The Deconstruction

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

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

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

Beware the Ice of March

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

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

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

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.