Another one of Leonardo's 'inventions'

 

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.