Year to year

It's been haht. Too hot, of late, and this heat has driven my mind back to a year ago, when at this moment then, I was in the middle of a short residency in the middle of a small island in Maine.

Relief.

Relief from external matters and from seasonal climatic ones too.   Warm but dry by day and refreshingly crisp, if not chilly by night.  The ideal settings for Summer.

Here I'm looking back to that moment and the time spent with new found friends with a few images of that setting on Norton Island.

At top is an image of a painted papier mache "buoy" that I'm expected to have cast in iron during a public iron pour & party happening in Beacon, NY on July 20. 

rock and foam

Swimming with the fishes

The clear, warm, dry days that typified our stay on Norton Island, as it turns out, are not typical of this slice of Steven King's heaven.  The heavy mist rolled in and out all day Sunday, - our last full day, and it hung on as we departed the following morning.

Seven souls with all their baggage and a week of shared existence crossed over the foggy nothingness of the reach on a flat bottomed skiff as if crossing bouy festooned Styx with Charon (Rob) at the helm and a single headed Cereberus (Daisy) on board pointing the way pointing the way forward. 

Without the outboard running, the scene could have appeared as if ripped out of Hitchcock's Lifeboat.

I ventured out one last time to do a little more tinkering on the beaches on the second to last day.  As I was hammering lengths of driftwood against an edge of rock in order to cut the pieces to desired length, I felt as if I was cast in a Bear Grylls-like survival show, dropped on an island with limited tools - with not survival as the objective, but to litter the shore with bits of crafty flourish.

Exploded Stone

 By chance, some of the material I took with me to the island was some amount of my own beard and hair cuttings...disturbing as it is even to write it...let alone to look at it as a viewer with that knowledge, I'm sure.  But I'll own it.

.....It's all part of the island's DNA now.

 Another split rock, this one sits just outside the Art Barn.  It was improved upon by the other visual artist, Lilach Schrag with the addition of a rusty bolt, below.

Shell Game:  one of three placed around three different beaches.

The buoy tree arranged by my fellow residents.

Sampler

So how did I spend my time when not combing the beaches? Well it took sometime to unwind strands from the ropes that washed ashore. That was a tedious job that I got bored with quickly, so I only did enough to create the sampler above.  But I do dig the rich colors that were not initially apparent on the beach.  Additionally, I worked on some oil paintings that were part of the intentions I brought with me onto the island, and I made several small watercolors and drawings in response to the island environment, some of which can be seen in the studio shots posted previously, like the exploded buoy drawings (the more colorful geometric ones.)

A week, or ten days is just about enough time to acquaint oneself to the environment one is in.  The work I created while in the studio was small and largely observational, getting the lay of the land, as it were.  Much more observational - although certainly abstracted - but definitely of a representational, ilk .  Feeling out the place, taking it in, and responding in an immediate way.
It's fascinating to me to see the process by which a place moves from being foreign to known.  Within days, shortcuts between vital locations are identified and made habit, and in a process that is  undoubtedly repeated with each new group, place names are given to geographic features, as if for the first time.  Within a week's time we adapt and a sort of experiential propriety falls into place.
My time in the studio mimicked this process, and given another week, I can imagine the results would begin to turn more toward a more internalized digestion of the environment.
So I did several small drawings, a bunch of small oil paintings - the beginning of a project I had come prepared to work on, several things that made it into my sketchbook, and various other things, many of which can be seen in the studio photographs in earlier posts.  I also did some brushed ink drawings of fissures in the boulders along the shore - which amounted to not much, but good exercise.
I had intended to finish working on Friday and leave two days for relaxing and reading - and preparation for the "art show"/open studio scheduled for Sunday.  But I just wasn't done and I yet had ideas and material to process, so I kept working - though leisurely - through Sunday.  This last bit of effort rendered a batch of collages that combined some "orphaned" paper I brought from home and bark from a particular tree on the island.  Embarrassingly, I'm not sure what kind of tree it was....either I forgot or I never knew it's name.  These collages are all 9"x12", I believe.

Angelika brought this mouse/note pad back Germany for me.  It essentially translates to "Is it art, or can it go?"  Which greatly sums up the position of alert I'm constantly in.  On a ground level, it's the unspoken question always in the air as I'm moving through the studio (and when I'm attempting to clean the studio) and even through the streets.  A sort of hunting and pecking for significance.  Of course, by using the term art, I never seek to invoke the grand, Corinthian columned, carved in stone, notion of the monument of art.  It's a compromised place keeper of a word that stands in as representation of some thing that seems worthwhile and worth experiencing....but that's definitely not right either.   Still working on it.

Regardless, this German phrase,combined with Ray Bradbury's quote "By doing things, things get done." (which I believe I quoted here before) together can serve as a shorthand bible for my studio pursuit.

In the studio today

This is the last day on Norton Island and I'm wrapping up a few loose ends - and relaxing today.

In the studio today

 

Of birds and men

In my last post, I referenced Ana Mendieta in relation to the group of tiny 'land works" I did on one of the beaches yesterday.  Not quite an appropriate reference, but she immediately came to mind, particularly her figurative earthworks she made.  A much more accurate comparison to my activity of gathering and arranging would be that of the bower bird which was very much fore in my mind.  More fitting too since, I've brought David Rothenberg's Survival of the Beautiful as my reading material on this residency.  A perfect book for working in and reflecting on a setting as perfect as this.  

Last night, prior to dinner, a fellow resident reminded me of the most obvious human analogy to this activity is in the work of Andy Goldsworthy.  I was stunned that I simply hadn't even thought of him once during that morning's beach excursion (for I went out to tinker again yesterday morning) or during Monday's for that matter, which is really funny since those resulting actions are virtually a direct copping of his M.O. 

It's crazy to me that Goldsworthy was washed from my mind and an artist like Mendieta, whose work I might be able to respect, but don't have much time was the one whose work rooted itself in my brain. Goldsworthy's work, which I find entrancing, entertaining and inspiring is not loaded with angsty-feminist conceptual underpinnings which one would rightly assume would make it even more amenable to my own preferences - which it does.  That just doesn't explain why she, and not him, was in my head when I was essentially channeling him.   

It might be a sign of the influence my oft-environment has had in altering my thinking - namely the types of work and rhetoric I'm surrounded by while working at Bard's Curatorial Studies Program which is more concerned generally by Mendieta's flavor of gender identity politics and other such stuff from other such artists.  

Synchronously, David quotes Goldsworthy in Survival of the Beautiful:

I am not a bird and I do not mimic the things I see that birds and animals make.  However, there are parallels to be made.

The sculptures are a response to place, light, atmosphere, the daytime.  But it starts with the material.  That's the beginning and if there are a lot of branches that have curves in them, then that takes me in a certain direction.  It allows me to work with the material in particular ways that I cannot with a straight branch.  

That sums it up the motive/process nicely.  

I revisited one of the works made the day before to see that the tide placed a small rock in the center - improving the piece.

I went out again yesterday, early, and messed gently with the landscape on other shores of the island while also and for more trinkets to bring back to my own temporary bower.  It was a real man-bird hybrid of production.  I found myself compelled to touch and arrange these objects as I went along.  Whatever I couldn't/didn't want to carry along with my, but still intrigued me, I included in some little gesture.  They're not really compelling, but great fun to do, and I understand that upon discovering these little leavings on their own walks, some fellow residents created their intervention of their own...which I have yet to go search out.  

 I lassoed this great boulder and tied it down to a small tree found on the shore.  It felt too much like a clothesline to me, so when I passed it again on my way back to the studio, I altered it.  I removed the tree and anchored the boulder to a small rock I wedged into a fissure in the granite shore.  Though not adequately expressive, I liked the idea of the large, large stone being anchored by the small, small stone.

Gallery

The Watcher

I spied this great strong bit of geometry in the sides of a crushed plywood box.  A very modernist bit of flotsam.  I had to find an appropriate perch for it. So I tried various plinths and contexts to best suit it as either a hard edged framing device or reductive formalist sculpture:

In the end I returned it to the first pedestal I tried, and it worked well enough there.

Wind

I found this disposable cup in a crevice.  The hole appeared as a silhouette of  a flower.  It seemed beautiful (I brought it back to the studio.)

Short Pant and Shoe