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.

1/11/11 and Other Cryptic Messages

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

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

This weekend I went down to the beach for a couple of hours. The mid-week storm promised some impressive results in the ice-dune crop for this year and I was not disappointed. There is a lofty and varied rampart of ice running down the beach and just at the base of the path down the bluff, is perhaps the most interesting dune. It is actually an ice arch that spans about twenty feet and is at least four feet above the waterline. The roof of the arch is lined with little icicle teeth. I'm curious to see how this formation will change as the winter progresses as the lake is still at least a couple of freezing weeks away from total lock-down. While down there, the conditions were good enough to do some work, so I did a little sketch. It was a spontaneous response to the material limitations of a snow covered beach. With the ice dunes up, all of the sculptures on the beach are safe for the duration of the winter, but if we don't get any additional snow between now and the weekend, I'd like to expand this work a bit.

Thanks for stopping by Josh (unfortunately time constraints kept me from playing with ice this time), Anonymous and Janice K. (a while back). Happy solstice and now the days get longer, so enjoy.

Dinner for Dante

It happens on rare occasions, at that liminal moment when the lake or the bay transitions from liquid to solid, as the bay did this weekend, while the wind gods are breathless and the water's surface becomes a mirror. Before it has a chance to become a permanent fixture, the wind comes up and the water tries to regain the upper hand and the surface shatters into a thousand, thousand dinner plates of ice. And as if to push the evidence out of sight, the wind plows the dishes into each other up against the nearest shore. They fold and slide and stack up with each wave, accompanied by this magical sound of chimes rubbed with velvet.

You can't help but marvel at the confluence of conditions necessary to pull this magic off.

November Paintings

In November I was working on a couple of pieces from the Pattern Recognition Project. Some earlier works appear a few posts back. These pieces are based on images from the beach. Sticks, stones, water and now fish parts. This piece looks much better in real life from a color standpoint. I am fascinated by the forms that these fish-things take. The dried out carcasses with their angular surfaces and sharp edges countered by the soft aerodynamic forms of the recently dead, the bones and bony forms and the organic amorphousness of flesh. Fish are to me what bones were to Georgia O'Keeffe I think. I never get tired of painting them. While trying to finish the painting, I was at a bit of a loss as to how to pull it together, when for some reason I got Marc Chagall's I and the Village in my head. In particular the circular shape by the goat's head and the green man and it seemed to be right. The bottom piece I was playing again with water surfaces on a smaller scale, but from a closer point of view.

Sketches in the Wind

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.