Last Plunker Standing

Day 3 (6/22/11)

Last Plunker Standing

As the old saying goes, “A bad day…” is certainly true of the bike trail. We had planned on going out on the trail earlier in the morning but just as we were about to get the bikes out it started raining. We waited for the rain to stop then headed out. As you can imagine it was kind of wet for building but great for riding. Every trip down the trail is a new adventure. This time it came in the form of some Sand Hill Cranes. As we were riding along, a sedge of cranes started making a tumultuous uproar on the other side of the railroad tracks. When we first stopped two flew right over the top of us. One circle around and landed again. In an attempt to get a picture of them I decided to wade across the ditch which turned out to be almost knee deep. By the time I got across the water and up the tracks they had wondered off and I caught just a glimpse of the baby.

Cranes



Stormy



Another Rebuild

Keeping it Fresh

Day 2 (6/20/11)

New build

I went out early this morning. It was threatening rain so again I almost had the trail to myself. My big plan was to rebuild what I refer to as the “Totem build” but when I got there it was the one time that had a hiker (we will no longer refer to them as walkers since walker has become an obscenity in our vocabulary). When I first hit the trail I saw some material lying on the side of the trail so I took some time to make a small build. I haven’t had a lot of luck with builds that close to town surviving very long but I thought since it was small I would give it a try. I worked my way up the trail until I got to “K build”. It still had one tie standing so I took some time and reconstructed it. I also started working on “Giacometti build”. Finally on the way home I stopped and finished the “dangler”.

K Build

Giacometti Build

Dangler

On the Road Again

Day 1 (6/19/11)

I was Framed

I can’t believe it has been four years since I started being the scourge of the bike trail with my despicable building Aar Aar Aar. I also can’t believe that it is the middle of June and our first trip on the bike trail. Well, it’s been that kind of year. The trick this year is going to be keeping it fresh. The first year was easy, everything was new and the Christians were an endless source of writing material. The second year I concentrated more on the plants and animals. Year three was just lame and fortunately I was saved by our Baltic cruise. That probably explains why it is the middle of June and I am just getting started. It rained hard all morning so we weren’t sure if we would make it out or not. As it turned out we pretty much had the trail to ourselves. Most areas were still too wet to build but when we got to where the old tripod build stood I decided to go for it and rebuild it. Eileen documented the build from start to finish and took some really fun pictures of it. The only build that I saw that was still standing from last year was dangler but the dangler had fallen off. I will have to take a look at that when it dries out a little.

In the Beginning

Summer of 85 (Mill Dam)

I want to go back to the start of my directional spraying technique and take a look at some of the art that influenced the pieces I am doing today. I had taken a summer independent study watercolor class where I intended to do on location “plein air” paintings. Things started out well and every morning I would pack up my bicycle with my equipment and some snacks and set out to find something new to paint. After a couple weeks I happened across a set of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Concentrated Watercolors while perusing an art shop. I was totally taken with the intensity of the colors and started experimenting with them in my airbrush. I had used the airbrush in college but tired of the mixing and cleaning that went along with using the tube acrylics which were pretty much the only option in the early years. It didn’t take long after finding the concentrated colors before I was spending all my time with the experimenting with the medium. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that the watercolors weren’t lightfast. The good news is that I had only sold a few pieces and was able to warn the people who bought them to keep them out of the light. It was during this time that I started to notice the subtle effects that I could achieve by spraying the colors on from different directions. I experimented with different types of paper to try to bring out the color effects but could never get the kind of texture I needed to achieve it to its fullest. By then we had moved to Minnesota. Here I met an artist friend Chris Hindle who suggested my taking a papermaking class with Walter Nottingham at UW-River Falls but that’s another story.

Summer of 85 #1



Summer of 85 # 2



Untitled

Untitled #1

Untitled #2

More Leaves

9/14/06

As I warned in the beginning of this blog, order is not going to be a major priority and things might get a little random. In this segment for example we are going to go back to the fall of 2006. It was the weekend of September 13th and 14th. Cedar Grove had just been hit by a huge wind storm. The sound of chain saws cleaning up trees and branches could be heard everywhere. We hadn’t lost anything major in our yard but there was debris everywhere. I set out to make some paper to commemorate the event. Out of this endeavor several new techniques were born. As any artist knows, often you just go through the motions in hope that some happening or discovery will spark an idea. I had an instructor along the line who referred to them as happy accidents. This day brought a couple. It was the first time I pressed leaves into the surface of the paper to represent the leaves that were blown everywhere. I wanted to produce a paper piece that also illustrated the energy of the storm so I started whipping the wet paper with willow branches to give the surface a windblown effect. After working out some issues it became an effective way of texturing the surface and I have used it in other pieces since. After it was dry it still didn’t quite have the action I was looking for so I sprayed it with a special whirling technique, again developed for these two pieces. I then applied some molded leaves to the surface in a way to represent the blowing leaves. Until writing about my later leave pieces I had kind of forgotten about these and it was fun to revisit them.

9/13/06

Leaves

Autumn Leaves

This particular series is in part the result of a request by a gallery for smaller framed pieces. I purchased various sized shadow box frames and started to develop paper to fill them. It happened to be autumn when I started making the paper. Seasons have often been a source of inspiration in my work and I regularly make my paper according to the season at hand. It seems like an obvious extension of the passage of time element of my work to explore seasonal changes as well. Leaves, of one kind or another, have too been a major influence in much of my work. In early works I would often embed leaves to add texture to my paper. In my “Peace Paper” series I inserted olive branches to add texture and symbolism. Because I make all my paper outside it seems only natural to use what I have at hand in the paper. In these later pieces instead of imbedding the leaves I have pressed them into the surface and later removed them to leave an impression. Undulating colors was the driving force behind my work when I started painting these works. I was experimenting with getting some areas to recede while others advance. Although it is hard to see in the photographs, in the art itself, they really start to work.

Flowing Leaves

Leaves

Blowing Leaves

Falling Leaves

Early Undulations

Undulating Pangaea

Several years ago while doing a show at U.W. Sheboygan I was surprised to see an instructor with his students in the gallery looking at my work with 3D glasses on. He asked me if I had ever looked at my pieces through 3D glasses? When I told him I hadn’t he handed me the glasses to give it a try. It was like looking at the work for the first time. I had always been conscious of the interactions between the colors and in fact that was what had inspired the art in the first place. What I wasn’t prepared for was the depth which the glasses produced. In some cases the art appeared to be almost a foot thick. Since that day I have been striving, off and on, to get this effect without the glasses. It hasn’t been until the last year that I have really made some head way. These pieces where actually in that first show at Sheboygan. Two of them, Flutterbye and Undulations, I have since sold to The American Girl Doll Company. This group will always hold a special place in my heart because their purity and simple sophistication. I have since been able to achieve more depth in some of my pieces but I still enjoy the plethora of color when I look at these.

Flutterbye

Rainbow Moon

Residual Trapezoid

Undulations