The Great Thaw

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?

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

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

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

A Hard Snow's Gonna Fall...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sisyphus at Play

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

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.