Stony Night

It seems to me Van Gogh's work lends itself to the kind of pebble art being done a lot these days. Am I crazy? 

Anyway, I had a go at his Starry Night with some stones I gathered from the stony frozen beach yesterday. 

Have a warm and wonderful New Year's Eve everyone ! 

2017

They are ready. Are you?

The dry stone toolshed

The short slideshow video documents the various stages of the cladding of an ugly old metal garden shed we had in our backyard, and didn't want to see any more.  Evan, Joe, Akira, and Corrie who were working for me at the time, built it with my help and supervision on breaks between bigger jobs over the summer, back in 2010. 

The stones we used ( mostly granite, limestone ,sandstone and schist ) were left over from several equally interesting dry stone projects we did that year. The huge stone roof slabs were brought in from a quarry up in Buckhorn Ontario.

The shed is still looking beautiful as ever and is presently vacant. We are thinking of keeping chickens in it next year, or maybe we'll make it available on airbnb.

The blank page and the undrawn comparison.

This Christmas I was given a blank Moleskine journal of 120 unlined pages. 

Inside I stare at the first blank page of my book. Just holding it in my hands I become acutely aware of the implied potential contained within. I recognize a responsibility and an opportunity, to find what it is and happily produce something of worth. 

This is not unlike having been given a fresh pile of stones to work with. Like the pages which are silently waiting to be filled, the stones too are waiting to be put together in some creative way. 

The New Year is waiting too. It is our new journey/journal into an, as yet, unsystematized, uncatalogued, delightfully unstandardized future.  

Fill the pages. Write the words. Arrange the stones. Connect the dots. Bring new order out of all that is disguised as 'random' and 'confused'.  Make a positive, loving, artistic difference in 2017. 

The Stones by Wendell Berry

I owned a slope full of stones.
Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,
shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks
where the earth caught and kept them
dark, an old music mute in them
that my head keeps now I have dug them out.
I broke them where they slugged in the dark
cells, and lifted them up in pieces.


As I piled them in the light
I began their music. I heard their old lime
rouse in breath of song that had not left me.
I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.
What bond have I made with the earth,
having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing
I have carried with me out of that day.
The stones have given me music
that figures for me their holes in the earth
and their long lying in them dark.
They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,
and I must prepare a fitting silence.

The Dinnie Stones

Snowball Lights - A Temporary Installation

We finished hanging all our special handmade snowball decorations yesterday, just in time for Christmas. Hooray !   

The front walls will be beautifully lit tonight, hopefully - that is, if the snowballs don't all melt first. 

And...

We still need to find where the serviceberry roots are buried  and make sure we have the right currant bush.

Anyway, a special Merry Christmas to those of you who have so wonderfully brightened our lives this year.

Jolly and Folly

This time of year a good many of us make a kind of a special thing about being jolly. Those who would choose to scorn or poo poo the idea of any kind of cheeriness have had their opportunity all year to be gloomy. They need to let up a bit now, at least for these few festive days when strangers and friends and family want to take time to joyfully wish each other 'Seasons Greetings'. 

Being jolly is not all folly, and if it is, it's a kind of folly that often leads to such positive things as art and music and dance. Follies (fanciful structures of stone, of all kinds) are similar magical whimsical expressions of something inside us that refuses to always be solemn, somber and drearily pragmatic. A folly is a kind of architectural wish - a permanent installation giving substance to our desire to have that ephemeral something (can we call it joy ?) last for more than a season.  Happy folly holidays ! 

 

Winter Has Officially Arrived

It's true, as of yesterday winter again kept its scheduled calendar appointment with the northern hemisphere. Snow is everywhere here in Ontario. 

The cantilevered stile steps I built now have decorative clumps of the stuff on every step. 

Do you want to see how the snow got there? Take a peek at the short video clip below.

A small gothic arch form.

Here's a simple illustration on how to make and use a small plywood form for supporting a dry stone arch until it supports itself. Most arches have something to hold them up until they are made. This one is a Gothic arch form. You could make a Roman arch or an elliptical arch the same way. 

By the way, don't confuse elliptical arches with electrical arcs. Even though they sometimes have similar shapes, one is kind of 'magical' (the way the stones hold together) but the other, if your holding live wires close together, is just 'shocking'.

In the Nick of time.

Let's Go Screeing!

People do the craziest things, especially when they are on holidays. Running down a scree slope looks like a good way to celebrate Christmas. 

Oh Christmas scree, 
Oh Christmas scree, 
I'm causing avalanches...

Apparently they do a lot of this in the Lake District. Ironically, the word they have for mountain is fell . Dah !

I'm crazy about rocks and like to do a bit of rock climbing too, which often involves getting back down. 
But running down ???

Avoid the Christmas Crush

Better than a metal culvert.

Though the arch is not dry laid I rather like this bridge at Fox Harbour, Nova Scotia   



Under the bridge the concrete looks to have been poured onto flexible plastic culvert pipes, all cut in half and joined together to form a kind of elliptical arch. The stonework on the abutment looks to be all dry laid. In any case the ivy makes everything look good. Except of course if you live in Ireland and it's taking over and you'd rather not see it.

Mountain seen.

Good stonework never looks odd, even when it's the wrong way round.

Mark Ricard's Salem Creek dry stone retaining wall . December 13, 2016

Going round the block with an idea.

I 

I wonder which would be easier - actually building this photoshopped cube idea I had, or figuring out how to put a standard Rubiks Cube back together? 

In any case, I'm hoping to build one someday, somewhere. 

Contact me if you need one .

Neighbours and Stone Fences

When your neighbour hasn't even used many stones, it's still actually not that hard for him (or you) to take a fence along the length of both properties.

Callum Gray has great a new website

www.callumgray.co.uk

"Callum Gray is a drystone waller and landscaper based in Central Scotland and is ideally placed to work on large and small scale projects across the UK. Callum has established a considerable portfolio using traditional techniques to design and build home and garden features which will delight for many years to come." 

Callum always injects a lot of his own creativity and clever expertise into everything he builds. His stuff is truly amazing.
Congrats on your new website, Callum.

A Laughable Wall

I painted an imaginary wall yesterday.

It took longer than I thought it would.

It went for miles and miles over an imaginary landscape.

It ended up looking cartoony. It made me smile.

It had all sorts of flaws in it and was quite wobbly in places, but I still liked it.

It reminded me of something -

Not to take life too seriously.

A Very Coarse Sandstone

Along parts of the coast of California there is a lot of this type of rock. It’s called Greywacke. Greywacke is a type of sandstone, a sedimentary rock which is made from particles (sediment) that have been glued together under pressure. This coarse sandstone consists of poorly sorted, angular to sub angular, grains of quartz and feldspar. It is physically hard and dark grey in colour. Texturally it is an immature sandstone composed of sand mixed with mud.  

Graywacke sandstone is made up mostly of sand-size grains that were rapidly deposited very near the source rock from which they were weathered.  This type of sandstone contains fewer grains made of quartz and more made of feldspars, volcanic rock fragments, as well as silt and clay, than most sandstone.  It is therefore also known as “dirty sandstone.” The volcanic rock fragments give graywacke its greenish-gray colours. In terms of building walls it’s a pretty creepy material to work with. It's basically not a very good stone at all.