Down from the Ivory Tower

It looks pretty impressive, yes. 

And ,we had a challenge to build it in the time we'd given ourselves.

In fact we never saw it with the scaffolding taken away before we left to go back to Canada.

But we did it, and what a team of talented enthusiastic workers we had.

 

Can you guess where it is?

 It is not constructed of dry laid stones. It's mortared. But the next tower we do will be different . It will made without mortar.

I'll be posting more photos of this one in the next few months.

 

Our eyes sing along the top of the cope-cakes

That sweet line, drawn across the top of the wall, sweepingly level, taking your eyes for a walk along the zig-zaggingly, unsagging line of stones that run parallel to the level of everything we know to be level, and ever was. 

Those tidy tops of the otherwise untidy last-stones-to-be-found, all snuggled together now along one tidy course, all marching in formation, it's all so improbably, perfect 

Those remaining shapes, fortuitously left in the pile after most of the wall is built, now lifted into place, turned upright, bedded and wedged, becoming the crowning toping of the dry stone layer-cake we build, or rather, are baking . 

This is the serendipitous cope-aesthetic phenomena.

Playing on the beach

Real civilization cannot exist in the absence of a certain play-element, for civilization presupposes limitation and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely accepted. Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion of genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.

Johan Huizinga

 

Happy endings and beginnings

 

                     Willow's mom tells more of the story of Maeve the orphan calf.

"She was born about two weeks before Christmas. Mike was at work at the time so I decided to bring her in the house for about six hours to get warm. She was born during the day thankfully. Mike who is ever the optimist wanted to try and put her back with Hazel thinking maybe this time she would produce milk, but we both decided in the end it was better just to bottlefeed Maeve in the barn, like we had done with Murphy

At the same time, though separately, Murphy was outside in the field, and the other cows weren’t being very nice to him and he was losing a little bit of weight, not so much that it was dangerous, but more than we were comfortable with, so we decided to bring Murphy in the barn as well, and keep each other company

Not long after she was looking healthy and feeding well and enjoying human company, Mike happened to see on Facebook a post from a local farm something about 'meet and greet adult Highlands Cows' for $200 for 45 minutes a visit, and he realized maybe people would like to help feed Maeve! 

We put up a Facebook add a few weeks before March break just to test the waters and see if anyone would be interested, and it was very successful!

Sometimes we have four 'showings' a day. Each time I go to the barn I put Willow on my back so she gets to meet people too, not just Maeve.

We priced things at what seemed reasonable- $60 for a bottle feed and $40 for a 'snuggle', and we’ve had lots of families and groups of grownups and single people visit and everyone’s had a really great time, petting Maeve (and Murphy) , asking questions, combing her long hair and of course, holding the bottle while she gobbles down her milk. 

Over the past three months it has brought in a nice little boost to the farm income, and pays for a variety of things we always need, like hay and bags of milk replacer." 

Willow's parents ended up selling Muphy for a good price too, and he is going to a new home next month. His luck has really turned around too, He's going to be the breeding bull - From the one being being bullied on the farm here, to the becoming the head of the herd at another farm.

Happy Escher

 

Easter Island Egg Painting and Rock Painting

 

Hazel and Murphy

Hazel wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother, so when little Murphy showed up, she just left him in the field and walked away.

Happily Maddy and Mike found him and knew just what to do

Maddy bottle-fed Murphy every four hours until he was old enough to learn to eat hay and rejoin the herd.

Murphy and Maddy bonded during his bottle feeding days. 

Murphy, and Mac the farm dog, were almost the same size to begin with, and Mac attended most feedings, as well as spending time regularly in the barn during the day.

While others in the farm herd were not as tame, Murphy became used to human contact and missed Maddy deeply when she could no longer be there as often. 

I went there to bottle feed Murphy sometimes . He was grateful for my company, but I could see his disappointment that I wasn’t Maddy. 

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

 

Maeve 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 Maeve 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 Maeve, just like she'd rejected Murphy, her previous calf, the year before.  

Willow may remember that poor Maeve 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.