The Force Now - Chicago

May the force be with you. This has always felt like the blessing most empowering to give. THE force. Not just any old force but THE force, the one that matters, that really works. As usual I think scientifically, first. Gravity is a good one. In even an everyday star like our sun gravity is so strong it takes a hundred thousand years for heat and light to escape and warm my face on my last bike ride. That's a nice feeling from a four hundred quintillion megawatt power source ninety-three million miles away. Yep. Force.

Some scientists in Europe are building an electromagnet as part of a project to solve the energy challenge that will likely end our world as we know it within a hundred years. Their design can generate inside a building the repulsion force equivalent to twice what the rockets lifting the space shuttle generate. And then there is the Strong Force which takes over from that repelling force once positively charged protons are brought close enough together. This is the force that binds atomic nulei. Squeeze two protons tight enough, so they are 0.000000000000001 meters close together and the Strong Force takes over uniting them. The Strong Force is about a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism.

Mostly I just like the name - the Strong Force. Can you feel it?! Well. Actually. No. Not so much. The strongest force I feel everyday is love. I love my kids. I love my brothers. My family is everything. Everybody knows that this is the real Force. Holidays are coming where we visibly and invisibly join hands to celebrate our religions and the solstice, but mostly there is an extra couple of logs on the fire of compassion and togetherness. Be warmer this season my friends than ever before. Take extra time to squeeze those hands tightly. The real strong force is love and may it be with you. For real.

Oh, and by the way. I'm bringing artwork to the midwest. I got a little distracted there. Again. Pismo Gallery from Colorado will exhibit the newest and latest stainless steel light sculptures, inspired by forces, at The SOFA Art & Design Chicago Art Fair, Festival Hall, Navy Pier, Chicago, November 7-9, 2014. www.sofaexpo.com

The human race is the size of a sugar cube

Anyone reading much of anything these days saw the news recently that the human body strolling about being you is 90% other microorganisms. Yep, apparently only 10% of your body is composed of cells that contain your individual DNA. The rest is all bacteria, viruses, molds, flora and fauna that populate the planet You. Do you feel special?

Next, consider that humans are about 60% water. Two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen, not exactly personal ingredients, compose most of what you are as an animal. In fact 99% of the human body by mass is just six Elements: Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium, Phosphorus. Of these six, four are the same as the most abundant Elements in the Universe overall. The exceptions being Helium and Neon which are too gaseous to hang around and be useful.

Ok, basic, right? We are space stuff. But even more humbling is that we are overwhelmingly space itself. If the nucleus of an atom were the size of a marble the first electron whirling around it would be a football field away. Atoms are 99.999999999999% empty space.

If we could remove the space and pack all the electrons, neutrons and protons the way you pack your carry-on bag, the entire human race would be the size of a sugar cube. Sweet!

So we are simple chemistry sets and mostly nothingness. Great. The Universe is 13.7 billion years old and I hope to live to be 80. I'm just a temporary fog of almost nothing, literally. So folks, get busy. Make the most of today. Whatever you do keep in mind that you are nothing but what you do. That's it. Do good stuff NOW.

'Till next time.

Thanks
Love you all.

The Elements, KABOOM!

Hope your holiday was a fabulous celebration.

Green is Barium, #56. Red is Strontium, #38 or Lithium, #3.

We had our annual fireworks at the camp where I grew up in the summers. On a warm July evening that was wonderfully dry for a change we laid on our backs on a ball field by the lake and watched the pyrotechnics blossom and bang. Thwunk…. up up up, up, and then, POW, cascading stars, fizzing streaks of brilliance burning into our eyes.

Silver is Titanium, #22. Blue is Copper, #29.

Shock waves of sound echoed off the ridge behind and rolled off toward the mountain. Thwunk… Thwunk...again and again while the kids jabbered and the adults oooohhed and ahhhhed on cue. Boom, KABOOM… showers of light, gargantuan flowers in the deep cobalt blue of twilight.

Orange is Calcium, #20. Yellow is Sodium, #11.

As I closed my eyes after the explosions I could still see the image in negative on the backs of my eyelids and I wondered what makes that flash flash purple. (A careful mix of Strontium and Copper I discovered later).

White is Magnesium, #12 or sometimes Aluminum, #13. Is that coincidence, those numbers, that light color? Magic or just chemistry or both…

The fireworks ended my week on the lake. Seemed fitting. It's a special place. My father's first summer there was 1936. Boys' camp. I have five brothers. On and on, my two sons are there...generations…As my brother Kevin and I drove away to bring me back to Burlington and to deliver him to the airport to return to California, we passed a familiar farmer's field in a little lowland depression by the road. I glanced and we came to a sudden stop, parked the car and got out in the blackness of a moonless summer night. The Summer Triangle and Milky Way shone above. In the field before us was a hatch of thousands upon thousands of lightning bugs madly twinkling in the featureless darkness. It was as though the brightest stars in the Milky Way had descended to sparkle one flash at a time across the backdrop of pure black nothingness. With complete arrhythmia, in absolute silence, the sparks of tiny bug butts transformed the emptiness of a peaceful Vermont night. I have witnessed very little as sublime and simple as our half hour in the darkness. A few cars passed and we screwed our eyes shut to preserve our night vision. The fireflies were having their moment and we were fortunate to be witness.

The next day I got to work to find an email from a friend which contained a composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini Probe showing auroras on Saturn. They are huge, bigger than the Earth and they last for days. Stiff solar winds were creating ion storms lighting up the poles on our big ringed neighbor.

Incandescence, bioluminescence, and massive auroras… It's all about light my friends. Whether it's oxygen being excited or luciferase (from the Latin, "Lucifer"-- bringer of light) or burning Barium, we are surrounded by photons. It's why I do what I do--pushing light. Cheers to a summer of light and luxury, lassitude on a reasonable scale and magic everyday. Life is a wonder.

Please visit the website, www.HAVOCgallery.com. The Elements project is in full swing. Who wants Strontium?

Who needs K?

Acuity

Let's assume that the earth is the size of a typical classroom globe. The moon which is about one quarter the size of the earth is how far away? What's your best guess? While you are thinking, consider in this little scale comparison that the ISS would be floating 3/8" off the surface of the globe. Ok. So, the moon would be about thirty feet away. You all got that one. Right? OK. Now how far would it be to Mars?

Researchers have been studying the way elephants communicate and have found that there is a special stance that these massive animals assume when they are listening. There are nerve endings sensitive enough in their front feet and trunk that they can hear sound waves passing through the ground up to twenty miles away and actually communicate over distances of around ten miles. When they "talk" subsonically through the ground they have muscles in their ears which can constrict to increase the sensitivity to vibrations through their bones. Their bodies can accurately triangulate location miles away. 

And then there are blue whales which are capable of communicating in good conditions over a thousand miles of ocean. "Hey guys, the krill over here is on special. Swing by." These guys don't need the internet. They are just paying very close attention to their own species in a completely organic way. Millennia of evolution has gifted creatures with unfathomable sensitivity. So what about us? Did we miss out on something? I can't hear through my feet. 

No. But I can and most of you can triangulate with our ears to within one degree of accuracy.  We can differentiate as many as ten million colors according to some scientists. While we focus on traveling to Mars and speeding up the next chip in the little screens in our pockets we lose track of our innate superpowers. My kids can ski though trees at frightening speed, their minds over clocking texture, gravity, twigs, stumps, drops, ice, their brother sailing out of nowhere and stealing their line… Go to Youtube and search up the Isle of Man TT and consider the computations those guys are making on the fly--country roads at 170 mph… We are gods of capability. 

So celebrate and scrutinize. Play that music and wiggle that body. Jump, swim, run, pedal, sing, paint, and fire every last nerve you possibly can before they fizzle. We are superheros. It's all a relative thing. And by the way, Mars is a mile away.

Truth is beauty is magic.......Palm Springs and Baltimore

Wow.  There is a lot going on. I was looking out the window from seven miles up and thinking how much the earth down there looks like one of my art pieces, except much flatter. And then how the most dominant feature is all these tracks left by one animal--us. Shouldn't there be buffaloes?

I read recently that the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone created all sorts of unexpected results like the resurgence of the songbird population. This led me to thinking of one of my favorite lines in all the movies is when the alien hands a monk a key and says, "Time matters not, only life." We are collectively pretty damn focused on time these days. Researchers have come up with circuit boards one atom thick of a form of tin and graphene that processes near instantaneously. Yay. But can whales hear each other? When was the last time you listened to Handel with a kid? Yoga or Facebook?

And so, how about a little less tempo and a little more listening to songbirds? I had a music prof back in school explain how art, music in particular, can suspend time. Please, take some, my friends, and consider the alien's advice. Slow down. Breathe and see the patterns we make. And consider the ones we make without intention.

I know this is a very crunchy missive, but then, I live in Vermont. Stop by and say hi in Palm Springs or Baltimore.

Ciao. And thanks for being an active agent. Next time we need to talk about glide ratio and Phi.
Happy stormy weather.

2014, Unlucky plus 1

Swagger. Say that a couple times. Swagger. Swagger. Or make it a verb. Swaggers. It is like sauntering but with confidence, swiveling the hips with intention, subtly or with gusto, swerving through space as we go to signal that we are happy to be here and doing what we are doing. It is so different from marching in every way. And really the opposite of plodding, though plodding is a great word to say. Swaggering I am thinking is also uniquely human. Things and critters don't do this. Check that; things made with swagger can.

And at the inception of a new calendar this concept comes to the fore in my mind as something to embrace. Let go of any derogatory connotations of the word and make this motion an outlook. Swagger not because you are superior to others but that you are superior, period, the pinnacle of evolution, the highest form of life on the planet, with an awareness of self and of place. Put some swagger in your day and let the neighbors know that you are here for a reason.

What does this have to do with art? Well, glad you asked. All art is swagger. Why is any image worth creating, recording or preserving? Because it has swagger. It is a thing in space with intention and a smidgen of pride. It is because it is believed, (by somebody, at least one person) to be worthy, expressive, uplifting. That trumpet solo, that cast aside of the bat as the ball sails over the fence in center, those tights, those boots, that hat, the new wheel set, this photo, that painting, even that guy tromping patterns in the snow in a storm somewhere up high is doing something with swagger.

Go this route my friends. Take on 2014 with style and confidence. Be inspired each day and express it will just a little swagger.

Come see my latest in stainless swaggering at Art Palm Beach, www.artpalmbeach.com, with the Maria Elena Gallery, January 23-27, Palm Beach County Convention Center, Florida. I will be there to discuss the imperative of the original and its impossibility. And why James Brown is best for tree skiing.

See you in Florida. Thanks. Enjoy the turbulence.

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.