Everything Takes Longer in this Heat and a Message for the Senator

I have not been on since June, so here is the sum of my July efforts. I have been working, but numerous algae slicks have kept the beach unswimmable most of July. Finally, this week I was able to access some of my washed out raw materials and retrieve them for this year's model...so without further ado...

Picture number one shows one of the victims of the algae slicks. As it wasn't one of the fifty dead catfish, I chose him as the representative, as he was slightly more photogenic. Notice the watch above him. It does not belong to him. He may have had a watch, I don't know. It's not likely, but that particular watch is mine and is two inches across, giving you an idea of the size of this fellow. If I said he was two feet long, it might not be believed, perhaps taken as a fish story. So I leave a picture instead, in lieu of the thousand words.

Because I couldn't get into the water, I did quite a bit of work on smaller projects. I have two examples here. One is a "flower" about five feet across, or thirty watches, or two and a half fish, depending on the units of measure.

Here is a spiral of colored stones that I have been adding to every time I go down. It is currently a bit larger, although it has been "vandalized" twice in the last ten days by iconoclasts, it has a little more room to grow.

Here is the central portion of a 48"x48" painting in triptych format. It will be exhibited in the faculty show at Mercyhurst U. in August and September along with a small beach sculpture of white and black stones configured like the painting but with the colors reversed.

Here is what the sculpture currently looks like. It is not as impressive as past ones, as height is being sacrificed for length. It is well over 60 feet in length and protects quite a bit of the ledge. The left section has a small bench and a curved wall around the exposed trunk of the willow tree. The right side connects to the check dam wall and then extends another thirty feet into a bench that I will hopefully be able to grow as I get more stone. You have to imagine these next two pictures attached...and as for you Senator Fitzgerald, the info you seek is jborowicz@mpslakers.com. Even if it is too late for a meeting, drop me a line if you get a chance.

A Brief Trip Off-Planet

Had the opportunity the other day to meet up with some former acquaintances from out of our space-time continuum. Went for a beer at a lovely little place overlooking this scenic landscape in the eastern hemisphere of the planet Qelnm. Happy to report that although things on our planet are currently looking a bit grim, galactically speaking things are pretty good. The other explanation for this rather odd image is that a giant raft of algae washed up on our beach and with several windless days keeping it from breaking up it just continued to pile up deeper and deeper and go through every lovely stage of decay algae likes to go through, until our beach looked and smelled like something left over from the Valdez.

Finished a piece for a small exhibition, so other than off-planet excursions and time at the beach, I have been making some art.

I have been making some slow progress on the beachwork, but the algae kept me out of the water all week so this is where we stand currently.

More Humble Beginnings

I just want to say that all these new "improvements" to this blog are annoying as shit. If an improvement is supposed to make the process more unwieldy, illogical and cumbersome then I suppose they've nailed it, but otherwise, I wish they would stop "improving" things. Its like the guys who "improved" this site used to work for the government or something.

With that said, I'm going to try and access my site and get it to work after several aborted attempts. Below is a painting that I finished in February. It is 48 x 96 and formatted like a triptych altarpiece. I finally was able to photograph it, so here is its maiden voyage in the public realm, as it failed to get into the Spring Show at the Erie Art Museum. Its a rather large and heavy piece, so it is a bit of an operation to move it. Nonetheless, I like the piece and I hope at some point to get it out to be seen.

In unrelated business, here is a turtle that I came across while walking out at the peninsula. I flipped him over to take this picture, righted him and set him on his way. Such beautiful creatures. It's getting close to snapper mating season where you regularly see those armored behemoths cruising the Sand-ridge Trail to make their nests and drop their ping-pong offspring. It's quite a sight to see.

In more unrelated business...I've begun the actual building process for this summer's project on the beach. The photos below show the laying of the foundation. Where it goes from here, I can't say for sure. it will be dependent on a lot of variables, most importantly, the amount of stone I can retrieve from the lake after this winter's storms confiscated it.

In Denial

I'm going to make this brief. I have been trying to access my blog, but have not been able to for over a week because of some changes made in the system that my home computer doesn't agree with. I think it has been fixed but I don't want to write some epic, earth-shattering blog revealing the meaning of life, or the exact location of Atlantis, or the last number in Pi if you work it out to the space just short of infinity and then have all of it go for naught when it fails to post. So instead I'm just going to post the finished version of this month's painting including the outer wing panels. The center panel was on the last post. So, here it goes...

The Gathering

So, normally over Easter I make a little pilgrimmage out west to do a little hiking and communing with the nature gods, but this year a variety of factors kept that from happening so instead I spent an inordinate amount of time on the beach communing with the aforesaid gods and quite a bit of time in the studio painting. The end result of all of the painting time is below, the central panel for a little polyptich that I hope to have done by the end of the month. It is the third piece in a series of paintings that are influenced by the actual beach sculptures. I'm OK with the way that it turned out. Now as far as the beach time went, most of it was spent gathering the scattered stone from the destruction of last years sculptures and wall. Much of the stone is just gone...buried beneath the current level of beach sand or washed back out into the lake, but I pretty much got all of the really good stone that remained on the beach and put it back into a storage wall for the time being. This took a crap-load of time and quite a few miles of walking back and forth loaded with stone. The end result is this is what I have stacked up for future use when the building season starts in a couple of weeks. Its probably about 4 feet high and 35 feet long and about 4 feet thick. The sculpture in front has lasted about a month without any serious damage from weather or barbarian hordes.

On Saturday last, conditions were such that I actually went into the water to pull out some of the stones that were lying knee deep or less. Altogether I pulled out 60 good stones which are lying in this little serpentine wall temporarily. The water is still cold enough that the ducks are wearing sweaters. I suffered through it though, for the sake of art. It was very purifying.

With this clarified soul, I did a few small sculptures in the stone of the day. One square gave birth to a second square and just like that the sun set and that was that.

In Like a Lamb-Out Like a Lamb

The end of March was a scramble to get a second painting ready for the Spring Show and this is what I ended up with. I've spent some time recently interpreting beach sculpture-related imagery into paintings. The end result I'm not entirely sure of at this point. The piece I submitted to Harrisburg was significantly more interesting, but this has a few things going for it. I like the colors and repetitive circle motif, but what I'm not sold on is the irregular stones on the right side of the painting. I'll have to give it some time to work itself out. What I like about the feel of these last two paintings is that they have a kind of Japanese garden-zen-wabi sabi-Lake Erie feel that can be somewhat meditative for me, in the same way that looking at Jackson Pollock's or Mark Rothko's can be. Or for that matter doing the beachworks. This is the effect that I wanted to get and at least in some ways it works for me. I've been painting the frames gold on black and the gold band around the frame does not connect, but is rather open at the corners. This is to lend an air that the painting is not entirely contained by the frame, but rather extends beyone the defined space, escapes as it were. Just some thoughts... A couple of sketches on the beach that I altered after drunken revelers damaged the original version by setting a fire on it. It is that time of the year when pyromanic, beer-swilling, littering morons migrate to the neighborhood beach. Storms keep washing away the wrong things.

Pre-Equinoctial Good Fortune

On the verge of Spring, but is it really Spring if Winter wasn't really Winter? Last week it was in the 60's every day and this week it is supposed to be even warmer. Trees are already budding and I can say I do not recall such an early and warm Spring in all of the years I've been on this planet. This begs the question of how we are going to pay for this...or perhaps we already have.

Today on the morning news I listened to Rick Santorum claim that one of the things that seperated him from the other buffoons running for the Republican nod was that he didn't believe in the Global Climate Change myth. He may have a hard time convincing his opponents that the whole thing is a science conspiracy, like evolution, gravity and other far-fetched schemes. Does a day go by when a big piece of idiocy doesn't drop out of that guy's mouth? Anyways, its been a nice start to Spring.

Did a lot of work collecting stone down on the beach this weekend and while at it, I did a little piece just to get a break from lugging 30 pound stones down the beach. No storms in the last two weeks have kept my current stone pile safe. By the mid April I may be able to start planning the next big work. This first piece looks better horizontally, but for some reason the blog-picture device keeps turning it on its side. I'm sure there is a way to correct that, but it is beyond my understanding at this point.