Inventoried Range of Light, Explorations on The John Muir Trail. artSite @ Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek.

Today was the day to meet up with Erik at the Bedford gallery and start installing my modest installation display of specimens , journals and a out of the comfort zone, iMove in the artSite space today.
We, being Mary and I spent last night working blindly on a "iMovie" for the video monitor thats in the space. trying to create an iMovie when your under the gun and the night before you're installing the piece is tempting the Gods, however somehow we worked through the learning curve, throwing out only 5 DVD's, and came up with something that actually worked and looks really great in the space. Its basically a dissolve of photographs that I had taken over the past three years of trips on the John Muir Trail. mMany with Mary over the 200+ miles together.
The other element in the space is a display of specimens taken while on the trail in the wilderness regions that the JMT traverses through. This means while I was in the National parks I only took photo's not specimens. Along with the specimens is an accordion Journal made while on the trips that have photos and watercolor paintings of places along the way as well as write'n entries about our trek from day to day, and two manipulated photographs in the Lyle Canyon section of the JMT. When collecting the specimens together for the piece I had not really thought of ever showing them before so aligning them in order of collection and place was more tedious than I first thought it would be. Once I set up a system, however the chore became more bearable than it first seemed.

Accordion landscape books

After the Unbound book show at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, I wanted to get my good pal Eduardo to work his magic taking some nice photographs of them.
He's really a natural at making things really look beautiful.
Being that the books when unfolded are about 60 inches long the task of lighting as well as having enough space to lay them out for a picture was an overwhelming task to take on. The image of Evolution a book that comprises images and objects embedded to the surface, represents a section of the John Muir Trail that Mary and I passed through two years ago on our JMT trek.


The other book is about the same length and has imagery of the sky during the day on one side then the opposite side has the night sky. Layer'd on top are topographic renderings of the Waterscape and Florascape delineations in terms of who they are distinguished on the USGS maps.

White-out project.

Organs of a body.
Snow fields existed.
Feeders of a landscape.

Rich bio mass, cascading.
An eco system chain linked.
Dependent on a source.

Dihydrogen monoxide,
Frozen at elevation.
Fluid flowing below.

Solid white opaque.
Fluid clear copious.
Shapes like organs, feed the landscape.
















"white-out" correction fluid on maps and photographs.

Shift in thought...

Things were just going stale.
fur rubbed the wrong way?
i need a clincher.

Too easy.
Conceptually it worked, but in visual form... Bla!
So what, Who cares!

OK you hiked the JMT and your making art about it.
It was only a couple hundred miles in a few weeks.
Big deal...

Something risky was needed.
Like parking a 63 vette
in a bus zone risky.

Then,
like the take of a Yuba rainbow,
Bang! Bing! Zoom!

Focased

the past few months have been very busy with another column box like the Polyhedron piece from last month. The redwood Burl veneer'd onto the column came out great and the doors are hinged into place. After 4 coats of semi-gloss urethane i can now start working with the kinetic polyhedrons Ii want to instal inside. many are made already i just needed to veneer the outside of the box. During the time spent waiting for the finish on the redwood burl to dry in this rainy weather I finished printing a photographic piece that is like an inventory of field research trips to the rivers I hike and fish at no and then. The photos are of trout, trout and intimate close ups of experience in the landscapes. Often during these field trips I find the aquatic insects the rivers entomology of quite an interest. Screening the water as it rushes by and examining the insects in there different stages add to my inventories and understanding of the place.

I found a great source for some of the small scale objects that i've been using as elements for the sculptures in the box's. When I was visiting with my father we drove to a model shop that specialized in scale trains. While lurking around looking at all of the train models I noticed a few model building that you can make. Immediately I had a few ideas for them and bought them. They seemed somewhat expenceive at the time, then later when I realized that I might need a few more, i began to cruz the internet and found a few sources a bit cheaper than the train store I found the first ones at.

Many polyhedrons in my mind.

This past summer was filled with much research for work in progress and future things to come. Some minor break-throughs at the moment. Some finally led to major changes in translating emotions in the mind and objects i see. Two sculptures that I was fabricating early in the year became somewhat stalled by roadblocks planned last year with no procedure to jump start them other than stay the course. Summer came and zoom, i'm in the mountains playing out the process and searching for the zone that has no name. Lots of experiments with desperate elements to finally a spark of something. A slight mundane image, an another everyday shape, tweak, collage and my mind is making sense of it all, like a kit-bashed element of a De Chirico painting, inner-laid in a "Florentine cabinet of curiosity". Somehow it feels right, the emotion of how it fits. The photos transform into textures. Subtle reverse spatial dimensions.

Journal Drawings

I’ve been slowly trying to catch up on combining my journal entries from the trail and the sketch/drawings together. Often it’s hard to keep up with drawing images from the treks, and transferring the daily notes each day. I’m still pretty back logged. Today I have been working on a grouping that was from a section of the John Muir Trail in Yosemite National Park. Last year Mary and I spent a few days drawing and exploring this area below Mt. Lyell the highest peak in Yosemite. My journal that I carry, I laminate photos from the spots, I take a quick sketch on paper, and make notes of the days trek. Then by transcribing from these pages they become a combined vignette of what I saw and did during the day.

“ As we left Marie Lakes in Ansel Adams Wilderness the sun rose quickly. We got an early start to climb over Donahue Pass at 12,000 feet, and into Yosemite. Because being above timberline affords no relief from the sun, early starts are best. Only a small remnate of the once large snowfield now remains below the summit of Mt. Lyell the highest peak in Yosemite at 13114 feet. Entering Yosemite on the JMT, we get our first glimpse of Lyell Canyon from 2000 feet above. Its distinctive U-shaped valley carved by receding glaciers from the Pleistocene era some 17,000 years ago.”

Using a fine lead drawing pencil and a Generals charcoal white pencil on a medium Canson paper is my favorite choice. I like the way that the while pencil highlights the snowfields and bright granite of the landscape and the darker lead pencil shades into shadow leaving the paper as a mid-tone ground.