The Ides of March - March XV *

New Book

A new 60 page coffee table book has just been published containing recent works and collaborations by John Shaw-Rimmington. This, now the fourth book in a series showcasing his work across Canada, England and the States, is available by contacting mcclaryharris@sympatico.ca

Beaver Tails 3

 by Ryan Stananought 

Beaver Tails 2

 by Ryan Stananought 

Beaver Tails

Artist and dry stone waller Ryan Stananought explores our true Canadian identity. 

In this cartoon version of Ryan's, the hard working, ever resourceful beaver (symbol of Canada) shows qualities of both adaptability and ingenuity in walling, rather than being just a Brackish stick-in-the-mud.

to be continued....

Never return to Mortar !

Drive by spiraling *

It's not often one gets to create something permanent out of stone this large that you can then come back and drive completely around and film.  So I did !

Draw a stone

Eka is a young man of marrying age within the lost tribe of the Milcarnicans. He and Nikku, the daughter of the tribe’s Chief, are in love and go to the Chief to request permission to marry. The Chief gives Eka 5 blue stones, 5 green stones and two bowls. Out of sight of Nikku, Eka must divide the stones between the two bowls anyway he chooses. A blindfolded Nikku must then draw a stone from one of the two bowls. If she draws a blue stone then the couple will have the Chief’s blessing to marry, but if the stone is green then the union will be forbidden (green being the color of the evil serpent spirit, Balcan).
How should Eka divide the stones between the bowls to give Nikku the greatest chance of drawing out a blue stone?

Looking for Canadian Context

 The mighty surging ocean - the surf, the salt, the sand, and sky of B.C,  

or perhaps 

snow covered foothills of Alberta - the majestic Canadian Rockies off in the distance?

or....

Just a winter's worth of ugly, salty, sandy snow piled up high  

in some school parking lot, somewhere in Ontario ?

Photo by John Shaw-Rimmington

Where's Waldo ?

At Graniteville, near Barre, Vermont, everyone has a pile of granite waste from nearly 100 years of quarrying some of the finest granite in North America. 

Piles like this are virtually everywhere you go. 
John is standing on a smaller block...kind of like a stonemasonry "Where's Waldo?"

Thanks to John Scott for providing this post 

Explosive Stonework

Stonework is highly explosive but also very implosive. A good worker in stone will not allow the energy to fold back in on itself but rather try to explore this dynamic quality. 

Someone who works in dry stone who has no understanding of this will stiffle it.  A wall or dry stone sculpture can have the material so cruelly trapped within it, held helplessly captive and lifeless so that it drains not only all who build it, but everyone who ever sees it.

              http://fabianoefner.com/?portfolio=aurora 

The 7 photos of 'combustion' above are by Fabian Oefner 

A Lonely Fractal Voyage

As fascinating as this looks, I don't think I'd like to live in the fractal world revealed here by Alexandre Lehmann/ Ricardo Montalban.
This realistically three dimensional environment, though ornate and creatively complex, appears completely uninhabitable. 

That rocky space age potato planet I'm seeing is a lonely and hopeless place. 

There is no sense of scale either. 
Just think how easy it would be easy to get lost there.

When asked in an interview whether he dreams about his creations,  Alexandre Lehmann admitted...

"I have indeed dreamt of fractal structures. These are more like bad dreams, very alienating. When I roam through these structures in my dreams, I always end up feeling very claustrophobic and disoriented. It’s quite painful, to be honest."

Nope, I think I prefer the scale of the earth the way it is. I like that I can usually find my way home in it. That together, with others, we can make some sort of sense of it.  We can create things and relationships that don't get lost in it.  I like rocks and stones the way they come.  Even the mountains and canyons on this our amazing planet, awesome and expansive as they are, still have a familiar almost alluring quality to them.

The fantastic complexity of landscape in this video reminds me why I am content to live in a simpler environment -  in a place where the dimensions and implications of this kind of fractal reality are kept in proper perspective.

Mountveneering *

Before the advent of Mountveenering these enormous rock outcrops were nearly lost to the visible eye (and were a danger to air traffic) as they were so completely camouflaged against the sky.

It was obvious huge amount of 'remounding' needed to be done on many high mountains. A more 'manufactured' look was needed to make these lifeless heights more fashionable, less austere and less dangerous! The formidable task of reworking and re-cladding great expanses of mountainous land, which began back in the 1900s, was gradually completed during the course of many years. Many expeditions of masons risking their lives eventually clad these formidable rocky terrains with a thinner stone coating, (below which was laid electric heating cables) to give it all a more noticeable 'decorative' look.

Big rocks take a long time to split.

This one in Kern River Canyon took ages !

Stones and Cones

A sad Groundhog Day

Writer director Harold Allen Ramis died on Monday February 24 at the age of 69
One of his films, Groundhog Day, is my all time favorite comedy.
I very rarely watch a movie twice, but this one I've seen many times and still enjoy subtleties I missed on previous viewings.
It also has a very spiritual message. There is a 'timeless' cathartic redemptive quality to it.

I can't think of how any of this relates to 'thinking with my hands' except to say that our hands learn after days and days of monotonous continuous practice (and rebellion), how to do some amazingly beautiful and useful things. 

Here's to a man who showed us how to laugh at the repetitiveness of our existence, and get through each same day with a smile.


10 Facts You Didn’t Know about Groundhog Day  

Pediment Arch Part 3

Each voussoir had to be shaped and then carefully dressed with a toothed chisel to give a mottled texture.

The basketball backboard looking thing is the form for the stones in the arch. It also provides a good space for drawing what it is going to look like.

Final under arch dressing

A clever fitting to create a dropped keystone

Timeless beauty

A place to discover as you walk across the property

Back to Beauty - The revolution is coming !

Thanks to John Fisher for making me aware of this powerful counter culture documentary. 

Pediment Arch Part 2

These long red sandstone sticks are a naturally formed geological phenomena. It is quarried in only a few places in  New Mexico . Here Kyle is showing a class of local Gualala students how we can these split these huge stones long ways with feather and wedges to make even thinner sticks.

Kyle and Sean have painstakingly shaped and fitted together both pairs of supporting stick posts for the pediment arch and lowered them into the ground using a simple tripod and a complicated machine called a Gradal. Concrete was used to hold the posts permanently in place.

Drawings of the pediment arch.

Last November Patrick McAfee and I had a series of email discussions about the arch we had been asked to build in California this winter.  Knowing my love for ruins he came up with an idea to construct a classical pediment arch ( these are Patrick's drawings you see here) incorporating the big red sandstone 'sticks' from New Mexico for posts we used in the seating areas we built last year. 

I liked the concept too of creating an architectural vista where one could look through an arch and see another one at a distance, a replication, not necessarily an identical copy but often reasonably close. The vista would frame a particular view. Patrick wrote " It's an 18th/19th century concept associated with follies and Arcadia that I'm sure you are aware about. " 

When we arrived there we decided to try to site a single arch, having the bridge that we were also still building, framed off in the distance. 

We described the pediment arch to Kyle Schlagenhauf, a skilled California based stone craftsman, who had joined us this year at Gualala to build too, and asked if he and Sean Smyth would like to take the project on.

They in fact were really excited to do it. Building it using dry stone construction methods would be quite a challenge but Kyle and Sean proved they were certainly up for it, and together with Matt's help, pulled it off brilliantly.

Tomorrow there will be photos of the actual arch being built and more description of the process.

All the proportions on classical pediment arches are worked out so as to maximize the visual appeal of it. The height of the opening, for instance, being determined by doubling the diameter of the circle made by the arc of the arch.  ( As seen in this drawing Patrick did for us when we were seated around the dinner table )