This is Hazel

The troublesome cow. She never seemed at home on the farm.  She’d jump through fences and often looked like she might chase you if you tried to get close to her. 

She arrived at Silver Maple Highland farm nearly five years ago along with her part sister Hannah, who was a much better behaved Scottish Highland.

Willow’s dad got very busy putting up better fences for Hazel and then putting up stronger fences and then higher and higher fences . 

Hazel was not impressed. Maybe her Scottish ancestry caused her to disapprove of the lack of any proper livestock containment walls made of stone.

To solve the problem we built her a small castle ruin wall, with a gothic opening for her to at least appear more at home

 

Maive Saves The Farm

Our little granddaughter Willow loves having stories read to her. She lives on a farm with her mom and dad, three dogs, a lot of chickens, and nearly a dozen Scottish Highland cows. (You know the ones, cute, long-haired, red cows with long horns.)  

All kinds of things happen on the farm, so Willow will be growing up with all kinds of stories. Some happy, some sad, and some special ones, that will likely be told over and over. One of the stories I'm hoping to make into a children's book is about a beautiful baby calf named Maive who was born unexpectedly on a cold night last December. 

Maive was lying there, all alone in the snow, when Willow's dad found her,  just in time to bring her into the barn and get her warmed up. The mother cow Hazel was not a good mother and had rejected Maive, just like she'd rejected Murphy, her previous calf, the year before.  

Willow may remember that poor Maive looked very hungry when she and her mom came into the barn to see the tiny calf.  It would now be Willow's mom's job to step in and be a mom for Maive too, as she began a long commitment of bottle feeding the young calf every four hours.

The whole of the story is well worth telling, and illustrating.  It is a story with a silver maple lining  (and yes, it has some dry stone walls in it, too) .

I'l tell you more tomorrow maybe, but right now it's time for you to get some sleep.

Good night.

Walls of Traffic.

The highways create barriers to pedestrians and bicyclists 

Dangerous rushing rivers of mind numbing, body crushing, self confining mobilized metal,  menacingly fencing in the perambulating populace

The wanderers can not wander

The drifters can not drift

The meanderthalls are all corralled  

Trapped in the limitations of mindless expediency

These walls are not beautiful. These walls are not friendly. 

And they are for some reason deceptively not obvious. 

They seem so seamless, we can hardly recognize them as walls.

But they are walls. High walls. Loud walls. Annoyingly restrictive. Dangerously constructed and apt to have all kinds crashes. 

Strangely , They don’t appear to be walls for defence or protection or safe enclosure , either.

These are dividing highways 

That allow no merging of those stranded inside to cross from one safe haven to another 

The web of traffic does not allow for emergence!

Veins filled with mechanical entities that patrol and prowl the boarders,  constantly keeping the prisoners in.

A circuitry of high voltage that no one can not cross without permission.

And yet occasionally, a wall may yield an opening , a break within this almost Impenetrable network of free flowing ferocity.

There are in fact, ‘openings’ in these walls which lead to

Paths and parks and the possibility of peace and quiet

To realms where the walls of traffic have not yet divided the land 

And the machine has not yet claimed it’s dominion.

Creativity Prevails

Not surprisingly, A. I. doesn’t understand everything.  

It gave me a completely incorrect response when I searched google about a clever phrase I once read in a book on creativity .

The phrase was “ Creativity is just chaos on a coffee break.”

The response I got from A I missed the point entirely, and gave me this interpretation... 

"The idea that creativity is "chaos on a coffee break" suggests that a period of unstructured thought and relaxation can be a fertile ground for creative ideas. This aligns with the notion that creativity often involves exploring different avenues, making unexpected connections, and allowing the mind to wander without rigid constraints. ”

But surely, the better understanding of this maxim is that, - try as it may, no matter how much chaos might work to resist it, whenever chaos takes a rest, or tries to relax its efforts, it has no power to stop the inevitability of order taking any opportunity to prevail again spontaneously, and unstoppably re-emerge.

Finite Rockage

 

Pop Art and Popcorn Art

 

Sometime we have to work with stones that could only be described as looking like large chunks of popcorn. 

They have no faces, no bottoms, they are full of holes and have

no length. It is a challenge to get them fitted into any dry stone wall.

    

Maybe the best thing to do if you have a pile of popcorn rocks is to just draw them

Or buy a print from Walmart

Art That 'Yields To' and 'Deals With' the Elements

I very much enjoy Alexander Calder's artwork - 'kinetic sculptures', many of them. They have balance and move in the wind and take on pleasing airy transformations while in the grips of the powerful pressure of earth's gravity 

Unlike some of the other famous artists I've been writing about, it turns out Calder occasionally uses stones in some his 'mobiles'. 

That's good because, I think there's a great connection between an installation of stones, suspended in the air moving in a beautiful delicate balance, and dry laid ones, held in place on the ground (yet able to move) in a pleasing network of random rock shapes and sizes.

Both art forms seem to have made friends with gravity. Both are able to yield to nature to some degree of another. Both deal the with elements of form and movement. 

After all, stones are at their best when they are ‘mobilized’.  They stay well-connected, even when they are not tightly regimented, that is, not forced to be locked together (mortared?) in an order that makes the whole thing totally immobile and dead looking.

Stones can stay together a long time, in a wall, nestled in a state of connectivity. They all keep within their 'orbit', in constant structural conformity. They yield because they are placed together employing only the basic restraints of gravity and physics, thus allowing for a constant flow of invisible interactions. The wall is a kinetic work, not an uninterested static blob, all the while never losing balance or continuity.

Stones held together this way will always be something to behold.

The whole thing becomes a ‘moving’ experience.

Donuts to Dollars

Andy Warhol's pop art paintings were a big hit in the 60's.  The style was bold. The colours were vivid. The silkscreening method he used to create his prints reduced shapes to simplified areas of colour much the way vector imaging is done by computers these days. Andy could knock off multiple copies of his artwork which proved very profitable. 

If somewhere in his career he had ventured into doing big bold dry stone art installations, instead like another famous artist named Andy, he would have had to be content with one-of-a-kind art. Of course he could charge a lot more money for his donuts, but just couldn't  make as many.

Impressionism Set In Stone.

 

Let's imagine Monet, the great French impressionist, gives up painting on canvas, which he realizes is perishable, and goes into building permanent dry stone bridges. He'll probably need a good slogan and a lot of swag products. 

Running Joints

Alberto Giacometti painted and sculpted in a highly recognizable style. Though many of his works, like his tall thinner figures, (walking men and women ) seem very playful childlike musings, Giacometti was making darker references to modern life being increasingly empty and devoid of meaning.

While he did work in several mediums, I don't think he ever worked in stone. I wonder if he would have been happier, and found more meaning, if he'd taken the opportunity to experiment stacking stones to make artistic installations.

If he did work in stone, and his existential pessimism still persisted, I suspect one of the cardinal dry stone walling rules he would have had to break all the time would be the  "one over two, and two over one" rule. 

His dry laid compositions would probably have 'running joints' and 'zipper joints' showing up everywhere.

 

Mega Lithic Art to Stand the Test of Time

 

Using MY imagination, not AI.

 

I’m thinking about the famous artist Henry Moore exploring positive and negative space. 

In my imagination, might he have taken up a new kind of sculpting within the parameters required of dry stone walling? The shape and contours of his iconic human reclining figures would be defined by the spaces between the stones making up the main figure, and the surrounding recessed stones in the wall. It’s Moore or less a conversation between what’s there and what’s not. 

Sometimes we learn a lot more about something if we stop saying "it is what it is", and realize that really, "it is what it isn't"!

Seeing with the eye of an artist.

 

Will you allow me to do another illustration? It's kind of a visual pun. It's about how rarely we really see what we are looking at. Case in point, a painting of an old stone church, surrounded by a 'normal' rock wall.

This well known person you're thinking of, whose image I digitally edited, was a painter who managed to illustrate everything extraordinarily well. ( and I'm sure he even painted rock well, but I couldn't find any examples) He was good at what he did because he saw the normal, differently. Each endearing scene he painted, awakens in the viewer a love of some truth, or recognition of the beauty contained in everyday activities of life.

A normal dry stone wall, in a way, still deserves that kind of artist's attention. When I travel to countries where walls, like the one in the painting are common place, I'm often surprised how little they are noticed or appreciated by the locals. They just don't see them. 

How is it even possible to see things differently, to observe unappreciated aspects of life better, and not take for granted the common place places all around us?   

I think we have to stop trying to see over the wall. And, like the artist who did the painting, (along with the people whose stonework is depicted in the illustration) we must have let ourselves imagine everything has the possibility of taking on special significance, and that there really isn't anything that needs to be normal.

iPhone camera moveover. Let the Sketchbook tell the story

While working outside Canada last December on a stone tower with dozen other great guys, I got to know Devin Sherwood who was a local, who I had met previously at a Stone Symposium. Devin contacted me later, when he found out the place where we were building the tower was quite close to where he lived, and asked if we could use him on site. Im so glad I said yes. 

Devin was a great contribution to the team. The work was hard and required a lot of constant setting up and resetting scaffold as the stonework got higher and higher. The lifting and hoisting up of hundreds of rocks seemed endless but not only did Devin pull his weight cheerfully, always staying ahead of the work load, he found moments in the day to do sketches in his notebook, using a very small fountain pen, of all the fun that was happening on the tower. 

His sketching, a kind of comic book style, was something he had taught himself to do every day in a very disciplined way . I was so inspired by Devin's commitment to drawing and documenting what was going on, that when I got home I bought a fountain pen and a notebook and started sketching too.

On April Fools Day we started a new job in the county. While the scene was pleasantly familiar, lots of stones piled all around us, lots of hearting in buckets, and lots of days of walling ahead to look forward to. the difference was, now I was looking at the site with the eyes of someone who had the artist tools at hand to see the subject matter as something worthy of seeing differently. I hope to bring more on-site sketches to my blog in the future.

 

Oh, and to see lots of Devins work, go to @Devinsherwooddraws on Instagram.

Dürer was the 'rock star' of the German Renaissance

Allbrick Dürer was one of the first painters to seriously explore cross-hatching techniques that facilitated the creation of many of the first and best woodcut and engraving prints in Europe. Again, I wonder, given his label, 'rock star' (by smarthistory.org), if this accomplished artist too might have thought about actually getting into stone and rocks, as well.  

The wonderful way he creates that sense of light and shade in his prints is worth musing on.  Is it possible, since his works are so realistically shaded, using that classic, stippled, scratchy-line, 'hashtag' shading effect, that he might have thought about taking up a point, or a crandall or a bush hammer, and see about quietly dressing the large smooth, sawn blocks of stone bordering the municipal horse-and-buggy parking lot, in order to make them seem more natural and less man-made.  

When he was finished, the stones in the first drawing might have ended up looking like these ones - as if they were in one of his lovely engravings, 

But then again maybe if he lived in our era, he would have been more successful doing the reverse - grabbing a respirator mask, a pair of safety glasses, ear protectors, and have a stab at making #modernrockart. 

 

Graphic artist considers taking his tessellation skills to a new Escherlon!

What if Maurits Escher turned to dry stone walling?  What if he shaped his ducks and lizards and fish out of stone, making sure that every one had exactly the same shape? Would they be as easy to lay then as bricks or squared blocks of stones? Or would it be more difficult? I wonder. 

Would it be just one big boring puzzle? And more importantly, would the repetition of the pattern drive clients crazy? 

Now that I think about it, probably Escher knew to stick with drawing impossible interconnecting shapes rather than trying to make them in the three D world, and then end up having no one that impressed. Sometimes an impossible creation, that's taken an impossible amount of time, no matter how perfect it is, is not as interesting as something that merely involved fitting random stones together skillfully.

Rather, for the rest of us wallers, whenever an opportunity presents itself, keep striving to do the improbable, . You could surprise yourself how well you do and, hopefully, it won't look cookie cutter perfect. 

What if painters expressed themselves using stones instead.

 

Connecting Random Dots and Thoughts

Why is it that stones, when they get into groups, seem surprisingly eager to communicate recognizable geometric shapes and alignments. At some point after the first few are laid, the stones seem to start lining up more along a plane or a contour of something recognizable . This works with curves and spirals too. It may be too, that human eye, is only too eager to see planes and straight lines and curving alignments in otherwise fairly random arrangements of stones.

 

Stones really know how to Keep in Shape

 Unlike humans, stones, even if they hang around doing nothing, don't get out of shape too quickly. In order to keep their shape, they vehemently resist the forces of time and weathering, and the various forms of mechanical tampering that men have come up with through the ages. Yes, in the end they might sometimes have too submit to crushers and the indignities of huge splitting and sawing machines. But I suspect, if they had their way, if they had their choice, they'd like to be appreciated for the shapes they come in, the way God made them. An authentic dry stone waller, if he's being true to the nature of the material he is gathering, tries not to change the shape of the stones he's been called upon to use. A little chipping here and there, a splitting by hand, of larger  (overweight?) stones is acceptable. Generally however, if not exactly what is needed, the shapes they come in, almost always suggest how they could become 'fit' enough, with just a little human coaxing (coaching?), and only by 'exercising' enough restraint on our part.

Make no Mistake

 Sometimes rocks look like food - a melon perhaps , a loaf of bread, eggs, candies, chocolate or popcorn.

We need the inner nourishment of stone. For those of us who love stones and rocks, it's not something we can do without. Thankfully there is usually enough produce along the road side that we can get our fill. Sometimes it's a pick your own operation. Our eyes may often be bigger than our vehicles, though. 

Quarries are like big rock grocery stores. We can pickup all kinds of 'produce' there and bring it fresh to our garden. I've always said that a garden without stones is like a BLT with out the bacon.

Unlike food, stones are always in season and never go off. They never over-ripen or become soggy. Leftovers are always useful and often worth keeping around indefinitely until you can use them with other grains and scraps, in some sort of dry stone combo. 

Mushrooms are my favourite.  They pop up everywhere, and look good to eat even in winter. They're best on top of walls. The thing is, none of these rock/foods will make you sick. You can't make a mistake.You can always identifying it's a 'rock' even if you don't know what type it is. And really, if you think about it, they are all magical!

 

 

Reflecting on/under Bridges

 

Two Types 0f Stones

Sometimes it feels like there are only two types of stones.

Landscapers here in Canada often use something called 'Armour Stone' to do terracing and retaining walls. These are much bigger 'freezer sized' stones than we like to use. They don't need to be that big to hold back the soil. 

The word 'armour' makes it sound like they are at war. When you see all the heavy equipment they use to put them in, and the saws, drills, and sometimes grinders and other powerful weapons, it does look like a bit of a battlefield until they are done. 

Dry stone wallers are not at war. Many of us love what we do. We love each other too,
The stones we use could well be called 'Amour' stones. Oui?

Still Thinking we are not over Thinking yet.

 

Remember your password, people !

These are just a bunch of random characters who, if you remember them properly, will 'let you in'. Let you access your hidden self. Let you see your history, allow you to check in and put your life in order and do some personal accounting . Yes, these letters and numbers are real characters, and even though they are a bother, they really are not trying to make your life difficult. 

Without them, your life would be visible to everyone. Your past words, your mistakes, your faults, your inconsistencies would all be exposed to the world. Therefore to keep the busybodies, and the rift raft away, to keep your secrets from anyone seeking to do you no good, you’ll need a few chosen characters to help you.

Realistically you need at least 8 characters to have a proper up to date password. You can choose them if you insist. But likely the password would be a lot ‘stronger’ if you let total strangers do the job of maintaining your privacy.  Characters chosen from a line up selected for you by A.I. or friends of AL Gorithm are the safest.  

The difficulty of course is remembering characters that essentially (technically) have no correlation to your personal life.  They can’t have any connection with the date you were born or your favourite dessert, or the name of your first dog either. 

It’s better too, if most of them are not just names, like Jay or Kay or Vee.  Better to have your life protected by characters that are also symbols. Some or them can even have accents. There’s less risk if you use Asterisk too ,or names that have confusing word associations like Hash, Pound ,Colon or Parenthesis.

Remember don’t ever reveal your password characters to anyone.

But how are you going to remember these individual characters, and how will you keep these rascals in their proper order? Fortunately for you, we can teach you a special technique for not forgetting any of the characters in your password. First click on the window below and then just type in your password.

口口口口口口口口

Reverse Stepnology

Looking at my footprints, backwards in the snow

Not worrying what's behind me, trusting where I go

Put my best foot backward, then stepping back again.

Judging where I'm going, by seeing where Ive been.

Get the body tuned to, travelling in reverse.

Purposely unwinding, things that last come first.

 

The Paths We Carve

We get comfortable with the paths we've carved that we travel everyday. Sometimes it is time for a new path. Sometimes it is easier to use the path someone else carved out for you. And sometimes it is just easier to walk through less snow.

Stono-Mobius Erectus

 

Dots

Believe it or Not.

 In Canada, a well-built dry stone wall along a busy residential street can often act as a kind of 'aesthetic speed bump' and be a calming antithesis to the frenzy of traffic activity wizzing past. Where an ordinary speed bump only barely slows down traffic to a safe speed at the actual buMp, a good looking wall gives a visual signal, along its entire length, to slow down, inviting drivers to enjoy a safe drive, while keeping the car's suspension from getting wrecked, and also helping maintain a delightful suspension of disbelief.