stonewave

Endtimes for the Beachwork and Some January Studies

2012-01-19T05:44:00.000-08:00

If you were ever in doubt about the power of the lake, here is a reminder of what it is capable of. The photo below was taken in July when this year's work was getting close to done and the following three photos are what is left as of the weekend. And after the Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday blow out of the north I doubt there is any trace of the work left...period.

Take that puny human!

And now for some little paintings to make me feel like I have something to show for my efforts.

Fish-Sticks

2012-01-06T05:47:00.000-08:00

Went down to the beach last weekend when all of the destruction was occuring and in the calm before the storm I had some time to make a few pieces. These were almost immediately obliterated, but the seed of the idea was worth recording I thought. I had hoped to expand on the stick piece, but the weather had something to say about that. While I was putting finishing touches on it for the day I saw what I thought was a thick short stick that I was going to use but when I went closer to pick it up I saw that in fact it was a frozen 20" fish. It was a beauty. Little or no decomposition or gull ravagement, but there were some stones frozen to it...camouflage of sorts. There were some very nice colors as well. Below is a photo of that fine fellow on a slab of stone. This was not a naturally ocurring phenomenon, by the way. Unfortunately, for some reason, the blog will not allow me to put horizontally formatted pictures on it today, so to get the full effect you have to turn your head sideways

The close up of the head gives you a sense of the fish's personality. I imagine him a splendid fellow and mourn his demise. In this picture I placed a piece of driftwood alongside because it had a fish-like quality and there was a small stone frozen to the stick as if it were an eye.

In this picture you can see a full body double portrait, and the remarkable resemblance. Even the lengths of the rtwo are near identical and notice as well the fin shaped protuberances on the dorsal and ventral parts of the stick...uncanny!

In this final shot I have set up a triple portrait of the remarkable similar fish-stick duo. This time with an additional element...a large slab of stone. Which looks almost identical to the other two objects except for its color, shape , surface texture and general demeanor. Nature! What a quirky thing it is. This photo is particularly more enjoyable in a horizontal format.

The Great Devouring Maw of Winter

2012-01-02T12:27:00.001-08:00

The new year came in on a mild note, but soon turned to its usual tricks. North winds came sweeping down the lake and it didn't take long before it had eaten the beach. I went down today to see what the night-long howling havoc wreaked. And I gotta say...it was impressive. With the beach gone for the most part the surf spent the night pounding my latest retaining wall to pieces and then for sport it began to chew into the sculpture. It took down both ends of the sculpture and it is only a matter of time before it finishes the job as there is nothing between it and a hungry surf.

So the efforts of 2011 are now a thing of the past. I hesitate to predict what if anything will be left when this current storm blows itself out, but it will be at best, an impressive pile of rubble. Such is life on the littoral.

It is not just my sculpture that is getting a face lift. Our whole stretch of beach is in for some serious reconfiguring this winter as the lake levels are really high, because of all of the rain. You add the fact that the lake is not likely to freeze any time soon, so any big winter storm in the next month is likely to pack a destructive punch.

The following two pictures show what the state of things was before this storm decided to erase some of the previous destruction. These waves toss 100lb. stones around like leaves on the wind. And when it is over it's a sorry sight to see. The whole stretch of wall seen below and the ground it sat on is now a thing of the past. But there is always a light...

The Ephemeralitude of Novembeachworks

2011-12-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

November weather was spectacularly conducive to doing beachworks, but at the same time what it gave with one hand it took with the other. Every weekend that I went down the conditions were great and the materials supplied by the lake were varied and abundant. The end result was that I was able to play around with lots of interesting ideas. The problem was that although each weekend I could make something different, the lifespan of these works was often as short as a day or two. Each subsequent weekend when I returned, the previous work was washed away so I couldn't get any continuity in a project. I'm not going to complain, as never was the lake niggardly in any way shape or form, but the chance to build or spin off any previous project was frustrated by the "tide's" regular erasure of each work.

I liked working with the small boxes of colored stones of which that weekend there was an abundance. All kinds of beautiful stones/cobbles had washed up in a huge skirt along the beachfront. Colors in many variations. In the time I had, I managed to cage four different species and would have loved to continue, but the next week the cobbles were gone, along with the artwork, replaced by the grey stone discs, which led to some flower/lotus/artichoke shapes.

Along with the discs a nice carpet of sand was laid down, which is essential for embedding the discs and holding them in place. See how cooperative the lake can be when it wants to be? In exchange it removed the great raft of sticks that had washed up earlier, which I had my eyes on for the next project.

In a momnent of whimsey, the lake coughed up a yellow pumpkin as well which was bobbing and rolling down the surfline. It was just begging to be a part of something different and dryer. So I gave it a new home, which I thought worked out nicely.

I'll be curious to see if it is still there this weekend. It looked very comfortable . So conditions permitting I'll be down this weekend to see what this week's west winds have made available on the beach to work with.

Winds of November

2011-11-17T06:26:00.000-08:00

The first half of November was as pleasant as October was hideous. The weekends were great for beachwork and I was able to completely rebuild the protective wall in front of the Stonewave. And in the breaks I made a couple of small pieces, taking advantage of the abundance of black and white stones that have washed up as of late.

I love the black and white stones. I suppose it has to do with my deprived childhood. All of my friends with small families had the 64-Box of Crayola crayons, while we could only afford the 6-Box, which by the time I got to use them consisted of only black, white and brown, the primary colors having been depleted by use. Since that age I have always been comfortable making do with what was available.

Since the first two weeks, the real November has shown up and wiped away my little circle sketches with waves that have swept over the rebuilt wall. And Monday there were tornadoes sighted in the area and some big lake storms. I have yet to see the effect on the beach. But I look forward to going down on Saturday to see what the waves have wrought.

The Skull of a Lake Monster and Other Assorted Things

2011-10-31T06:17:00.000-07:00

Down at the beach on this cold, clean October weekend when I stumbled upon a marvel as rare as logic out of the mouth of a Republican candidate. There lying partially buried in the sands was the skull of a lake monster of the horned variety (horned in this case is pronounced with two syllables, as in hor-ned...sounds way cooler that way.) At least I think it was a lake monster skull. It was pretty far along in the petrification process, it kind of looked like wood, but the facial features were near unmistakeable. In the periods of time when I wasn't completely "astonied" by my find, I managed a small stick sculpture with a long tail of leaves. A comet, as it were, perhaps an omen related to the finding of the lake monster skull. The lake put the leaves there, I only did the stick part.

Now that the foliage is subject to biology and gravity the back of the sculpture is pretty visible and gives an interesting view in the early morning light breaking through the thinning screen of trees on the bluff.

On Sunday I went for a walk on the Peninsula out near Gull Point. The beach out there is where the scenes for "The Road" were shot and on this day it was just a sunnier version of desolation. I took some pictures of things that intrigued me. maybe I can use them later if I remember I put them here. Saw A Yellow-Billed Cuckoo, the first new bird I've seen on the peninsula in a long while.

Ancient writing in Sandskript....

A "tide pool" with some flotsam casting amoebic shadows on the sand....

Sugar coated vegetation, courtesy of sub-freezing temperatures....

Close Calls

2011-10-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

Big storms and a lot of October rain passed through the area last week and on the beach so did the waves. The surf line went up the the base of the bluff in some places and where the sculpture is, it washed past its base. The wall that was built in front of the sculpture was subjected to two days of surf cresting over it and when things finally subsided the retaining wall was largely disassembled. As you can see from the following two photos, little remains intact. If the wall were not there, the sculpture most likely would have come down in areas as well.

The center section was probably the only part of the wall that maintained some coarses still aligned. Some big 100 lb. plus stones were washed thirty yards down the beach. Others were washed away completely and may turn up in the next big storm, but are lost for now. You have to be impressed with those forces.

I knew I was in trouble when I saw these two logs washed up to the brush-line. Both of them were 40 footers and about 30 inces in diameter. You don't throw those things around unless you are pushing some serious waves for an extended period of time. I did a little reconstruction work, but you know that the November storms will erase anything I can put up if they get the chance. Fortunately , my friend Sisyphus said he would help.

This is a little painting I had done a while back which like the wall was wiped clean inadvertantly by someone who thought it needed dusting. It was part of the college's collection. So they returned it to me and I thought I'd ressurect it by repainting parts of it and frankly it works just as well in its recycled form. Unfortunately I do not know the name of the person who originally wiped the paint off, so I can't credit him in this collaboration.
Nice mustache, Josh.

The Fallen Sun

2011-10-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

When I was very young, three or four perhaps, my family loaded into the Country Squire station wagon with the faux paneling and headed west to visit an uncle who lived in Missouri. I remember as we got to the flatlands and this big bloated sun was setting I urged my father to make some haste so that we could get to the place where it landed. Needless to say he didn't make it and I distinctly remember being disappointed in my father for what I perceived to be his lack of effort. I wonder what an analyst would say in light of my current mental health situation...I think I'm fine. Anyways, this is a quick sketch with sumac leaves and a perfect October Sunday without a hint of a breeze. The sun has landed, I finally got there.

The King is Dead...Long Live the King

2011-10-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

This weekend was one of those rare October weekends that make this part of the country a great place to be . Warm, mild, cloudless, and a light breeze in the finest of Indian Summer traditions. Ironically, Columbus deserves some kudos here as well, because without him it would not have been a three day weekend of this perfect weather. This gift came on the heels of some truly miserable October weather. Three days of cold gusting north winds that left migrating Monarch butterflies strewn along the beach like the wreckage of some maritime disaster. They didn't stand a chance. The cold and the wind crushed the life out of them and they expired in droves all along the water's edge. So when I went down on Saturday for a little peace and quiet, I was greeted by this carnage. And so I made a little shrine for the Monarchs

I tried a few different things before I settled on the final arrangement and not having experience in the medium of butterflies, I'm not sure if it works, but I suppose it was better than the alternative.

Some leaves were turning and I needed an excuse to stay down longer so I also did a few leaf sketches to go alongside the butterflies. It was a less depressing exercise. So that was Saturday.
I had some more fun on Sunday, but I'll save that for later.

The Equinox...or Thereabouts

2011-09-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

This weekend was the usually annual Equinox gathering on the beach. Goats sacrificed, libations made, reckless dancing, the whole nine yards. The actual equinox falls midweek, making this premature equinoctial celebration necessary. Not the best weather, but just as sunset approached things warmed up and a break in the cloud cover made for a spectacular sunset. I did not record the event, but on Sunday I went down for a couple of hours to work in the fall weekend quiet and on this evening there was a pleasantly luminescent sunset...and one lonely wave rose up to watch it. Or is that the Loch Erie Monster. Now that I think of it I did hear a plaintive antediluvian wail just as the "wave" disappeared.

I made a couple of small sketches using white and black stones, of which there was an abundance lying about this week. It is my homage to Kasimir Malevich. I particularly like the black square.

I also made a quick stick circle as the sun was setting, but I didn't finish it in time to get a good picture. You can however just make it out at the bottom of this picture as the sun was setting.

So, that was the weekend at the Beachworks. Happy Equinox.

A Sketch

2011-09-13T05:30:00.000-07:00

I have not been down to the beach for many sunsets this year, having instead usually gone down in the early afternoon, but on this occasion I was lucky enough to enjoy a nice blood red sun. These usually bring out a range of purples and indigos and blues and they also have a tendency to light up the things on shore with interesting effects. In this case a transluscent fish...

...or a section of wall gets gilded. It is always a pleasant evening light with which to experience the beach.

I did a little sketch on our expanding beach. As lake levels lower a bit and a three day blow from the east, probably thanks to the hurricanes rolling up the eastern seaboard, deposited a goodly new stretch of beach I have inherited a bigger area to play. So here is the first of the fall eforts. It turned out OK, but was just something to get me back into the addiction. Everytime I do one of these little stone ones I'm newly amazed at the range of colors these beach cobbles come in.

The End is Near

2011-09-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

As August winds down and the nights start to have a bit of a chill, the lake becomes more volatile, prone to emotional outbursts. Wind gets windier, the sun gets cleaner and cooler, the clouds more insistent, the waves get pushier. On one such day I was down at the beach, working on wasting some time and the waves were beating up against my wall and trying to pull stones out of it while at the same time throwing other stones up on the beach elsewhere. Somewhere the waves were given the impression that raw materials were a fair trade for hand crafted finished work. I, however felt that I was getting the short end as I wasn't being compensated for the hours. Sure, it was nice to get some new stone, but when you are giving up the bottom row of stones on a wall, it seems a bit unfair.

These two pictures were taken from the platform on the wall. The waves were coming in with impressive force and regularity and while sitting there watching them it was easy to get the sense that you were on the edge of everything or nothing.

Twice during August I was visited by a Bald Eagle. A sight more common these last years. It perches in a dead tree just down the beach and scans the shoreline. The last time he visited, I was out in the water and I decided to go get my camera and see if I could get a picture. As I got the camera he took off over my head so I took this picture. He headed past me out over the lake about 30 yards past where I had just been in the water and then he took a dive. It was a very picturesquely eagle-like kind of maneuver on his part and I tried to capture it camerically, but when I hit the button I was informed that my camera card was full. While I was busy swearing, it pulled a pretty good sized fish out of the lake and then flew back over my head about 20 feet off the ground and then up over the bluff to partake of his catch. As it passed I swear I heard it chuckling at my failure as a paparazzi.
I am more fit to take pictures of things that move in a more patient and deliberate manner, like these subjects below. On this day the water was very clear and there was a good sun. On the littoral there was a swath of pebbles of a good size and varied color and as they were regularly being washed by gentle waves their colors were being brought out by the glaze of the wetness. I just walked up and down the beach like a shorebird, bent over and looking for little bits of edible shorebird repast, but in my case it was some out of the ordinarily colored stones. And this was the resulting little eye-feast.

The Work Continues...

2011-08-30T05:18:00.000-07:00

This is my fourth attempt to get something to post. I have written lengthy and brilliant essays of the kind usually associated with the great thinkers of the past, only to see them vanish into thin air when I hit the post button. The loss to humankind is immeasurable. Rather than risk it again, I will just try this little paragraph in the hopes that I can get a post to go through unscathed. It seems I am being censored by some greater power that wishes to keep the people who occasionally read this blog from reaching enlightenment, or it could be related to the fact that my computer has had some new software added to it that screws with the posting process, I'm not sure which. Here we go....

Here's what it looks like at the end of July...

Resetting the retaining wall...

Adding the central platform...

Somebody left an offering in the window. This is the first one in the new sculpture. It use to happen all of the time in the old one. It lasted about a week before somebody knocked it down and replaced it with three empty beer cans.

A Pilgrimage to Belgium

2011-07-20T07:06:00.001-07:00

One of the diversions that has kept me from my routine this summer was a short trip to Belgium. Having taught Art History since the previous millennium, I have made it a point to see most of what I teach in person and this year I wanted to close the gap on one of my favorite works of art...the Ghent Altarpiece. And so I went to Belgium to see the Ghent Altarpiece. Now you might think making a trip to Belgium just to see the Ghent Altarpiece might seem a bit obsessive, but keep in mind there are some other things in Belgium other than the Ghent Altarpiece. Now having said that I will admit that I spent two days in Ghent and for four or so hours each day that I was there, I sat in the little room where the altarpiece is and just looked at it, which may qualify as obsessive I suppose. But in my defense, it is actually many paintings, but because it is not permitted to photograph it, I would suggest a Google image search to get an idea of its complexities. Above is an image that will give you an idea of what it looks like in general, but in real life it is much larger, say about 11' by 15'.

Anyways, I had a delightful time and was able to experience some of the finer things of Belgian origin. My daily lunch was a baguette with a chunk of Belgian cheese washed down with a cold Belgian beer and some Belgium chocolate for dessert. Dinner was pretty much the same thing, which you might think would get monotonous after 10 days, but I avoided that by simply eating them in a different order each day. But what of breakfast you might ask? And here I have to confess that I purposefully avoided eating a Belgian waffle the entire time I was there and instead had a baguette, a chunk of cheese, some chocolate and since it was morning I substituted some fruit saap for the beer. Why avoid waffles? Well, just in case I ever go back, I didn't want to leave myself nothing new to experience.

Anyways, it went about as smoothly as a vacation could go. I saw a ton of great art, saw some beautiful places, took some great walks, ate some great food, drank some great beer and rather than say anything more, here are five pictures. And let me conclude by saying if I had just spent the entire vacation looking at the Ghent Altarpiece if would have been worth it.

Let he who is without sin stack the first stone...

2011-07-15T06:34:00.000-07:00

The reason I have been slacking in recording anything of late has nothing to do with finding someone without sin, heck, I stacked the first stone weeks ago. My problem has been that I didn't know where the new project was heading and now I think I do. With the repair to the damage to the retaining wall underway, and the first forays into the water to see if there was any new stone that needed to be harvested, the problem has become more clear. I will have some images soon that show where it is going since this photo was taken, but for the mean time, I just wanted to check in to force myself to get back into the routine.

I have also been working on a painting that is made up of 10 panels. An altarpiece if you will. It is now finished and this is the central 3 panels...a kind of an homage to the Ghent Altarpiece. I'll explain all this later.

The Deconstruction

2011-06-03T07:56:00.001-07:00

The elements and obligations or lack thereof have now conspired to allow me to return to the beach with enough time to play with the stones. Last year's model is now obsolete and so begins the long process of updating.Step number one, remove the east tower and re-stack the stone someplace out of the way. My solution was to make little stacks on the retaining wall, but also to put some on top of the center tower, just to see how high I could go.

Then, remove the west tower and put that stone someplace. So I put some more on the middle tower and made more little stacks on the retaining wall, but after having learned a lesson from previous re-stackings, I stacked them based on size, so I could use the bigger stones as foundation stones. Good thinking, me. Thank you , me.

I would guess that the central tower was close to 14 feet high, before I stopped adding to it, as it was too hard for me to get the stone up there and I have no great love for precarious perches.

Second tower down to the ground and now I am forced to think ahead to new forms. I must admit that the stones have not been very clear in their expectations for this year so I am hemming and hawing a bit to see if I can pick up any clues as to what happens next.

In the mean time, I was also stacking some stone on the serpentine wall that connects to the big basin. And during this two week time we had three magnificent storms that contributed to this Maya being the wettest May on record in Erie. They also contributed about three feet of eroded soil behind the retaining wall.

This wall is now almost completely filled with soil eroded from the bluff. I don't know what will happen after a few more big storms, but whatever it is it is going to require me to rethink some things. In the meantime the wall looks kind of cool filled up like a terraced field.

I have started the new foundation, but since this photo was taken I reset it to be more smoothly curved. It is upward from here.

THe Work Begins

2011-05-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

This weekend we finally got some weather that could pass for spring-like. I was able to escape my duties for a few hours to go to the beach. Big storms the previous week had taken out a short section of one of my walls and subverted a section of another, and deposited a fifty foot tree right in front of the big wall. This may have protected things from the surf possibly, as the water reached above the platform to the base of the sculpture. The down side of this is whatever species of tree it is, it stinks. While working on the clean-up, I thought there was some fresh dog leavings, and I was cursing dog-owners to myself and at some point I sat on the tree and realized it was actually the tree itself that stunk. It was completely stripped of bark so I can't tell what it is, but I am certainly surprised to learn that there is a type of tree out there that smells like dog-shit when it is stripped of its bark and submerged in the lake for an unknown period of time...Will wonders never cease. After cleaning up a couple bags of garbage I did my initial stick sculpture of the year, as there was no shortage of material lining the beach. A small circle with three concentric bands to see how it would catch the light of the setting sun. I like the way each concentric ring changes "color" . I didn't have time to do anything big, but this weekend I will try something larger scale and if there is a clear day, I'll see if I can get the sun to cooperate and do something interesting.

I saw a Goldsworthy piece shot in time lapse photography and it looked pretty cool as the light changed, so this was my dry run for something a little more ambitious. I have also begun the dismantling of last year's sculpture in preparation for the 2011 version of the Stonewave. Some ideas are rattling around in there, but nothing is for sure.

Annual Migration

2011-04-28T12:23:00.001-07:00

I went to the mountains.......and it was good.

Beware the Ice of March

2011-03-29T12:34:00.000-07:00

Despite the Equinoctial cavorting of the sun, Winter seems loath to abandon its grip. This week we have had 5 consecutive days without topping 25 degrees and with lows in the teens. This is no way to welcome the Spring. On a weekend, waterfront walk, I shot some nice icicles...say that 5 times really fast. And if it wasn't for the sun and the crystal I would be cursing the weather gods, because my endurance of the cold is wearing thin and without the beauty, there would be nothing to recommend this last week. I finished another bigger painting this week, 2' x4' in size and pretty complex. I continue to play with white and on this piece, I really liked the result. I think this one is more successful than the last one in doing what I wanted it to do, but I'll have to spend some time away from it before I can make a final call. For three weeks or so it was pretty consuming, so I can't really see it just yet, being still immersed up to the eyeballs. I submitted it to the Spring Show, which I have not had much luck with as of late, so if it doesn't get in, the time away will be enough to clear my head I would imagine. I also did a second little piece from some fungus images I shot on Presque Isle a while back. I like the result and the colors feel nice. I wonder if Georgia O'Keeffe ever did anything with fungi. It seems to me to be a natural direction for her to have gone.The weekend's weather is redeemed by some beautiful teeth of ice biting the shoreline.

New Work from February

2011-03-09T13:08:00.000-08:00

I just finished a new painting a couple of days back. It took up most of my painting time in February and I'm not sold on the results. I wanted to do something that was connected in some way to some of the sculptures from the beach...try to marry the two concepts in some way. I will need to look at it a lot in the next couple of weeks to see if it's telling the truth. I wanted to continue the experiments with white and the stick pattern had some promising qualities so I went with it here. In real life it is 48 " long and 24" tall and when you look at it there is a nice rhythm created by the seemingly randomly overlapped sticks. If you give it a chance it is even somewhat mesmerizing, a quality that works for me. I get a similar feel when looking at the better Jackson Pollock paintings. Along with this rhythmic Brownian movement of the sticks, I tried to create some tension between the shallow depths implied by the darker "stones" in the lower left corner and upper right quarter that appear to be under the "sticks", and the darker circle of sticks and the patch of sticks in the lower right corner that are more ambiguously situated. In the end I think it does what I wanted it to do, I just wonder, if with that said, it is interesting enough to give a damn about visually.

In a regards to the marriage, here are some stick images from the beach that suggested this painting. In a totally unrelated matter, Josh, I enjoyed very much reading the bit you wrote about Aleksander and Poland that Norb appended to his last writing.

Waiting for the End of White

2011-03-01T13:35:00.000-08:00

Greetings Minnesotans. Thanks for the BD wishes. All goes well here as I advance towards decrepitude.
As of late I have been working with white a lot. Some years ago I became familiar with Kasimir Malevich's white paintings and at first I didn't know what to make of them, but after seeing a few in real life I was fascinated by the subtlety. Jasper Johns' White Flag is another brilliant work in white. And one of my former students, Justus Cotterill, has been doing these great paintings involving sharks/boats/water/shacks that are like white-washed Richard Diebenkorns. Beautiful...beautiful. Of a sudden I think I just came of age when I could really understand how spectacular white could be. It was all just good timing, so I've been working out some things with white. On the weekend while down at the beach it became really clear where all of this was coming from, a little epiphany on whititudness.

I haven't been down to the beach much this calendar year so far, as the conditions haven't been great. The few times I went down there just wasn't any mojo. Lots of wind and bitter temperatures, but not much in the way of mojo. This weekend I went down just to see if the snow was doing anything interesting to the stones...not much luck. But here is a shot of the stones in the snow and then one from the summer for comparison purposes.

I got one small piece done in February and a second much larger piece close to completion. Both images are part of the Pattern Recognition Project. This one you might recognize from Fungi and Games. I like the way it turned out. I'll post the bigger piece next week.

Fungi and Games

2011-02-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

By now I, like most of my fellow "northmen", are truly weary of the snow and cold. It weighs like a backpack full of walrus droppings on all of us. The long dark of February is always a test. This year the morale load is lightened by the knowledge that it has been no picnic for the "southmen" either. Even Florida has had a few days where they froze their little orange pips off. And the "eastmen" must have truly pissed off the weather gods to deserve the colossal dumping on that they have had to endure. My plight has seemed trivial compared to theirs. Though the days get longer and the end of the tunnel seems not so far off it is still difficult to find cheer in days when wind can even make one's Brownian movement painful.
I don't know about you, but at times like these, my mind turns to the pleasure of contemplating fungal wonders. And it is my pleasure to share some of these eukaryotic furbelows with you. I would wager that this might just be the first time in human history that the two words "eukaryotic" and "furbelow" have been used beside each other in a sentence. And if you look both of them up, the combination makes sense when taken with a little poetic licence on the side. So, with that said, enjoy this history making moment and the pleasures of fungus ogling

All fungi are courtesy of Presque Isle and rest assured that no fungi were hurt in the making of this blog.

1/11/11 and Other Cryptic Messages

2011-01-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

January of 2011 started in unusual fashion. With temperatures in the high 50's, it wasn't what we come to expect. The ice dunes were reduced and the skirt of ice along the shore disappeared and for a short time we were transported forward in time to May. We usually get one such spell of pleasantry, but usually not in January. After this temporary breath of warmth we returned to the chill that is our lot and we are now in our tenth consecutive day of 20's and lower. The real hammer blow of winter has yet to fall, that week to ten days of single digits with wind chills that freeze your eyeball juice and scour your soul.

While we are waiting, I've been down to the beach for some small works and to add to some existing pieces, so here are a couple of messages.

December Paintings from the Pattern Recognition Project

2011-01-06T08:11:00.000-08:00

Some paintings from last month. The top one is a 20 by 20 watercolor playing with ice another small ice study at the bottom and another little stone study. Still exploring textures and the compression of space with some successes and some not so good, but I think I'll be at this for at least another year in one form or another. I've got some beach sketches for the next post. Happy New Year.

Winter Solstice Sketch

2010-12-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-17T09:37:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-06T11:58:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-30T12:45:00.001-08:00

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

2010-10-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-18T10:36:00.001-07:00

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

Fall forms and colors...

The Equinox in Review

2010-10-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-15T13:43:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-27T07:48:00.001-07:00

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

2010-08-26T08:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-24T07:17:00.001-07:00

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.

The Olympians Pay a Visit

2010-06-07T12:27:00.001-07:00

This weekend Zeus paid a little visit to the area as did his fellow Olympian, Poseidon. About 2:30 am on Sunday, I was awakened by some pretty impressive bolt tossing done by the big guy. One strike was so close that the thunder was simultaneous with the flash. The thunder was of the kind that seems to start inside your head and vibrates down your spinal column. The rain was blowing so hard it was sideways and actually coming through the walls. With storms like this you just assume that the beach is getting reworked into a new form. You could see the waves rolling in like a herd of horses tumbling over each other in a rush to get ashore. To say there were white caps on the lake would be a bit misleading as the entire lake seemed to be churned to a white froth .

When I got down to the beach in the afternoon, things had calmed considerably and I was pleasantly surprised to see my stonework had survived for the most part. A 15 foot section of wall will need to be reset, but the remains of the Stonewave were largely intact. Where the real surprise was, was at the retaining wall at the foot of the bluff. These first two pictures show that the water running down the bluff face had piled up behind the retaining wall at least as high as the wall itself before blowing through it. A good 12 foot section was just obliterated by the force of the water as it gushed out of the breach. Stone from the wall was strewn in the torrent's path a good thirty feet from the wall.

These photos show the next manifestation of the Stonewave and what's left of the wall in front of it. There are two rectangular towers at this point each are about 5 or 6 feet tall at this point. There is a gap between them that I'm coaxing into a curve as the left hand tower bends away from the right hand side. Behind to the left is a small circular tower that is for storing the stone before it goes into the fill inside of the tower. It will shrink as the other two grow. The Stonewave will also feed the two towers as it gets disassembled.

There is also plenty of stone on the beach right now courtesy of a couple of big Spring storms. So I will have plenty to work with for the rest of June I would imagine.

Water, Water Everywhere...

2010-06-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

Finished a small painting of the lake surface this weekend . I shot the photos for the studies down at the peninsula a couple of weeks ago. There were some interesting surface effects that I've been playing with. This one is the first one that actually came out well. I'm not sure where these water images are going to go. I'm in the process of trying to cross-breed the Pattern Recognition pieces with some "color field" studies that I've been doing in my sketchbook, that were born out of looking at some Georgia O'Keeffe and Mark Rothko works mixed in with Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth and the monolith from 2001: A Space Oddyssey, maybe a touch of Franz Kline

thrown in there too. Maybe by the end of the summer, if I'm not distracted too much, I will get it figured out. In the mean time, I have been cleaning up the damage from the old Stonewave and incorporating it into the new one. Its final form is starting to take shape in my head, but a big part of that final form relies on the lake giving back at least fifteen feet of beach that it took.

The Crash of Waves

2010-05-12T12:12:00.000-07:00

Well, that decision was made without consulting me. I was probably within a week or two of finishing this version of the Stonewave, when the Lake decided to have a say. Three days of wind out of the northwest turned the lake into what appeared to be a refuge for whitecaps. They couldn't hit the shore fast enough. Sometime during the first night the surf washed past 45 feet of beach and up and around the base of the Stonewave. It sucked out two or three courses of stone at the bottom of the sculpture along about twelve feet of the baseline.

The result was that the northwest corner of the structure decided to disengage from its previous relationship with the rest of the sculpture. The surf dragged some of these stones 50 yards down the beach and these base stones were four or five feet long and easily 100 lbs. The peak of the western wave didn't fall, but it was leaning pretty precariously, so to avoid some bizarre accident, I spent the weekend removing the hazardous stone.

And so begins the process of building this year's model. I really haven't got an idea yet. I'm waiting for the way to become clear. In the meantime I'm just stacking up the collapsed stone in piles. I have an idea where this one is going to go, but it's exact form eludes me, but there is plenty of time for things to come together.

On the painting front, I finished a small painting related to the textpedition from a couple of posts ago. It turned out OK, but I've got some bugs to work out before things progress to the next stage. If you are going to be in the Erie area over the next couple of weeks there will be a new NPAA show opening at the Mercantile Building on State Street (across from the comedy club). Along the lines of the Nuts and Boltz Show from last year, it should be a good show, better I think than the Spring Show, which I thought was a little lackluster this year. I thought the good stuff was good, but there was a bit too much that I thought leaned towards the mediocre. Still worth seeing though.

Travels in Guatemala...Uaxactun Stela 5 and the Mosquitoes

2010-05-07T06:08:00.000-07:00

The other day I was going through some some old drawings and sorting things out to move into the studio and I came upon the stacks of drawings from my dissertation on Classical Period Maya Stelae. One of the top drawings was for Uaxactun Stela 5, or Waxaktun, as it is spelled now, and I flashed back on my time in Uaxactun. I went back to my old sketchbook from that trip in 1999, to see if my memories were accurate. Uaxactun is a sleepy little collection of huts in the jungle north of Tikal. I had to go up and spend a couple of days drawing the stelae that were still on site. My room was on one side of an old airstrip used to fly in archaeological supplies in the old days, I assume, while most of the rest of the town was on the other. The airstrip is overgrown with grass and is used today as a pasture/soccer field by the locals...the following is an excerpt from my sketchbook for the day that I did the field drawing for Stela 5...I was trying to find the best path back to the ruins from the village and was having some trouble so I enlisted the help of a local kid...

July 28, 1999
After several aborted attempts, Miguel showed up and I asked him how best to get to the ruins, but he hung his head, reluctant to give away information without pay. He thought my wedding ring would be appropriate for his mother, but I insisted on keeping it for its sentimental value. Begrudgingly, he finally gave a half-hearted point and the general instruction of "alli", which was absolutely worthless...

...in Group A, after walking around the plaza trying to identify a few of the badly deteriorating stelae, including Stela 9, I moved in the direction of Group B and the elusive Stela 5. The lighting was perfect and I got some great reference photos, then I sat down to draw. The conditions were very good and I think I got a good drawing...Today I noticed the first big populations of mosquitoes that had an interest in me. Others I have talked to have been harassed, but for me, the first time was while drawing Stela 5. So if I get malaria, I'm blaming Stela 5. The mosquitoes may have initially been attracted by the fact that I was drawing. Sometimes when I am drawing, I will attract onlookers, particularly kids. While drawing Kaminaljuyu Stela 11 in the Guat City Anthropology Musuem, for instance, the entire 7th Grade of Guatemala ended up looking on...

Anyways, the mosquitoes were pretty thick and hovered about glancing from drawing to monument and back again, occasionally making a critical observation or remark before plunging their probosces into my unguarded flesh. There were so many of them that eventually, not a moment would go by without an unsolicited comment and an uninvited bite. I was reluctant to allow this abuse to continue, but I had little choice. There was no telling how long good conditions would last, so I worked as quickly as I could, occasionally swatting the air or myself without consequence, other than to rile the mosquitoes to concerted action against me. Now they took to getting a couple of compadres to hold my arms down while others would imbibe in a little sanguinary repast without fear of interruption. This may sound like an exaggeration, but they were rather big mosquitoes. After a while, a few of them flew in with a liter bottle of agua purificada, and I thought to myself, that this was a rather decent thing for them to do, but in retrospect, I think they were just afraid I would become dehydrated and by providing water they ensured themselves a kind of perpetual smorgasblood.

The good news is that I never did suffer from any of the various insect borne illnesses that plague some who travel to the area and eventually turned the field drawing into the finished drawing above, a very interesting stela from a historical standpoint in the Maya area.

A Textpedition

2010-04-13T06:37:00.001-07:00

A busy Spring-Easter break. A lot of good weather kept me on the beach trying to move the Wave towards completion. The photograph below is where it stands at the moment. I have been working on the left side tower. I've been adding a couple of courses as I find the stone.
Also, the painting is the most recent of the Pattern recognition pieces. Some ice and wood images combined to see what the results would be. Also did some walking in the woods to find some new textures to start playing with in the next painting. A succesful textpedition as there were some pretty cool things to see. The light in Erie is just starting to come into its own and it was really bringing out some of the color from its long winter hibernation. Some nice blues, greens and oranges have returned, like spring birds. I'll begin work this week.

Vernal Equinoctial Efforts and an Answer

2010-03-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

The equinox has come and gone in fine fashion. The weather was agreeable and I was able to get about five hours of work in on the beach. With the ice dunes receding and the snow cover melting off, the first crop of spring stones was revealed...and it was a big crop. I would say that three of the five hours were spent just gathering stone.

There is also a massive amount of wood on the shore and it was tempting me to leave my stone

for better things. Driftwood is such a jealous lover. But I am too close to the end to be
distracted. I only have about three feet of height to the summit. Maybe fifteen courses of stone and I will be through. So I have been most attentive to that last little wave crest

When I get tired of climbing up and down the stonewave I take a break and work on the retaining wall at the base of the bluff or I've also begun to lay some of the monster slabs (seen leaning against the stone wave in the picture above) along a section of the beach that got sucked out in a late fall storm. I'm hoping they will protect the remaining area of soil from being wiped out by an early spring storm.

So it was a fruitful week and very peaceful. The familiar sound of waves has returned to the beach and some Common Goldeneyes just offshore beep along in a little counter-chorus.

In regards to some of the comments on the previous post, I certainly do have an appreciation of the works of Kiefer. About twenty years ago while travelling in Italy, I came across one of his works in a contemporary art exhibit and I had never heard of him so I wrote his name down in my sketchbook with the intention of looking him up. When I returned home, I promptly forgot him until a couple of years later when I saw Lot's Frau in the Cleveland Art Museum it reminded me of the piece I'd seen in Italy and when I cross checked the name with my sketchbook it was like seeing an old friend. In general I find myself a sucker for paintings with a strong tactile element and he certainly does that well. Thanks for stopping by and for your comments.

The Great Thaw

2010-03-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

When it came, it came quickly. One weekend the lake was a skating rink for the gods and the next weekend it was treadable by Jesus only. In a flash, a week of warm weather set things free. As a result there was some major stone harvesting going on on Sunday. I'm getting close to completion of the spring manifestation, which I will try to post next weekend in time for the equinox. Until then I offer a little painting that is part of a bigger "Pattern Recognition" piece. It contains no dead fish, but instead a nice view of a birch from Pine Tree Trail. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next...

What Place Is This?

2010-02-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

I have lived here for many years and I have spent many days on this beach, but some times you get a day when the conditions are such that it feels like you're on the planet for the first time.

This weekend was one such day. The light was great, the wind was down and it sounded like the vacuum of space. I worked for about an hour and a half and then stopped to play some games with the snow.

Then I just took a break and watched as the late afternoon sun turned the beach into the frozen wastes of Europa or whatever the hell that moon of Jupiter is that is covered with ice. What a breathtaking variety of crazy textures the ice and sun put together.

The day before, down at the peninsula, I took some photos of ice dunes that were curled up on the shore. Great forms and textures...Henry Moore does ice sculpture.

Couple of little sketches with slabs of snow and stone dancing on the ice dunes.

This place never ceases to have a little magic for anybody who pays attention.

Gnomon and a Painting for January

2010-02-02T12:41:00.001-08:00

Last weekend was the coldest offering of the winter. The lake has started to lock back up again with temperatures in the single digits. I spent a couple of hours working and the pleasure/pain principle was kicking in. My gloves have the fingertips missing because they've worn through and the stones were so cold, that at times my fingers were sticking to them.

But this is also the most enjoyable time to work because of the silence. The wind is down, there is no surf and the beach is empty. The cold just seems to disappear because of the focus of the moment.

I've dismantled the old stonewave down to the level where it is safe and now I'm ready to rebuild. I'll start this coming weekend to work my way upward, but in the mean time I took a few slabs out onto the ice dunes and set them up to see what they would look like. One of the stones was about 4.5 feet long and almost square in cross section. I dragged it up to the top of the highest ice dune, a newly formed cone and planted the shaft there. Against the blue sky it had a nice feel to it. I'll be curious to see if it survives the week.

Finished a second painting for January. Another in the Pattern Recognition series. Taking what I learned in Guatemala and applying it to the beach.

A New Part to a New Piece

2010-01-28T14:58:00.001-08:00

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...

2010-01-13T05:42:00.000-08:00

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.

Sisyphus at Play

2009-12-16T06:24:00.000-08:00

As November came to a close there were some great weekends of quiet work and much progress was made towards completion of the second wave crest.

A light snow in early December made getting up and down off the stones a bit tricky but it was pretty and very peaceful along the water and eventually the cold seems to go away. But things are looking pretty good . I figure two more good weekends of work and I'll have the second wavecrest done...

But nature has other plans. A screaming freight train of wind comes barrelling out of the north with sustained winds of 50 mph. Three days of this just piles the surf up and it crushes the beach. I didn't want to go down that weekend for fear of what I'd see. It wasn't likely to be good, and with the end so close. But so it goes. The beach was wiped clean and all that was left was a carpet of pebbles. What logs and debris weren't washed away completely were pushed even farther back from the shore. The storm surge overran the stone wave by 10 feet pushing some logs behind it and sucking out huge chunks of the beach. Inluding a 6 foot stone tower that I had built to store stone and the last 10 feet of the Stonewave. The surf undermined about a 12 foot section and doomed the project. And so once again I'm are at the bottom of the hill faced with a boulder and opportunities. We'll just go from there.

The Waves of Autumn

2009-11-20T10:54:00.001-08:00

The beginning of November has been a pleasure. Days in the 50's and the sky is generally blue rather than slate grey. The last two weekends I've been reworking the shape of the first wave and resetting the lower portion of the second wave. I was getting in a couple of hours on both Saturdays and Sundays. As of last Sunday this is what it looked like.

I have been taking stone from the top of the other two waves and the western end to reshape the first wave and the lower portion of the second wave. If the crest of wave one is still there this weekend, I'll start on the crest of wave two. I think if I can get a couple of hours in I can finish off wave two before Thanksgiving. The goal will then be to finish of the third wave before snow locks things up for the winter.
Stone and wood are still being tossed ashore by the lake on the days when there is a little surf. But most days of late have been glass calm. I was coming down off the bluff on Sunday and you could see the bottom of the lake about 40 feet out as if there were no water , it was so clear.

Here is the first crest as of Saturday last, before I had Sunday to finish it off. You can see that the light was pretty clear and clean that afternoon. If I didn't have other obligations, on days like this, I could stay down there and work until dark. It is so calm and peaceful. Even the waves respectfully keep themselves quiet when it is like this.

From the east end looking up the wave this is what it is like now. This whole end was vandalized at the end of summer, but now with little reason to go down to the beach, things will stay undamaged, hopefully.

Thanks for stopping by again "anonymous". I appreciate your comments. I hope you find the upcoming work worth stopping back for...and JA, thanks for the postcard. I hope things are going well, I'll try to get in touch after the end of term rush.

Cycles of Growth and Destruction

2009-10-28T06:28:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of storms that have resulted in a relentless, pounding surf. When you watch the power of the waves smashing the beach it is really quite awe inspiring. Tree trunks three feet in diameter and forty feet long being pushed around like matchsticks. Huge blocks of masonry being tumbled around like styrofoam boulders from a Star Trek set.

The end result has been impressive and depressive. Usually you get a couple of these storms a season, but this Fall we've already had about 4 or 5 and we are not even in November. You've heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. After each one of these storms I head down to the beach not knowing what to expect. The surf line, which under normal circumstances is 45 feet from the Stonewave has now moved about twenty feet closer. A huge bite having been taken out of the beach in the last couple of storms, so that now when high winds kick up the storm surge goes well past the Stonewave. After the last really big blow, there was actually driftwood on top of a section of the wall four feet high. Some sections of the "Wave" have been undermined by the waves. At this point, I think I can keep it stable, but a couple more big blows could take sections of it down.

Now the good news from all of these storms has been the unbelievable amount of stone that has been bull-dozed ashore. I have spent several hours over the last couple of weekends just collecting and stacking it for later use, like a squirrel gathering acorns. The second to the last photo shows one of the piles I've got ready for use. There are two larger piles as well. I am slowly incorporating some of it into the sculpture and the goal is to get the project reconfigured into the shape that I want before winter locks things up. In the second photo you can see the eastern end of the stonewave and I'm working from there westward resetting the stone to repair vandalism and stone theft as well as to reshape the wave crests to conform to the more aesthetically pleasing sculpture that I had in my head. We'll see how it goes. Waves and weather willing, I hope to be done between the holidays. Then we'll start thinking about a new configuration for 2010.

Asteroid Impact

2009-10-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

Down at the beach to do a little work this weekend. The sun came out for the second time this month and the light was beautiful. The beach was raked by some serious surf twice this week leaving behind an abundance of stone and wood, but not much beach. So I spent most of the day stockpiling. While I was working, I heard this loud shrieking in the sky and looked up in time to see an asteroid heading my way. Fortunately I had my camera with me and snapped this shot at the moment of impact. It slammed into the Stonewave with such force that a giant mushroom cloud enveloped the northern hemisphere causing drastic climate change and causing all the dinosaurs to go extinct and the end of the world as we know it....at least that's the way I remember it. Or it could just be a piece of driftwood sitting on the stones. Yeah, I think that's it, now that I look a little closer. Yeah that's it. But it looks a little like an asteroid doesn't it? So hopefully you can understand my confusion.

Just finished this painting. With all of the stuff washing in lately it was on my mind. So I thought I'd play around with it a bit. Hope you like it.

And for the guy who asked about the fossil (I can't remember the name, Hellbrunn or something like that). I found it just like that. Split pretty smoothly along the face and unabashedly showing its golden ratio for all to see.

Stone and Wood-Reconfiguring the Beach

2009-10-05T13:37:00.001-07:00

Maybe I spoke too quickly about the lovely months of September and October. It has been raining, windy and cold since I wrote those words of praise. And the next couple of days don't promise much in the way of respite. Early last week we had three days of strong winds sweeping out of the northwest. Waves were stacked up on each other impatiently awaiting their chance to pound the shore.

Whenever that happens the surf line will run up on shore almost to the base of the bluffs and when it's had its way it will leave behind a collar of driftwood and often a ridge of stone as well. The aftermath of this storm was no different. Logs were piled up along our stretch of beach.

Where the Stonewave sits, the wood piled up at its base. The wall withstood the beating with no obvious signs of damage and the stone and lay at its foot as if it wished to join its more ordered kin. In all of the years I've lived here I've only seen one storm deposit this much wood on shore in one fell swoop. Canada must be treeless now. How could this much lumber be afloat in the lake? Why did it choose to come ashore on our beach, homing in like salmon returning to their home streams. Along with the natural flotsam comes the man-made detritus. Plastic bottles and lumber from docks, jetties and boat-launches. But also, some big worked beams. Some weighing a couple of hundred pounds, often with spikes or nails still in them. These pieces of beam must be 50-100 years old by the looks of them...if not older.

These storms can be very destructive and in this case a huge section of beach has been sucked away and another part has been stacked about two or three feet high with stone. For me this is a treasure. I spent Saturday and Sunday just gathering good pieces and stacking them for later use. In the picture above you can see a three foot long piece of irregular stone that washed up. There were probably 15 of these big ones that were pushed ashore and a couple hundred between the 1 and 3 foot range. It's going to be several days of stacking to find homes for this windfall. Several days to clear away the wood for later use as well. So although it hasn't been the most pleasant of Octobers yet, it has provided for a pretty impressive stock of raw materials for the next couple of weeks...if I can only find the time to do it justice.

Equinox on the Beach...almost

2009-09-25T09:45:00.001-07:00

So a couple of years ago we had a little equinox party on the beach. Last year we fell foul of the weather gods, but this year we were back in their good graces so the tradition continued (tradition being very loosely interpreted here).

The weather was glorious and the libations were uplifting and there was a pleasant coming and going of people which lasted until sunset. At that point the remaining ten sacrificed the goat, watched summer slip away and then made the long climb back up the bluff to their lives.

I must say that there is nothing quite like spending the day on the shore with its repetitious rush of wave to beach, accompanied by the wind in the leaves, shishing back and forth like calloused hands rubbing together. All this lit by the yellow sun that has lost its white summer intensity and glows instead of shines in a soft blue sky.

Brian brought some fish and we put them out in the water a ways. It was a bit tricky getting them into the bottom of the lake because of all of the stone, and then at the moment we decided to put them in the water, the surf decided to kick up. Although the water was actually warmer than the air, I was a bit offended at the assault. The way the fish were leaping out of the water was made even more appealing by their movements caused by the waves. It was a nice little kinetic effect and in the end well worth the dampening of our parts.

I made a couple of circles while we were there. The stick circle really looked nice in the afternoon light and made an interesting counterpoint to the setting sun. This weekend I will go down and see what is left of the pieces and I may have some time to do a little work.

And when the sunset finally came it was a beauty as several have been of late. And so we mark the end of another summer and enter into Erie's most beautiful months...September and October. In the perfect world they have our September and October every month.

Happy Equinox.

Revisiting Some Old Work

2009-09-16T13:58:00.001-07:00

I have not been able to go down to the beach in a while, and when that happens I always get a little jumpy, not getting my fix. I also worry about the vandalism, which always puts me in a dark place. I suppose I should practice a little Buddhist detachment, but that just might be something I won't be able to get to in this incarnation. If the waves swept things clear, I could live with that, but human folly...

This Saturday in the afternoon, weather permitting, there will be a little equinoctial gathering of some of the tribe. Some art types, colleague types, friend types, neighbor types, so if you are in the neighborhood and care to stop by and share a moment, you are welcome. If the lake gods cooperate we'll stay for the sunset.

I was just going through my files and pulled up a few images from the past to post for the selfish purpose of seeing them again....

This is the time of year when any new stone comes as a gift of storms. So additional work on the Stonewave will be minimal for the most part and I'll start working on some smaller temporary pieces and do repairs on the vandalized parts and other touch-up work before the snow flies, at least that is what the sunset usually says around the equinox.

Crazy Things Washing Ashore

2009-09-09T13:08:00.000-07:00

So, on the actual day of Labor Day, I couldn't really do much stone work because of the conditions, so in keeping with the Dao of the beach, I spent the evening working with sticks. Of which there is an abundance as of late. Little sticks. Nice little sticks most of them. It's like the Exxon Valdez crashed off the coast carrying a cargo of sticks. So, I went back to the circle idea and tried a couple of variations. I'm getting better at these things and in the end, I liked the way this looked in the raking light of the afternoon sun.

And there was a beautiful sunset to finish the day off, so I guess this counts as a pretty good day to be alive.

And for you recent commenters, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

The New Wave Grows

2009-09-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

Well, the Labor Day weekend turned out to be laborious. I spent about 4 hours a day on the beach as the water was calm and clear and the weather warm. Ideal conditions that have occurred only three times this summer. So the Stonewave has grown substantially. This is what it looks like from out on the water a ways. Took a little boat ride courtesy of a beach neighbor. The forms are not exactly what I'm shooting for, but once weather turns I can rework the wave crests to make them closer to what I want. If the elements permit, I might also get the fourth wave crest in before winter.

This is what it looks like from land and at this angle the waves look more like what I want them to look like.

Just since this Fall, the wall has stopped so much sediment from running into the lake that the ground at the back of the wall is now two feet higher than the beach side. The plant life is pretty lush as well.

The view from behind the wall out towards the lake is kind of interesting in the light at this time of the year as the sun barely clears the bluffs to light up the back of the wall.

I like the curve of the front of this wave and the color of stone and vegetation is quite pleasant. Very late summer in feel, if you ask me.

In the last two photos, the late afternoon sun really changes the stones' attitudes and they start to feel quite pleased with themselves, almost to the point where they imagine themselves stonework fit for El Dorado.

Prehistoric Beast Washes Ashore

2009-08-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

Well, imagine you are walking along the shore of the lake. The water is calm and clear for the first time all summer. So you wade in and begin to pull out the trash that washes in with regularity from who knows where...bricks, chunks of concrete, rusted metal pipes, broken glass, etc. Then, about fifteen feet away, from out of the water, a head arises on a long slender neck. It hovers above you suggesting the creature may be thirty feet in length! Its small head lowers and you can see its mouth lined with tiny sharp teeth, perfect for snatching small fish. It looks directly into your face with its large lidless eyes and then backs away slowly and slips into the water and with a powerful sweep of its hind quarters it is gone. That most certainly has never happened to me. But wouldn't it be cool if it did! Instead what happened was, as I was wading along pulling crap out of the lake, I thought I saw a smashed can so I reached down and it turned out not to be a can at all, but rather a prehistoric beast that had washed ashore, just like I said in the title, but it was fossilized of course. Almost as cool as seeing a live lake monster.

It is about 7 inches in diameter and sliced about 3/4 of an inch thick. The back is the shell, but this view shows the inner structure. It is some kind of nautaloid/snaily looking thing with the inner chambers filled with different materials. Right near the opening there appears to be hardened sand. The next several chambers have a more quartz-like look. Some of the chambers are filled with dark brown material and some with a raw umber colored material. It's absolutely beautiful as you can see. If anybody out there knows what this is and when it lived in Lake Erie, I'd be curious to find out.

The stone wave is slowly growing as well. Here is what it looked like two weeks ago. It is starting to gather some momentum.

Semaphore Squares

2009-07-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

An unseasonably cold and wet summer continues. There was a slight break in the clouds around the 4th, but things have stayed in a rather Scandinavian state of being in general. So this week I spent cleaning the beach of the wood-slick that washed ashore after the last rains. The silver lining to the wood-slick is that usually if I try to make anything that contains driftwood it is almost immediately burned, but now, there is so much lying about that the pyros are ignoring my piddling wood sculptures. So .... I've been making little squares and filling them in with sticks. I like the woven feel of the wood.
There is something about the way they catch the light when they change direction that makes them infinitely more interesting than your average pile o' sticks...

There is also a pleasing affect caused by the different types of wood, the different colors of bark, thicknesses etc. This circle never got finished because the 4th of July crowd trampled it overnight and I have yet to repair it, but I think it was going in an interesting direction, so I will try to revive it.

Here are the three squares together. They remind me of those little semaphore flags you used to see on boats. I don't know why they remind me of that, but I'm going to stick to that story. If I get a chance and can stay ahead of the ravages of time and indifferent beach-goers I plan a fourth square. We'll see how it plays out.

This week the Stonewave was vandalized again. Somebody keeps pulling stone out of the sculpture. Sometimes it is just malicious stupidity, but this time it was theft. Somebody is hauling the stone away, which I find to be even more maliciously ignorant. When these events occur I go around a couple of days in this kind of fog. I feel dislocated. It is then that I especially appreciate when people give positive feedback about the sculptures. It helps pull me out of the malaise. So thanks for sharing the comment, anonymous.

And to close things out for the day...here is a nice sunset. It's not always about color.

Antediluvian Days

2009-07-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the rain came in epic proportions. Some of the worst flooding that I can recall. It fell for hours and at times in sheets that completely obscured vision. I've been in some pretty impressive downpours, especially when in Guatemala during the rainy season. It knows how to rain in Guatemala, but yesterday's rain was impressive for its density. At Tikal you'll get these downpours where the raindrops are the size of tennis balls, but there is an inch or so between the drops, but yesterday the raindrops fell so close together that they rubbed on the way down. It was quite an impressive sight and in this built up environment it had its destructive moments. I haven't been down to the beach yet, but usually downpours such as these have an impact on the bluffs and I even suspect some significant damage to the beachworks. But before the deluge I was working on a companion square to the solstice flower. Right next to it, I squared off a bit and went back to some stick work as there was an abundance of little fits of flotsam wafted ashore as of late. It took an hour or two and if it survives I have plans for a third square and who knows...

I also put a couple of courses of stone on the second wave crest of the Stonewave. This second curve will be a little higher than the first...that is if yesterday's storm didn't undermine things.

We'll pay a visit this afternoon to see how things are.

While biking around the peninsula I came upon a female snapper in the process of excavating a nest. A little late for that I thought and she chose a particualrly bad spot, so I think eventually she will have to move on, but in the mean time she allowed me a photograph or two. Pretty hot, as snappers go.

Solstice Flowers and Hookah Smoking Caterpillars

2009-06-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

A splendid day for a solstice. In preparation for the ceremonies I made a pretty good sized "flower". I'm getting pretty good at these. It took a couple of hours and held together pretty well. I put a stone square around it, which ultimately helped to keep it from being walked all over. I finished it off on the solstice and adjusted the square in order to have the corner align with the setting sun. It turns out that I anticipated a bit incorrectly, but you can't really tell from the photo. So I'm going to pretend I was in sync with the cosmos. After the setting of the sun the fatted calf was slaughtered. The augers read the entrails, burnt offerings were made, the dances were danced, the fasts broken, the visions visioned, the oracles oracled, the coracles coracled, the fish smacked the water and the dish ran away with the spoon.
And so ended the l o n g e s t day of the year.
In a footnote, just after girding my loins but before descending to the place of sacrifice, there in the sacred grove at the top of the bluff, I came upon a fungus of immense proportions. The fattest man in the world would be delighted to have a dinner plate this big! As fungi go, it was one of the biggest I've ever seen. A movement in the grass just nearby attracted my attention and when I investigated I was surprised to find a sizeable caterpillar dragging a hookah behind him. Subsequent discussions revealed that he was leaving his mushroom behind as it was too large, expensive to heat and frankly he was tired of the life of conspicuous consumption he was living. In light of current environmental realities he was moving to a more modest shroom where he could live in a less destructive manner. Unfortunately, while crossing the parking lot he was run over by a Hummer.

2 Explosions-Millions Dead

2009-06-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

On the 14th of June I was down working on the beach at sunset and as the evening progressed a humming sound became audible. In the back of my head I was hearing it, but not noticing it. When its real quiet, you know how sometimes you can hear your blood pulsing in your ears? It was just outside of my attention, but then it began to get louder and it became clear that the sound didn't originate in my head. Like a dynamo it increased its intensity and even changed frequency. I just assumed it was some insects up in the woods on the bluff, but at some point I looked up...

The evening sky was absolutely filled with what must have been Mayflies. Zillions of them. I've never seen anything like it. They were along the beach as far as I could see and hovering about 15 feet off the ground. Hmmming as they floated and shifted about, layers and layers of these ephemeral little bugs. I'm assuming that the whole phenomenon was mating related. One grand orgy of desperate winged lovers. Out over the water some of them would tire or lose focus and drop to the lake surface where they would become meals for fish whose lips would kiss the surface, leaving a ripple and a love affair abruptly terminated. Living along the lake one gets used to huge populations of various bugs with the coming of warm weather, but this explosion would be hard to match.

A second explosion that is familiar to natives of the area is that of the Poplar/Cottonwoods. Late May/Early June brings a snowfall of poplar fluff. It can be really annoying when you are trying to bike through a wave of them. In the sky they are as dense as paratroopers at D-day. On the ground they eventually become amassed in drifts. The fluff also clings to trees giving the feeling that you are in a southern swamp where the trees wear Spanish moss. It can be quite beautiful.

Sometimes it will clump together on the ground in snowballs. When the wind blows these guys roll along like the ghosts of tumbleweeds.

I did a little sketch this weekend. I found a nice gnomon so I planted it and ringed it with sticks and then white cobbles and finally with some small squarish flat stones.

I had hoped to continue playing with this sketch next trip down.

But somebody had built a fire in the center of it over night, so that plan went by the wayside.

It had the potential to be interesting I think....

Quick look at the left side of the Stonewave as the top starts to come together...

Saw a turtle on the peninsula yesterday while biking around . It was about a foot long. I flipped her over just to take a look at the under-carapace. Nice colors. After flipping her back, I had to fight the desire to help her on her way as she was in a dangerous place, but unfortunately not being able to tell where she was going, I hesitate to play god.
Nice shell, huh?

Sunset and the Second Stonewave

2009-06-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend was just about as close to perfect as one can get, sunny but not scorching, breeze but not a wind, and a lot of empty beach. I probably spent about four hours of quiet, uninterrupted work on the new Stonewave. And on top of all that two magnificent sunsets to close the day. The next three shots are Saturday's sunset in three acts about three or four minutes apart.

People from Erie will tell you that we have great sunsets and give some stat like we rank in the top ten or something. I don't know the origin of this claim and I'm sure there is some rationale for it, but I can't imagine how that is determined. I know we get a lot of snow. It's easily measured, but how does one measure sunsets? With a sunsetometer, perhaps? The claim is clearly unsubstantiatable (Is that a word?). But I will say this; if you go 5 consecutive days without seeing an absolutely soul-wrenching, pyrotechnically spectacular solar decline, then you are not in Erie.

Work continues on the Stonewave. This one is not as tall as the first, but is already twice as long. It is finally starting to look like a wave of sorts. Lots of stone has been washing up so I've been working slowly. I'm to the point where anything that is to be added will be new stone. The old Stonewave is now completely metamorphosed into what you see below.

The contour along the top will start looking a little more wave like. The plan is kind of an undulating line running from the highest point on the left to the lower end on the right. It will start to look more interesting I think once that starts to take shape.

I like this little gap between the first two segments of the wall. You can see some green between the stone which feels right. I'd like to get a better shot of this when the stone is lit up with late afternoon gold.

PS to the Walden fish enthusiast. Thanks for sharing your observations. Always a pleasure to hear from the piscean inclined.

The Affairs of Dead Fish

2009-05-07T10:34:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when the beach gets really trashed. Both humans and nature conspire to beat the hell out of it. Without ice dunes to protect it, any good northwest wind will blow in a slick of trash. Little plastic objects, water bottles and wood ranging from whole trees to kindling, with an occasional piece of construction material thrown in mark the water line. Warmer weather attracts people down to the beach to drink and set fires. Unfortunately many of these people are the kind of empty headed genetic dead ends who feel that the beach is their private garbage can. Some lack the intelligence that god promised a door knob and they will smash their bottles on the stones. Apparently the connection between broken glass and bare feet on the beach eludes them. A pox...Nature sometimes throws up a little garbage of her own, but it is almost always more interesting. I must admit, I like dead fish. I don't particularly like to eat them, or smell them. It's more of a visual thing. I don't recall exactly when my love affair with dead fish began, but it's probably been longer than my marriage. Sometimes they are bloated, sometimes dessicated or gull-pecked, but always interesting. Some of them are frightening enough looking that it gives me second thoughts about swimming down there. I've never seen one that I took for granted, though. A lot of these unfortunate fish have ended up in paintings, including the one above. Immortalized as a work of art maybe isn't the fish's preference, but is it not better than oblivion? My wife often chides me when she sees me working on a fish painting, but I now put it down to envy. I have done more paintings of fish than I have of her, perhaps she is getting suspicious of the relationship between us. Oddly enough, whenever a fish painting strays into one of my exhibitions it almost always sells. So I know that there are others who share my attraction. Being a Pisces, I sometimes wonder if there is something cosmic at the root of it all. Ahhh, fish.

Some shots of the latest additions to the new Stonewave. It is still taking shape. Several times over the last weeks it has been vandalized by fire-starting drunkards, so I have had to spend much time restoring it. A bit frustrating, so it goes. If I can get a couple of hours of good stacking, I think I can start to get it into the form that I want, but right now the top appears to be amorphous and it remains to be seen how it will all come together. I've been having trouble getting the curve to do what it needs to do. So I'm patiently waiting for the stone to make a decision.

Grand Canyon Migration

2009-04-22T05:09:00.000-07:00

It has been awhile since I've posted. The hecticitiness of opening night preparation kept me busy(By the way, the show runs until May 2) and the annual trip to the Grand Canyon over Easter break has also played a role in my negligence. But I have a moment...

Every year more or less, a friend of mine and I head out for a little camping trip to the canyon. We leave on Friday morning and head west, non-stop for about 36 hours. Driving in shifts we usually arrive on the south rim by dinner time on Saturday. This year we brought my 10-year old son along to share the torture...take him on his vision quest. Snow and cold on the Kaibab that night made the hot dogs taste better, but the sleeping more challenging.

Up in the morning we hiked the 5 miles down to Cottonwood Creek, set up camp and then explored the creek bed as far down as it goes before a drop off cuts us off. Unfortunately one can't get down to the Colorado River from this creek bed. Over the years we have done every rim to river trail, several more than once. Cottonwood, although it doesn't get to the river, is a very nice place to use as a base camp for day hikes.

The second day we hiked over to Hance Creek and then down the bed till the cut-off. We covered about 15 miles that day. The weather both days was perfect for hiking. Close to 70 degrees each day. I'm not even going to bother trying to describe this landscape. It defies description on a large scale. You can maybe do justice to bits and pieces of it, but the whole is incomprehensible.

The third day we took the Tonto west towards Grapevine to the point where you can see the river from the promontory. One of the best views of the river from above. After that we took the rest of the day off. I wandered back down Cottonwood looking for subtleties that I could grasp. I'm particularly fond of the little chutes and slides that appear in various places. Little treasures. Here are two interesting little magic places that one can wrap one's head around. That night freight train winds blew up Cottonwood all night long and by daytime the comfortable warmth of the previous three days was replaced by sleet and snow for the climb out. I am happy to report that my son did make it out alive and may actually look back upon the experience some day with fondness.

I really enjoyed this little place, this little moment. Trickling water, fluid rock, an elemental tango and for the time I was the only witness...me and these really cool little silver frogs.

While down inside I couldn't resist playing with all the raw material. To build anything seemed to me to be absurd in light of the setting. How does anything man made even warrant attention in the midst of such grandeur. If nothing else, being in the canyon puts your ego where it belongs.

So rather than build, I just did some arranging. I did two little pieces while in Cottonwood, kind of playing along with the Canyon gods. A bar of piccolo in an infinite cosmic fugue that maybe a few people will hear and smile at, a little gesture just to let them know that their work is appreciated. The first piece was just a line of light colored stone following the contours of some reddish slick rock, up a little crease in the wall and trickling to an end in pebbles.
Its amazing to me how this rock flows. When you run yours hands over it it feels like flowing water. I have a fundamentalist acquaintance who believes that the Earth is only 6000 some years old and I can't imagine anyone being able to maintain that belief standing in this place. Watching how water and air have shaped this landscape, it is absurd to believe that 6000 years could create this. This place goes way beyond the provincial idea of such small time spans. It reeks of age, of time, of the infinite and its fluidity can only really be understood in that context.
I did a second larger piece that afternoon closer to camp. A spiral out of reddish cobbles on a slick rock shelf. Jesse actually managed to contribute a bit before his patience ran out and he wandered off and began to practice his quarterstaff maneuvers with a dried yucca shaft.

It took a couple of hours and it sort of took its own form as it spiraled out. The rock face had something to say about things, but I liked the way it played out. I just wish there would have been better light for a photo. But by the time I got done it was dusk.

The last picture was taken from the Tonto trail above the campsite. The spiral is almost lost in the setting, but I liked the picture because it inadvertently included the small rock shelter on the opposite cliff. It all feels very stone age to me and it certainly puts things into perspective.

So, that's what I did on my vacation.

The Gift of Ice, Equinoctial Squares and a Show Opening

2009-03-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

On a day that ends like this it wouldn't make a difference if what preceded it was less than mundane. What an amazing sunset! Of course, another way to look at it would be that any human effort to create beautiful things under a sky like this would be humiliatingly trivial.

I'm not averse to humiliating myself and it was a perfect evening to work, so I'll take my lumps.

The night time temperatures must have dropped well below freezing the previous night and as the lake was calm, a thin layer of ice formed along the shore. As I was walking down the bluff in the early afternoon I could hear this loud hissing sound as if a gas was escaping under high pressure. When I got to the beach, I found the origin of the sound to be thousands of paper thin sheets of ice that had washed up on shore and each gentle wave pushing into them resulted in their shuffling against each other. The resulting sound was this unearthly hissing. A song of sirens plagued with lisps.

I went to the edge of the water and began to pick up pieces of this delicate ice. If I was careful I could hold pieces as big as 18 inches square and not have them break. I played around with a couple of different ideas and unfortunately for me, the possibilities were so tantalizing that I ended up panicking and failed to meet the challenge. Maybe someday I'll get a second chance.

I did, however, muster the courage to make a small square of overlapping sheets of ice.

Then I added a small square of driftwood sticks and thought, "That looks interesting enough to continue", so before the ice melted I added a third square of stones. The way that the sun was reflecting off of the ice sitting on the dark sand made for an interesting little sketch and I started to feel a little less inadequate.

But just a little...

This took place the weekend of the 15th. The following weekend was the equinox. Weekend weather was hospitable and there always seems to be extra mojo in the air on equinoxes, so I returned to the beach to see what the lake had to offer this time.

Sticks. That's what the lake had to offer. The ice dunes had almost completely melted away and left behind thousands of sticks. Like fossil bones of decayed ice leviathans, they lined the beach. So building on the little stick square ideas from the previous weeks I decided to make a larger square.

It was about four feet on a side and I figured that if it survived the week unscathed I had some ideas for some additions. If it weren't for obligations I could have stayed down there all day. But it was a pleasure while it lasted.

The light was good for shooting photos so I was happy with the day's output and I got a record of it. I also put in a couple hours on the new Stonewave project.

Hey, if you are in Erie, I've got a show opening on Friday, April 3rd at the Urarro Gallery. Sixty paintings, 15 photos of Beachworks projects and Brian Pardini will have some great wood sculptures and Kathy Merski some black and white photos...very nice. Free cheese, so come on by.

Global warming can't come soon enough.

2009-03-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

Winter's back is broken and not a moment too soon. Sure there will be more snow and some bitter cold, but the red-winged blackbirds are back in force. They perch in the upper branches and trill out their claims to territory and that means that there is no going back.

Went down to the beachworks to spend some time. A pretty stiff wind was blowing off the lake ice, keeping things chilly. About a mile off shore you could see some pretty impressive breakers hammering at the ice sheet. By next week I'll bet the shore shakes off its lace collar. I spent about 2 hours with the new project and these are some of the photos. I apologize for the lackluster imagery, but the sun was buried under a slate grey blanket of clouds, so brown was the color of the day.

I levelled off the stack of stones on the right side of the bench and then raised the left stack by about 5 courses of stone. I'm still not entirely sure where this is going. I'm open to ideas from the stone, but at this point I'm getting too many options, so nothing is particularly convincing as of yet. I'll just play along until it becomes obvious.

These two pictures of the left stack turned out kind of nice. I didn't take into consideration the background when I was shooting the picture, but when I saw it I was struck by the beauty of the tree in the background in relation to the stones. Serendipity.

I had some additional time to work on a small piece right in front of the bench. I did a little window and took some of the sticks that have been uncovered as the ice dunes melt and played with a little diagonal pattern.

If it survives the week I have some derivations to work off of this window. The problem is remembering. I didn't have my sketchbook with me at the time so I didn't jot down the ideas, so I'm at the mercy of my sieve of a memory. The beach snow is slowly disappearing and I am looking forward to seeing what treasures lie beneath.

Ephemeral tombstones

2009-02-24T12:15:00.001-08:00

So I am down at the beach this weekend. There is a little break where the wind dies down and the temperatures are such that it doesn't physically hurt to be outside. On these days I could get lost in time just being. I started doing some work on the new stone piece, but the light was so bad that I didn't photograph the progress. It is coming along nicely though. The storage wall of stone is buried about a foot or two in the ice so I am stripping the stone down from the top. By the time I get to the lower courses of stone, I am prying it out of the ice and the end result is a substantial hole where the stone used to be.
When you get into the routine, things just seem to exist outside of time. There is no wind. There are no gulls. There are no waves. Everything seems to be locked in the ice and snow including sound. I remember the first time I noticed the absence of sound, it was like a revelation. All of the sudden you hear something and it is silence. The rest of the year there is constant sound of surf and birds and wind, the susurration of leaves and waves and sand.
After working with the stone for a couple of hours I thought I would see what the snow had to say. A drift had blown up against the wall during the week. It was about 2 feet deep and densely packed enough that one could stand on it and not sink in the snow more than an inch or two.
Found a flat stone and began to cut into the drift and found that it would hold together fairly well, so I figured a way to hack out a squarish chunk and lift it out without it falling apart. The blocks were about 2 feet in their longest dimension. The first one was a bit bigger because I took it from the biggest part of the drift. It was then carried over to the top of one of the ice dunes where it looked a bit like a tombstone.

It looked cool enough to warrant me staying down there a little longer to cut a few more blocks out of the drift and see what would happen. By the time I got four good blocks out it started to look like a Hyperborean snowhenge. Unfortunately I was running out of good snow. So I left it at four blocks.

Then the ghost of David Smith swept down the dunes with visions of Cubi sculptures...I don't think he's dead actually, so it wouldn't be his ghost. Perhaps it was his nagual/way. Stacking one of the blocks made for a different feel for the grouping. But it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I didn't push things any further as I thought the blocks were a bit delicate. So the experiment ended there.

I'll be curious to see if they survive for long. They would be tempting to smash if one were of the vandalish nature. It has been bitter cold since Saturday, so I don't think weather will do much, but it is supposed to warm up on Thursday, so I'll try to get down to see what has become of them.

This last week a friend of mine died of pancreatic cancer. He was 80, but deserved to live to a hundred. He was as vital at 80 as most people are in their prime. He had a great mind and the beautiful thing about it was that it was open. In this day and age, its a pretty rare thing. I will miss him and this little "monument" is for him. I hope you like it, Antonio.

Getting done with winter

2009-02-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

Although the local groundhog suggests only six more weeks of winter and a recent warming spell brought some needed relief. This week winter wanted to remind us that it is not through with just yet. We are on the cusp of setting a new record for snowfall in a year and I suppose if you're going to have a lot of snow you might as well go for the record. I believe the record was set circa 11,378 BC with about 6,023 feet of snow that year. We're about three inches short of that right now, but should top it by Sunday.

Living in Erie has its moments, and some of those moments you just get tired of. I suppose that is true of anywhere that one might live, but after living here for so long sometimes it takes on the characteristics of theater of the absurd. How else do you explain ice fishing? Hey! Let's take a really mind numbing activity and do it out in the cold. When I see those guys out there on the bay with the wind scouring the ice, in their little yurts trying to coax fish out of their lethargy I gotta say I'm baffled. And when some of these guys get stranded on a breakaway ice flow, which happens annually here in the Great Lakes, I must confess that I hope none of them have reproduced.

(In a totally unrelated thought, I just want to say I hope things are going well for you in NYC Mr. Fournier. thanks for stopping by.)

Winter does have its inspiring moments, don't get me wrong and I'd rather freeze my ass off than sweat it off. Moved by the muse of the season, here are four recent paintings from the 100 Views series...

This painting is from the peninsula. On a walk along the beach just short of the light house, I rounded a corner and the light and the sky towering over this empty shallow stretch of ground just reminded me of a Dutch landscape so here is my little homage to Ruisdael.

This also came from the peninsula. On a walk along the bay side I spooked a hawk out of the brush. Apparantly I had interrupted a meal. When I went over to take a look there was this explosion of blood and feathers on the white of the snow. A cardinal had the misfortune of being red.

I don't remember where this was, but I remember really liking the feel of the icecicles just massed on top of each other and draping down the surface . In Erie this could be anywhere.

This last one is from one of the stands of birches on the peninsula. Birches in winter. They are magic. Every time I walk this trail I feel like Robert Frost is looking over my shoulder. Time to go.

Things to see at the beach

2009-02-03T14:37:00.000-08:00

Nothing much is going on at the Beachworks. Things are buried pretty deep in the snow still. Maybe this weekend things will let up. Until then I thought I'd post a painting that came out of the project. This is a big 40" x 50" of colored stones overlayed by water and snow and ice. It was painted last winter and I kind of like end result. Until next time.....

The Relentless January

2009-01-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

Not much to report of late with the new project. Weather has made it difficult to work. The last break we had was early in January and I was able to do a little stacking and the form of this work started to take shape. The central portion has an embedded "bench" and is flanked by leaning stacks of stone. I lay some very nice slabs as the bench surface and got a few courses placed on top to hold it in place and then the snow started and it just hasn't stopped for days and the cold has been pretty harsh. The end result is all of the stone is buried under a foot or two of snow and the top of the project is also covered in snow. So I can't really work until some of the snow goes away and I can get at the stones and the top is cleared away a bit so that I can stack them.

In the mean time, although I haven't been able to work, the weather didn't deter somebody from vandalizing the sculpture. When I went down Sunday to see what the work conditions were like, I could see that somebody had ripped the bench stones out. I don't know what they did with them as they were probably close to 100 lbs. apiece. They may have just thrown them to the ground, but I couldn't see because of the snow cover. It was also clear that they had done further damage to the wall that is next to bench. I don't know what people get out of doing this? Whether it makes them feel special in some way, I don't know, but I had hoped that this kind of stupid behavior was through for the winter and I wouldn't have to worry about things until the spring. Go figure.

A Brazilian Chimes in.

2009-01-07T17:55:00.000-08:00

I don't know how many people ever bother to check in on this site, but I do welcome comments and am happy to respond to anybody who has something to say. So I would like to address a recent comment for two reasons. One is to assure anybody who does check this site out that no animals have been hurt in the making of this movie and second to inform the commenter that he is in error.

I don't know who this commenter is as he signs in Anonymous. I can only assume that perhaps he is a Brazilian soccer player. I know that they like to go by a single name. Or it could be that it is just a last name...Anonymous...it sounds Greek possibly. Perhaps it is Yanni Anonymous or something like that. Or maybe even it is a clever Nom de Plume. Regardless, the commenter makes four observations in his statement and as far as I can determine they are all false.

First, he suggests that the sculptures are in violation of the rules of a "homeowners association". I'm not sure whose association he is referring to, but the neighborhood association in the area has been defunct for close to a decade and therefore has no meaningful rules. If Anonymous actually has a homeowner's rulebook from the defunct association, I would actually be interested to see it. As an anthropologist, one of my interests is legal systems of pre-state social organizations and as a member of the community I would find it further interesting as a piece of community history.

Anonymous makes a second observation that the sculptures violate Millcreek Zoning. When the Millcreek Zoning people were contacted about these sculptures, I was informed that no zoning concerns existed. In fact the individual who addressed the concerns actually seemed to be rather amused that anybody would entertain the idea.

The third observation about state regulations I cannot speak to definitively, as state regulations are infinite in number and juridictions are complicated etc. But I can say that I've sat on that sculpture watching sunset with an agent of the Department of Environmental Protection on more than one occasion and if he wasn't aware of the regulations that were being violated then I must admit that it is not likely that I would be.

Now frankly, these three comments although false, are not really of import to me, but the final comment is not just patently wrong, it is personally offensive. I am and have always been an environmentalist and an outdoorsman. I've been a hiker for over half my life and have hiked on four continents. I ride my bike 16 miles to work (round-trip) 8 months a year. I've got those spirally light bulbs in every socket in the house. I am a long time member and supporter of the Sierra Club and the EDF. I have hauled a ton of garbage off of those beaches over the last decade...bottles, cans, broken glass, plastic, old tires, construction materials. Every time I go down to work, part of the ritual includes collecting garbage. After every storm I police the water to pull out dangerous metal, stone and construction materials. To suggest that I would harm my beach or my lake is just ignorant. Any stone that I move and stack has been washed up on shore by storms that regularly reconfigure not just the beach but the lake bottom. Every sculpture that I have made has eventually been washed away by storms. No piece has lasted much longer than a year before it is swept away. I have seen ice dunes plow 150 pound rocks up on the beach in the winter and waves push tons of rock up and down the beach hundreds of yards in a single day. To suggest that anything that I do has any impact on such a dynamic zone is just silly.

Now, I don't know what the motivations of Anonymous are. His agenda is a mystery to me. I have had hundreds of people talk with me while working on the beach. The feedback has been supportive and positive. All of it. I do not mind negative feedback, but when it is unfounded and untrue I confess my lack of patience. So, Anonymous, if you happen to check back in on this blog I have two suggestions...if you have any facts or data that can support your assertions I would be happy to see what you are basing your observations on. If you can't defend these claims then please do not come back. I have lived through eight years of lies and deceit with the current administration, I don't care to deal with it on my own blog.

On a more pleasnt note, over the first couple of days of January we had some nice windless days. These are the best days for working. Staying warm is no problem and it is very restful. I took some time off of the larger project to play around with a couple of window images. The above image consists of some smaller flat stones arranged on the side of the ice dunes. I scraped out the innner window part in order to make it appear white. Outside the stone frame the dunes are colored by the presence of sand and gravel. In the background there is a second ice dune and then beyond, the lake and sky. I like the way that the photograph is divided by the horizontal bands of the differentiated landscape. It adds something to the overall affect. The image below is the same piece with the inner window filled with small ice balls that are currently littering the beach, components of the most recent set of ice dunes. And finally, Taek Jin, if you check back in, it was good to hear from you. Vaya con dingos.

Winter Solstice Human Sacrifices...or not.

2008-12-31T06:59:00.000-08:00

The WINTER SOLSTICE has come and gone with the proper sacrifices made. The victim was appropriately George Bush, whose trussed body was lain upon the altar stone and beaten with a sock full of frozen Tootsie Rolls until Dick Cheney's hand popped out. They were then both painted red and sent north across the frozen lake to meet their fate. Eight years too late, but a satisfying image nonetheless.I went down to the lake on the solstice to see what nature had in store for me on this shortest day of the year. It was a stunning revelation in grey. High winds and cold temperatures beginning early on the 21rst and running through the 22nd had piled the surf up on the beach 40 feet beyond the normal waterline and then froze it in several rows of dunes. Now this is a yearly phenomenon, but the surprise here was how quickly it happened, how far inland and how high. The dunes were already about 10 feet high in places and were made up of ice balls of various sizes, from ping pong balls to volleyballs. The end result was an unearthly Jovian vision. A grey-white corrugated icescape for as far as the eye could see. The ramparts of ice blocked the view of the lake, but if one were to climb up a bit of a dune, the brown waves topped with white crests could be seen making their way shoreward. They could not get far, as a shelf of ice has formed along the shore and then a skirt of frozen floating iceballs beyond that would absorb them as they tried to make their way home.The above photo was taken looking down towards Presque Isle. Of course it can't be seen through the snow and gloom. In fact you can barely make out Baer Beach. Now one of the truly amazing things about this place is that three days ago I was down here on the beach working in a T-shirt in near record temperatures in the 60's.The following three photos are of some of the stone cairns covered in ice and snow. On this day I couldn't work as the snow covering made it too hard to find the proper stones for laying the new courses. So, I waited a few days and by Christmas the conditions were much improved for working and I have been able to make significant progress since these photos were recorded. I will post those images next time. Until then, I hope that the new year is an interesting one for you all. Good health...

Shiftiing Stones and A New Form

2008-12-18T11:21:00.000-08:00

The year is coming to a close and in Erie it has been a grey end. Already the sun has become a stranger. It looks like we are in for a long cold haul. The solstice approaches and with it some time off from work that might lead to some extended hours at the beach so I have that to look forward to.

I've started a new large scale project out of the ruins of last summer. I 'm not so sure where I'm heading with it just yet, but I began with this square of stone above. I began to push the top off of the vertical a couple of inches in each course until it began to lean. I liked what was happening with the other attempts at leaning forms and gapped forms.

Unfortunately every day that I worked was either rainy, sleety or otherwise slate-colored so that the photos look like they were taken without the benefit of sunlight or color. It has just been sucked out of the landscape. It's a convention of earth tones around here right now. In the background you can see the storage wall for the stone which will slowly become smaller as the project grows.

After the initial square was planted I began a second platform that was quadrilateral, but the south line of it was bowed a bit. This platform was spaced about 4 inches from the original square and it followed the lean of the original square.

I don't know for sure where this gap is going to go just yet. Whether it will recurve or bend back I can't say for sure. I suppose the final height of the platforms will determine that. I like the way the tree on the bluff behind the sculpture bends along with the gap in the picture below.

Since these photos were taken I have added a few more courses, laying in the seat stones. These are long stone planks that are relatively flat on the upper surface that make a pretty good surface for sitting. I am toying with the idea of having a sitting space incorporated in the form.

There has been some significant stones wash up in the last week or two, so I've benefited from donations from the lake both stone and stick wise and I hope to integrate a bit with this piece.

Here is a view or two of the second platform. The next time I go down I'll begin the third platform and by that time I'm hoping the final shape and scope of the thing will become more apparent. In the mean time, have a nice solstice.

Back to the Jungle

2008-12-11T13:12:00.000-08:00

Along with the 100 Views and the Beachworks projects I occasionally revisit the Requiem for the Peten project. I've been sending out proposals to galleries around the area trying to drum up some interest in exhibiting this installation. It has been depleted by sales over time, but I have steadily filled the gaps so that it still stretches over 50 feet and includes about 45 paintings and 6 drawings. The show at Glassgrowers Gallery in Erie worked out very nicely. About 25 pieces made up the mural, but that was last year's news. I am hoping that I might be able to find a space for 2009 or early 2010 (if I'm not making my second Space Odyssey at that time). Things don't look good for that at present, but serendipity can not be discounted.

The piece above was finished two years ago and has become one of the main segments of the mural. It is joined to the panel below with a small, narrow painting between them. Altogether it is about 6 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide. It depicts Temple IV of Tikal from a high point on the west end of the Great Plaza. This is a monstrous structure that has gained some fame in popular culture as the rebel base in Star Wars. The butterfly images were derived from sketches and photos taken from walks down the old runway away from the ruins out into the scrub forest. At certain times of the year, that space is so densely populated with butterflies its like the souls of all of ancient Tikal are on parade. And a beautifully dressed parade it always is. I have walked that trail for a couple of miles without finding a terminus, but it is always good for a surprise or two.

The lower panel is a painting derived from a number of different burials found during the excavations at the Plaza de los Siete Templos. To contrast with the greens of the jungle I began to play with sienas and ochres and getting these warm earthtones bordering in some places on warm-blood reds. The stone bone textures counter the plant patterns from th upper panel in an interesting way. This is one of the nicest paintings in the installation.
The above piece is a tangle of aerial roots or tendrils that occasionally fall out of the trees or perhaps are tossed out by the monkeys. I'm guessing they grow at the ends of branches and are knocked off more easily. You can see them from the ground up in the branches, but I never looked closely enough to figure out what they were doing up there. This panel is inset on a larger painting of a ceiba trunk and root system with bones. I love the complexity and the Jackson Pollock frenetic energy.

This is a small panel of a tree trunk with some impressive thorns. The tree grows along the walkway between the aguadas and the ticket booth at the entrance to the ruins. Every time I go down there I'm amazed at the variety of surfaces on the trees boles. Even though I've seen them time and again, it is still an impressive array of textures. Sometimes, I wonder if I will ever go back. So many things pull in so many different directions, but it was a long strange ride regardless.

Dancing Stick Sketches

2008-12-04T13:47:00.000-08:00

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...

Big Surf and the Obliteration of Art

2008-11-18T11:08:00.000-08:00

The dull slate grey Fall has arrived and with it the wet cold that goes through you into your joints. This is my least favorite time to be on the beach as there is always a wind and it is always a damp cold one. I went down to work on my "friendly jetty", a low sloping wall running down towards the waterline. It was friendly because I left a gap to walk through at the midway point, unlike the big concrete variety that dot the shore here. This picture you can see it at the end of the day. I worked another day on it, but then before I could photograph the latest manifestation two days of high winds and surf obliterated it...back to the drawing board. Fall is a time of change and the beach is certainly dynamic around now, unfortunately it is also dull grey. Here is the long view of the jetty before she was washed away. I was kind of liking this little thing, but so it goes.

I had made a set of colored stone circles a couple of weeks ago and last week added a new circle or reddish stone. I thought the bottom photograph was interesting with the circles juxtaposed with the shelf of washed up cobbles to the lakedside of the circles. These circles were also casualties of the high surf this week. Amazingly the surf had to be high enough to wash over about a two foot high rampart of these cobbles that had been pushed ashore a month ago by similar conditions. I thought this rampart would protect things until the ice dunes arrived. Wrong again.

A lot of stone has washed ashore in these last two storms and a shitload of construction material as well. Bricks and concrete blocks and that kind of thing. The place looks a little shaky right now, especially in this light. This week a snowstorm also blew in to the tune of about 8 inches. I haven't been down to the beach to see the results, but it was certainly a beautiful snow. It was accompanied on Sunday night with a pretty impressive electrical storm. That's something you don't see every day. The lightning flashes were incredibly bright, reflected off of the snow on the ground and in the sky...God's camera flash.

100 Views-Four for the Fall

2008-11-12T14:26:00.001-08:00

Not much time to talk today, but I wanted to post a few more paintings. I am now in the 60's for the 100 Views series and trying to finish up the Fall paintings during this, the second Fall of the project. This first image is from last year, but the following three are recent works and there are a few more new ones that I am liking currently. Some new work down on the beach with the stone circles but I'll hold off on posting for a bit.

Beach punctuation.

2008-10-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

In the last couple of weeks the dust has settled from the Delaware show, I've been able to catch up on all my work and the weather has cooperated so that I have been able to get down to the beach to do some work. Last weekend the beach was illuminated by that magnificent October sunlight. Cool and clean with a blue sheet of sky. I continued to dismantle the stonebench and started a new little piece using cobbles.
Right now the beach itself is lined with a rampart of cobbles. Washed in by several days of heavy surf prior to the weekend. This low wall of stone may actually keep some of the smaller sculptures safe from unruly surf for a while. It has also supplied me with an inexhaustable supply of cobbles. So I began to gather some black stones, white stones and blue stones and place them in little circular piles.
These piles are about 2 feet in diameter and are about 6 inches apart. When they are placed next to each other it is amazing how the contrasts of their color/value is apparent. When you are looking for them it isn't so obvious that they are that white or black. The blue ones are pretty obvious though. Unfortunately, the sun doesn't get over the bluffs to light the sculptures up until the afternoon and I was working in the morning, so the photos don't pick up the colors so well, but regardless, the end result is interesting.
The white stone in the circle above is particularly affected by the lack of direct sunlight. There was a nice feel to this little sketch and if it survives, I can see a couple of different directions to go with it.
The blue stones are quite beautiful when they are dry and they glow with an inner coolness. They are quite plentiful in the piles of cobbles. They are also the most regular in form and are really very pleasing.

The black stones are the most difficult to track down and here they are photographed wet, because without the sun they don't quite have the same charm. One of the next steps may be to add some or the oranges or reds to the picture. We'll see how it goes.
This weekend I went back down and was surprised to see my circles still there. So in the two hours that I had, I took a little more of the bench down and dressed up the circles a bit. They had been rained and winded on a bit. I also gathered up a bunch of little sticks to put around the black stones to see what would happen. I don't think I have enough. The end result wasn't quite what I was looking for. But it does lead to other possibilities. I also worked a bit on the passage. The end had been washed away by the surf so I put it back together. And I am building up the layers on it a bit. If it doesn't get wiped out by today's big winds I have a plan for it. You can see the rampart of cobbles on each side of the passage, by the way.

I have no idea if anybody actually looks at these images on the blog. I have no idea how to find that information out. But every now and then a comment shows up and the last time I checked I had a nice note from Jen from Florida. All I can say is thank you. The people who stop to chat while I am working and the comments like these are a big help. After dealing with vandals destroying the works every so often and the people who keep taking the stone and the absentee landlords it is the timely positive comment that makes it easy to keep playing Sisyphus. Thanks again.

Passages

2008-10-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

Went down this weekend in near perfect conditions. Fall colors exploding. Crystal blue sky. Did some work dismantling the bench and made this little piece. About three feet wide and 30 odd feet long down to the waterline. A quick work, stone sketch as it were, but I like it. It has some potential. I like the way the horizon melts in these pictures...

Here it is lengthening out a bit. This was the second day on the job and I took it down into the water. I don't expect this to last long, but it will be interesting to see what happens after a couple of days of surf.

The peninsula in the distance with the stone passage mirroring it.

At the Intersection of Wallstreet and The Beach

2008-10-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

Well, what did you expect? When the blind lead the blind everyone falls into the ditch. The fact that the blind elected the blind doesn't help those with sight much. Saying "I told you so" doesn't really balance things out. So what is one to do when all about you are losing their heads? ....Go down to the beach... The light was perfect and the sun was just trying to vault over the trees that top the bluff, but couldn't quite free itself, its beams being tangled in the upper boughs of the taller trees. The light that made it to the beach was that pure golden light. In the shade it was slate blue-grey. In the water it was cerulean and green and a deep blue in places. I found a log and set it up in the shallow surf only to have it fall seconds later when the water undercut it. After a dozen tries I got it to remain for a minute of two, a sentinal on this empty stretch, like the black monolith in 2001 A Space Oddyssey. Then I sat around and waited for intelligent life to evolve....still waiting.

100 Views at the "George Weymouth Gallery"

2008-09-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

I went down to the beach the other day and began to reconstruct the stone bench and the other sculpture that had been vandalized. I should have some time this weekend to get them back into shape. The flower was completely obliterated by the surf whipped up by Ike's remnants. In the meantime I'm posting 4 paintings from the 100 Views Project. These are currently being exhibited at Twin Lakes Brewery's Gallery space, dubbed rather spontaneously, the George Weymouth Gallery. It has a nice ring to it. I think they should make it official. Anyways, the gallery is exhibiting 27 paintings and 6 photos of the "beachworks" along with a number of Brian Pardini's sculptures. When I left after hanging the show, things looked pretty good. We'll have to make a few adjustments on opening night, but I thought it looked pretty good. This is an image from the Winter portion of the 100 Views. The hope is eventually to finish 25 images for each season. I'm a little more than half-way through right now.

This is a Spring image of fish cadavers washed up on shore. It was a cold wet day and they glowed a pale white against the earth tones of the beach surface.

This is also a Spring or late winter image just short of Gull Point. I think this is the part of the beach where they were shooting The Road. If not it should have been.

A Fall image, one of several leaf images. This day while walking on one of the trails I felt like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road or it was a scene from Hero. A beautiful day it was.

So there you have it, 4 more of the 100 Views. The Show opens on October 4th. I hope it is a beautiful day as the light coming through the gallery windows can make a lot of difference with these images. More stone sculptures coming soon.

More from the "Requiem for the Peten"

2008-09-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

This last weekend the weather was amazing. The stuff that makes Erie very liveable if not an actual paradise. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take advantage of it to work on the beach as I was in Greenville, Delaware hanging a show at the Twin Lakes Brewery...the George Weymouth Gallery. Weymouth is a well-known painter/portraitist in the tempera tradition. Apparantly the gallery used to be his studio and the brewery owner is his grandson or something along those lines. The show is with Brian Pardini and includes his driftwood sculpture and 27 of my paintings from the 100 Views. The weekend was a bit tainted because right before I left I discovered that my beach sculptures had been damaged by the remnants of Hurricane Ike and then vandalized as well. Some of the stone was then stolen by a local guy. Upon returning to Erie on Sunday night I retrieved some of the stone, but there will have to be a reckoning of sorts so that this doesn't happen again. So with no new images from the Beachworks, I will revisit the Requiem works. The above piece is a 30"x40" watercolor of a felled tree, possibly a ceiba. It has been laying on the ground by the Great Plaza trail for years now. But in its initial felling the bole was a beautiful orangish-siena when wet and when set off by the greens it was particularly impressive.

This is one small panel from a larger painting called Root/Stone/Bone from the Requiem series.

The image comes from a child sacrifice placed in lip to lip plates and then cached in a building. The point of view makes it even more disturbing I think and the earth tones were a bit exaggerated to stay in keeping with the larger painting that it was a part of.

This is the most recent addition to the Requiem series. I particularly like the leaves which were taken from a little sketch that I did right outside the lab at Plaza de los Siete Templos while waiting for Oswaldo and the truck to head back to the casita. I had a small bottle of India ink and I used a twig to sketch a couple of leaves lying on the plaza floor. The sketch had to be quick before the leaves blew away. There was a wabi sabi feel to it and it was fun to translate it into color...Recumbant Figures.

I have to say good-bye to this piece. It sold in the Glassgrowers show. It has always been one of my favorites. It is a stucco mask from the North Acropolis and it shows up in many paintings, but I particularly like this one. The third mask over, the reddish one was painted shortly after visiting the Modigliani exhibition at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo. I was blown away by this color that he used in a couple of reclining nudes, so I stole it and used it on this mask and it made the painting as far as I am concerned. I will miss it.

So these are some images from the "Requiem for the Peten" exhibit. It has been shown in Pittsburgh, Ashtabula OH, Erie, and Jamestown NY and I was getting ready to retire it, but the other day I put a few pieces up and now I think I want to try to get it out at least one more time. So I will send out another round of proposals.

Out of the Ashes the Phoenix Rises...

2008-09-08T13:56:00.001-07:00

So, the canvas couldn't stay blank for long. I couldn't resist playing around. So I started a small stack of stone with a bit of a curve in it. I liked it enough to continue and.... so it gave birth to a second stack in which I wanted to experiment with leaving a small gap between them to see what the light would do with it and so...
the stack got a dance partner, which turned out OK. One morning I came down to work and somebody had crowned the work with a small plastic cow. The cow did not last long. A couple of days later someone laid claim to the cow or it wandered off of its own volition. Now I'm adding a third stack to see what it has to say. So far I like it.

Another project I started to work out was with the ubiquitous flat stones that come in all sizes. I've done a couple of versions of this, but I seem to be getting better at it. It is currently much larger than the photograph shows. The photos show it on its side. I can't seem to get it to rotate.

So there is still plenty to do. Plenty to learn. Plenty to see. I look forward to the fall when the beach becomes a bit more deserted and work can go on without beiing damaged unless it is the hand of weather.

Four Miracles

2008-09-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

After years of working down on the beach and walking at Presque Isle I've become familiar with these places in the same manner that one is familiar with a wife or a significant other or a favorite sweat shirt. The smells, the sounds, an awareness of seasonal and daily cycles, the affects of time in the long and short term. One can often predict what will happen next based on the signs, like body language these spaces are always communicating something. If you listen and watch you can begin to see the system at work, but no matter how familiar it all becomes there are always wonderful surprises. A week doesn't pass that the lake doesn't produce a curiousity of some sort. Its one of the reasons I keep going back. I want to see the surprise ending. From ice dunes to Turneresque sunsets...there is never a dull moment. Plenty of peaceful moments, but never a dull one.

100 Views

2008-08-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

The Stonewave has been dismantled for a while and some new sculptures are in the works, but I am going to sidetrack to another project that I am working on. While spending so much time down at the beach working with the stone I became much more aware of the cycles of weather and the changing landscape of the beach and all kinds of little natural events that I was able to witness just because I was present. These experiences moved me to record some of them in small scale watercolors. As long as I have known of Japanese blockprints I have been blown away by them and great works like the 100 Famous Views of Edo served as a kind of challenge. Could I do 100 images of the beach? So stealing what was necessary from Hiroshige and Hokusai and others I began to think in terms of 100 Views of the Lake. This inspiration from the blockprint artists was combined with the Thoreau-esque idea of traveling "a good deal in Concord", except in this case, its traveling extensively on my beach or at the peninsula. So here are a few examples of the 100 Views...

This is one of my favorite winter views. The ice dunes were spectacular that winter and in the light of that particular day, the water had a beautiful green cast to it.

One of the first Fall ones I did was this one of some brilliant Staghorn Sumac leaves lying on the beach on top of a sheet of Zebra Mussel shells that lined the beach.

This is one of most recent paintings. The lily ponds that are all over the peninsula have a wealth of interesting plant species and its easy to understand Monet's fascination with lilies.

Spring on the beach may be the most challenging as weather is haphazard and the light can never be counted on for long, but one morning there were some great blues as the sun rose.

So here are four of the 52 that I have completed so far. They are slated to be exhibited in Wilmington, Delaware in October and here in Erie in the Spring. 48 to go. It has been interesting so far.

Going...Going....Gone

2008-08-20T10:55:00.001-07:00

Well, if you haven't been down to the beach in a while, the Stonewave has gone the way of all waves. It took a bit of effort, but it has disappeared. Many thanks to all of the people who helped by heaving, hauling or kind words scrawled on stone or made in passing. Special thanks for the ostentatious offering (MM and BC). It made me laugh out loud and I ate the pears on the spot. Sorry I didn't get back to you Charles, but thanks for the comments. It was a nice project while it lasted and I hope you come back...strange things wash up on that stretch of beach all of the time.

Some Early Beach Sculptures Wiped out by Storms

2008-07-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

This week has brought some bad news for the Stonewave. The owner of the property has finally made an appearance...metaphorically, (it was actually a phone call). I had hoped that no such creature existed, be he has demanded the destruction of the Wave. I'll deal with that bad news in a later post. I do want to thank all of the people who have stopped by and lent their support, not just this week, but all along. It has been a great help in dealing with the disappointment that the project will remain unfinished. But as I said, I'll deal with all of this in a later post. For now I want to share some pictures courtesy of the Rossetti's. My records of earlier attempts are not available for posting at this time, but he made me a disc with some of his pics that turned out pretty well and so thanks and with no further ado....

The first pic is of one of the first attempts...short-lived, humble, but it gave birth to more ambitious plans.

The second is a shot of the first really big piece. This one actually made it through the winter before falling in a spring storm.

This one is the third of the tower structures and by far the biggest. I had to make a staircase in order to work on the upper portions. The next photo shows things a little further along just before it got wiped out. I kind of liked this one.

The last picture is the Stonewave from last Fall...a nice touch of color in the foreground courtesy of some sumacs. Bravo nature!

The demolition of the Stonewave has begun and I'll try to post it sometime soon.

The First Big Stone Harvest

2008-07-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

Fourth of July weekend brought about the first good days for stone harvesting. Each day during the four day weekend the lake grew clearer and more calm. I could see the bottom even in chest deep water. Occasionally there are even clearer days, but this was the first in a long time so I spent a lot of time hauling rocks. The bottom pictures show the Wave with the season's first crop lying about. This was the beginning of the first real progress made on the project this summer. The next three pictures show the July 4 harvest. A lot of big stones and a lot of good stones, so much progress was made. There were also a lot of visitors who stopped by to chat which is always interesting.

I have been working on the second wave...the rear portion of the sculpture. It is now about as tall as the front wave. Since the July 4 weekend I've been able to get in here and there, so the stone supply is still sufficient. Things continue to take shape but my hands are getting beaten up pretty good, so a day or two off won't hurt things.

The Stone Flower from a couple of posts back has survived now for about a month. I add to it occasionally and I think some other people do as well.

I bought a new digital camera and shot the first pictures of the Stonewave with it today, so from this point on the pictures should be a little better than the pictures from the point and shoot camera that I had been using since my 35 mm was stolen. I just need to figure out how to download them...

Three Stone Circles Sketches

2008-07-04T15:29:00.000-07:00

Waiting impatiently for the water to clear, the rain to stop, the lake to calm down and the temps to get warmer...or any combination of these factors to occur in order to get into the lake and find some stone. Good days have been few and far between, but this weekend I did manage to get some work done on the Stonewave. I'll shoot some photos tonight of the progress. In the mean time I have been playing around with circles.

The bottom circle was the first from a couple of weeks ago, but it didn't last long as somebody took the sticks and burned them. Must have produced quite the conflagration as the sticks were about 8 inches long and there were about forty of them. But if it kept those poor idiots warm for 2.3 seconds on that blustery 70 degree night then I am thankful that my little sculpture could be of service. The middle image was the next phase. I used the colored stones from the previous piece and added some to make the ring bigger, went out and found some new sticks and tried again. This one lasted about a day before the sticks were burned again. This time in situ! To add insult to injury two hand rails were pried off of the staircase to the beach and burned along with my little wheel of sticks and a liquor bottle was broken in the fire as well...glass bottles apparantly were a last resort for these poor unfortunates as they braved the elements.

The sculpture in the top image has lasted about 10 days so far without major harm from nature or human interference and I've added a stone "flower" this week...the surf has been kind. I have a few more circle ideas still rattling around in my head so you'll just have to be patient. Much painting is being done as well on the 100Views project so I'm enjoying my momentum.

Just finished Picasso's biography (vol. 3). If nothing else, it makes me want to work harder. I found a number of his beach images to be not so interesting and the sculptures from this period in his life don't do much for me, but you have to be impressed by the facility with which he draws from the ideas of others and takes off. By the way the biography is about as in depth as you could want one to be, perhaps too much so, going into such detail as to where he got his socks laundered on July 5th.