Birefringence and NYC

Some words just jump off the page. I was reading along and "birefringence" leapt out and whacked me with the realization that a group of scientists are spending their careers studying something that I have been looking at for years as my personal cool optical phenomena awareness. Wood like tiger maple has "chatoyance" or the ability to change its luster depending on the angle of the viewer. I first noticed this playing with my corduroy pants in grade school. Light, then brush it the other way, dark. I could make stripes on my non stripey pants with careful brushing instead of listening to the teacher talk about the Civil War. Again. A guitar maker friend years ago explained how some woods will shift their highlights as the angle of the light changes.

And then I noticed the way the groundskeepers at Fenway can make stripes in the grass with careful mowing. There is a whole cadre of aestheticians riding around the ballparks and golf courses in the summer unleashing "birefringence" on the unknowing general public. Why is the grass two different colors when it's the same grass? Well obviously it's the propagation of light reflectance along multiple axes. Sweet. And this is exactly what I do for a living. I push light. Gently but with determination I make light do stuff. Ambient photons, light from ninety three million miles away, or waves from a halogen bulb on the ceiling are the pushees, the dancers, and the scratched facets in the stainless are the pushers. I'm just the coach.

With a little homework I discovered this fathomless field of non Newtonian materials, liquid crystals, polymorphism and the next level which is all about refraction and not reflection at all. We will discuss that later. Meanwhile, please come see what this humble choreographer is making the dancers do. "High stepping into town..." at The Affordable Art Fair in NYC next weekend.

HAVOC Gallery will be exhibiting the latest in my stainless light adventures alongside the smooth, wood lines of Joel Urruty's sculptures and Susan Madacsi's vibrant steel at The Affordable Art Fair, www.affordableartfair. com/newyork/, October 3-6, 2013.

See you in New York City.

Reflecting on not reflecting

Hi every last one of you,

Just returning to the studio after a fabulous two shows on the west coast. Seattle, as usual, kept a group of my new pieces and San Francisco pretty much took the rest. I returned home with one piece and commissions to keep me more than busy. Merci, gracias, and thank you.

Attached to this missive are images of brand spanky new wood sculptures, pieces that reflect years' of my focus on wood as a visual medium. Almost antithetical to the intangibility of my light sculpture work, these pieces are a fixation of the organic time inherent in the grain of wood. Wood grain is time manifest. Air, sun, water and years and years grew these Douglas firs which were then milled by the Rasco Wood Products Company of Clarks Grove, Minnesota (says so in stenciled faded black lettering) into laminated curved beams which have been holding up a barn in Vermont for ninety years or so. I dismantled said barn seventeen years ago.

These sculpture are generated by slicing the beams on the three different axes, X, Y, and Z and then reassembling. They are all the same material: pink in one, blackened by leaching iron nails in another, rock solid here, decaying and faded grey there, raggedy and fuzzy from time relentless...

They are not stained, by me anyway. One has a little oil rubbed in. One, a bit of wax. They are rugged chronicles and they are smooth in places; they are rhythmic and history fixed. They feel old and grown and a little bit fresh and unpeeled. Trees have souls. There. I said it.

So, thanks for looking. It's nice for me to stretch and share.

Hope August has been full of sun and vegetables, hammocks and beaches, cool drinks and many hugs.

New words for the old friends

I like numbers. They exist in a place in our brains that is completely different than words. But for me it's the big ones that really dance. Knowing that your brain is three pounds of tangly mush says a bit, but knowing that in the mush are 100 billion neurons that make 100 trillion connections is the real magic. That is more intersections than there are stars in the galaxy, IN OUR HEADS. And these connections are constantly updating, reforming, refilling. Just the notion that you read this information has changed your head forever as well as the actual imprinting in your mush of the numbers themselves. Some of us will remember the numbers. Some of you will remember the idea.

And then throw in the poetic that for a moment here we are like chess pieces suddenly aware of ourselves, our choices and a game going on. AND to continue the metaphor, in a game of chess, in a little over forty moves there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. Kind of makes one want to sit down. Maybe sip some tea. I guess I like numbers and brains. But mostly awareness. Thanks and enjoy your tea.

But wait, there's more. The Annual Art Hop is upon us which is even better than tea. Stop by on Friday, September 6th from 5 until 9 or Saturday the 7th from 10 until 4. Leave your email on an official scrap of paper and we will randomly select one out of the official hat to receive the panel 'Arc Light' free. No charge, just happiness.

Not just passing through

Neutrinos (meaning "small neutral ones" in Italian) are sub atomic particles so small that their mass has never been accurately measured. 65 billion are passing through every square centimeter of your body and then continuing on through the Earth and away. Yep. Now. And now. Now.

How does this have anything to do with Art? Glad you asked. Turns out they have "flavors."

Yep. So even this infinitesimal bit of the universe has style, a manifestation of difference. You should too. And maybe not so subtle. Carry on.

Illuminate the mindful details in stainless

One of my school buddies back in the nineteenth century said,

"Le bon Dieu est dans le detail."

As life and work have spooled out since then, I have come to recognize the applicability of this maxim to my apprehension of the universe. Tiny bits so often overlooked harbor the divine. Attached are just two details from larger panels that illuminate this wisdom. The macro view is great but the sublime lurks in the minuscule.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe echoed this in the twentieth century and I think it's worth repeating: "God is in the details."

Carry On.

In Visibility

Brushed metal creates a unique pathway for ideas to travel from artist to object to viewer. The work is in its essence a creation of space where there is no space – a purity and power unique to this medium.

Etched stainless steel in particular creates dimensionality.   A painting or a photograph can be the same no matter where one stands in relation to it. At close range one may see brushstrokes, or pixels or screen-print dots but the image hanging on the wall is the same image wherever one stands. My work creates objects in space.  Consistent relationships exist in the defined space of the panel.  True parallax holds within the image so that things in front of other things maintain their spatial dynamic as a viewer walks around the room.  When one first sees the panel there is an immediate sense of depth. With patient viewing and movement comes the realization that one is looking into the panel.  Eyes are now focused on objects behind the surface plane.  One’s eyes can even find brushwork or elements which project off the surface plane, objects which our fingers confirm do not in fact exist in the room or in the air in front of the panel.  By manipulating specific tools and juxtaposing these projecting and receding elements, space is created. 

 As one moves about the room elements will come into view and disappear. Other elements will shift from black to bright white and black again. From every vantage a different image appears, and no two people standing in the room are ever seeing the exact same piece. From a distance the piece can completely dematerialize as an object and exist only as field of light as though there were a hole in the wall into a humming, shifting portal of energy. Up close one can look behind objects and study the background drifting away. Closer still and the scratch lines refract light into spectral colors. The surface can be hard, tangible, "right there,” or facetted, glinting with no sense of place.

Once the viewer is engaged and looking into the space a dialogue has begun.  As an example, I can make a panel, which depicts water, the shore with pine trees and mountains in the background and clouds drifting by….  But this is a closed experience. There it is, trees and water. Good art has the power to engage the viewer, to demand inquiry and reward with new information. These panels fulfill that role but also are about the process itself. Inspection reveals elements—big strokes, minute features. Further inspection reveals relationships between elements. Still further reveals the pursuit in the viewer of the intentions of the artist and now the loop is complete. What am I trying to do? What are we looking at anyway? Are these birds or nebulae? Are these waves or bamboo?

Duchamp remarked that good art is a dialogue between the artist and viewer. Paul Klee once said, "Art renders visible.”  What the viewer sees is the dialogue between us. He sees the workings of my mind and hands and tools to engage the perception of the person in the gallery.  He finds radiance and confusion and . . . moss, perhaps.  He finds distance and scale and harmony. He finds chaos and flowers and radiation, moonlight, dark matter, and conflict.  He has peered into the hours of creation and he finds himself wondering what is random and what is intentional and if the randomness might be intentional.  Welcome.

January 2010

What's the point? The crux of this is dialogue. You look and see "things" and wonder what the intention might have been. Or, "Did he mean to put that scratchy thing right there?" And why? As soon as this occurs the dialogue with me has started. I'm not even in the room and you are questioning what I was trying to do with that tool which made that mark. "My mind and your mind, and you and you and you...," to quote one of my favorite Adrian Belew songs. It's all about control. I want you to be engaged enough to squint, to wander back and forth, to see the jet black in a white field... If you think Louise Nevelson, then I have you. Or Pollock with the motion frozen. Or Rothko with the hovering field of energy... Google Hubble images or the Large Hadron Collider and you will start to feel the tone of this dialogue. Last Saturday I snowshoed up Cascade Mountain in the Adirondacks on a mint, blue sky day and descended in waist high fluff. Can you find that in "Jaco and the Twink?" There are snow crystals, diamonds in the sun, sparkling dust filtering down. There is the rush of gravity, inexorably pulling me to the ground. But I'm flying for just this moment.