into the surviving Beachwork. It's not pretty work at this point, pretty much Emergency Room triage. We'll see how it goes.

Beginning Another End

Couple of paintings from the month of May. Top one about 24" x 30" or so, pretty labor intensive.  This is the first of the paintings for which Rome was the source. Took a bunch of photographs of  various Roman ruins and did a lot of superimposition. The whole time I was working on it there were a number of unknowns. The preliminary sketch phase was a bit general so in the end I was doing some orchestrating . I worked from the bottom up and took a chance with the Pantheon dome and I think it worked out, certainly better than I had anticipated. The band of arches across the mid-section of the painting was an arcade from the Colosseum and I had to keep it from being too obvious and skated on the edge, but think it also held together.

The dead Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks from the previous post are in a plastic bag in my room at school. One of them did not make it. The entropy of biological decay. The second bird is still intact and posed for this picture..