HEADS TAILS YIN YANG

shadow screen

 

The new shadow screen in my yard is now completed. Today I picked up the plastic spread over rocks I did not want to drip paint on. Put all the paint cans in a box with the brushes to have them all in one place for the next coat of paint. Thought I'd repaint it every year, using the paint for a protective coat over plywood that has been dry for ten years in the shed I keep scrap wood in. Now several coats of paint will keep it firm for several years. It's mortal, of course, and some day the plywood will do whatever old plywood does. It's not for all time. It's not universal. It's not high art. It's fun. Over about twenty years I've been keeping scrap wood in a shed that I used for a chicken shed about ten years. Now I want to convert the shed into a stable for two donkeys. The wood has to go. This project is made from scraps in the woodshed, none of them altered in any way. That was control number one, use the wood exactly as it is. For perspective, the disk is four feet across. The initial visual idea was a sun rising or setting behind the mountains. The disk was yellow and the horizontal waves were green with highlights of blue. I painted both sides the same. The side facing north toward the road is a yellow disk with green mountains. I wanted my side to be my own, different from the other side,

 

 

 

Friday a week ago I was sitting on an upside down five gallon bucket looking at it in its yellow and green phase wondering what I could do to make it my own. The other side faces the road. It's the public side. This side, the south side, is my own personal side. I did not want to do something I would get tired of seeing every day the rest of my life. First thought was to paint the disk Chinese red, a red that makes fire truck red look dull. Too powerful. I did not want the visual equivalent of a loud speaker playing heavy metal FM. I wanted something that would cooperate with the quiet calm I feel when I step out of the car and enter the canopy of trees. By the time I reach the door to the house, the trees have welcomed me showering their relaxing vibration all around where I walk. This is my small world of chipmunks, gray squirrels, red squirrels, several kinds of birds, crows. I wanted something that would flow in this immediate environment. It is situated with the flow of the wind through here. I don't anticipate the wind hurting it, unless we get another direct hit by hurricane like Hugo in 1984. Hugo would have sent it flying all the way to Pine Swamp. That's the worst extreme. It would take such as the most extreme to destroy it. The wind runs through here east and west. North and south winds go over the tops of the ridges. The house sits in a valley with ridges all the way around. It doesn't feel tucked in, but it is. Extreme storms are the only times the wind is bad.

 

 

 

Sitting on the bucket, gazing at the yellow disk, I was looking for something to give it some life, give it some lightness, make it dance. I visioned different colors and nothing was satisfying. Looking at possibilities in my head, I sat gazing at the yellow disk, watching the shadows from the trees move slowly, very slowly, across the disk. After watching the shadow the whole time looking at the movie screen on the inside of my forehead, bingo, I saw the shadow I'd been gazing at while my mind was looking inside. White was the answer. I wanted to make it a shadow screen. I wanted to make the  circle like the Zen zero, black ink on white paper. Making the black outline makes the whole image a suggestion of ink on paper, same scene as other side; color on one side, black & white on the other. I did not want to depart from the color side. If I had not seen the shadow, I was thinking it would be fun to give a spray can of any color to everyone who stops by in the course of a month, and invite friends to do some spray can graffiti on it, kids especially. Anything. Anything they want to do. Cover it up with graffiti. I still think that would bring it to life. For me. When my inner eye connected with my outer eye, I found what I was looking for. If the other side can be called the sun in the mountains, this side can be called the moon in the clouds, making both sides of the construction a unit, like a coin. For anyone who wants to know if I call it a sculpture or a painting, I'd like to call it a stabile. Alexander Calder called his metal constructions that stood in place stabiles. I like that.

 

 

The lower horizontal edge is sixteen inches above the ground. It stands on one post, the one on the right. It is a mailbox post with the arm that holds the box planted in the ground like a fencepost, tamped down good. I had a 6x6 inch post standing under it at the other end while painting it. Replaced it with a rock that exact length, by chance, it standing on a flat rock. The weight of the construction holds the rock in place while the rock holds it up. It would eventually sag without a support. I chose that height to have it above splashes from rain on the ground, and the grass that grows in that area is about a foot and a half high. It will give the suggestion that it is floating on the grass. A wall of jewelweed stands behind it in the summer. The jewelweed has fallen down by now. It was as high as the goldenrod in the picture. It makes a beautiful background. Several ferns grow in this place. On the right is a small rhododendron that will be a little bit bigger each year. Soon it will become a part of the whole image. Standing to the right of it I have yet to plant Tom Pruitt's mailbox and post. It is at least seventy years old. It's made of steel. Has two bullet holes in each side, entry and exit. It's all rust. The post is old wood roughly nailed together with about four times as many big nails as needed. It is a memory of a good old friend.

 

 

 

 

The vertical posts are 6x6's and 8x8's, cut in different lengths between a foot and a half and two and a half feet. I have seven of them painted different colors, blue, green and white. Have stood each one on a flat rock. Placed them randomly. Will make changes. Have two more not painted yet. They are three feet long. I'm thinking about placing them horizontally on flat rocks. Using the rocks to keep the painted wood up off the damp ground to inhibit rot. These are blocks found here and there over the years. When I see one being thrown out at a building site, it goes into the trunk of the car. One more item for the shed full of wood scraps. Also thinking about painting the vertical blocks with different colors on each side and the top, kinda like that. Everything chance, as it happens at the moment. I wanted to stand the blocks because of a forecast for snow Wednesday. I don't know whether to believe it, but wanted the posts standing in case it does snow. It has the potential to be gorgeous in the snow. The snow will give me some ideas for the painting of the vertical blocks. Thinking about painting them white and black, each one differently. The snow will tell me. I look forward to seeing it with grass and ferns grown up around the posts so only their tops are visible. It works well with the feeling walking under the canopy of the trees, rhododendrons, big ferns, big rocks. It is a good place to sit on an upside down bucket and watch the shadows. Most of the time it has no shadows, and that is equally satisfying. It is a different light every time I see it. Fun is the best part. It was a fun project.

  

 

by tj worthington

 

 

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FOUND ART CONSTRUCTION

This is the nearly finished thing I've been working on a couple weeks and put the pieces together today. It's not totally finished, but the main part is there. What I do from here is structural, hidden braces to keep the plywood from bending. This picture above is as seen from the road. For scale, the yellow circle is four foot diameter and three-quarters inch thick. In the past, I used it for a portable table top to make picture frames on. When a painting was finished, I'd make the frame on this table top. The other plywood is scraps from figures and shapes I've cut out of half inch plywood with a jigsaw over years and haven't been able to throw away the scraps. Might find something to do with them. This project has been in my mind at least ten years. Laziness kept me from starting it. I kept my wood scraps in the shed that I built in my first year in the mountains for chickens. The chickens lasted about ten years until dogs started coming in and I let the chickens go rather than kill all the dogs. Wanting now to make the chicken house into a stable for two donkeys. No place else to put the wood scraps, I decided it is time to build the construction.

Here it is seen from my walkway between car and house. Its place is about half way between my walkway and the road. This side needs another piece to cover the black post sticking up. I'm thinking I have a smaller plywood circle someplace. Might put a circle there, paint it white and let it be sun and moon on this side. As you can see, the yellow disk symbolizes sun like all yellow circles do. The plywood scraps on either side are to suggest, and only suggest, sunrise in the mountains. I did not want to shape any part specific to this purpose. Only using scraps without altering them. I have a couple of extra pieces, but they don't work on it. There's no rush. One day whatever it is will come to me. This is good for now. Looking at from the walkway, it has a big stand of jewelweed behind it on ground that slopes upward to the road. The wall of jewelweed hide it from the road, so nobody has seen me working on it. When the frost comes and the jewelweed falls to the ground, there it will be. Where did that come from? I'm looking forward to seeing it in snow. I've beat down the foliage around it stomping about. It sits in a kind of grass that doesn't grow over two feet high. It's a beautiful grass. And a few different kinds of ferns I've planted in there over the years and a couple of young rhododendron. In summer, the greenery under the construction will look like a sea of green it is floating on. I made the bottom as high as the top of the grass. It stands in the shade of a maple tree.

Pictured here is the foundation. I took a mailbox post made of treated wood, which I've had for at least fifteen years, maybe twenty, planted the post for the mailbox in the ground good and deep, tamped it in good like a fencepost I don't ever want to wiggle. Half a dozen screws hold the disk to the post. The far end of the black post is held by a free-standing post that may get painted red. I like basic colors. That will be the only red. The middle post is standing there to sit the disk on while screwing it into place. The pieces of plywood screwed to the disk and the post give it good enough hold, I believe, to stand the wind. About once a year a fierce wind blows through here. The construction runs lengthwise with the flow of the wind, so I doubt wind will hurt it at all. I may look out one morning and the disk be a hundred yards up the meadow, too. Basically, it stands on the vertical black post. I questioned for days and nights how to fix the disk to the post without cutting it . I believe by the time I finished putting the parts together, the disk is firmly in place. It being symbolically a sunrise, I believe I'll call it Orpheo, (or-FAY-o) as Orpheus was called in Portuguese from the film Black Orpheus made in Brazil. It's one of my favorite films that never grows old. Orpheo plays guitar every morning to coerce the sun rise. Carnival in Rio. Infectious music. And one of my favorite film characters, Seraphina. I fell in love with Seraphina.

 

These are the parts getting painted. One side green, the other side blue. The idea is that looking at the mountains in the distance, the near mountains are green and the far mountains are blue. This is where I got the blue and green. It's suggestion only. No attempt to make it look like waves of mountains. I think if I had shaped them to look like mountain waves on the horizon, it would be terrible. That it is not the shape of mountains gives it another dimension, possibly somewhat expressionist. But it's not any of that. I have to call it found art. All the parts were found. They may have been mine, but I found them. They were not shaped specifically to this event. Scraps. Stuff somebody in their right mind would have taken to the landfill years ago. I have the heart of a junk dealer, can't throw anything away. I have a ridiculous amount of stuff that is useless, stuff I keep because some day I might find a use for it. That phenomenon of throwing something away and needing it within a week has bit me in the ass so many times, I only throw away trash that can't be used for anything. This construction is placed so landscape, greenery, trees around it are part of it. It's called site specific. Plywood has a way of bending over time. It will degenerate over years. I'm thinking about repainting it once a year to keep protective paint on it to slow the entropy.

 

 

 Here are the parts after their coat of primer. I'm looking forward to seeing it next summer with the greenery all around it. I have picked up scrap blocks of wood over the years and have seven or eight of different lengths, six inches by six inches and everywhere from a foot and a half long to two feet long, to three feet long. I want to paint them different colors, drill a half inch hole in one end of each of them, stick a two foot long piece of rebar in it and jab it into the ground, so the blocks of painted wood will stand vertically above the ground at least a few inches, to keep them from rotting. Also thinking about buying some old black used bowling balls from Alleghany Cares, painting them beautiful colors and standing them elevated on rebar in among the vertical blocks of wood, all placed randomly. I have neighbor Tom Pruitt's mailbox that is probably seventy years old, made of steel, rusted with two bullet holes in each side, entry and exit. The post is wood that old and very poorly constructed, but it holds. It is so poorly made that it is beautiful. I'll stand the mailbox post in relation with the construction. Tom had been dead several years before the road was paved. The bulldozer pushed his mailbox and post aside like it was just another rock. So I took it home. I couldn't stand to see Tom's mailbox buried by a bulldozer. It doesn't have his name or numbers on it. Only rust. The red has been gone from the flag for so long there's not even a memory of a molecule of red paint left on it.

 

 

This was the beginning, putting the post in the ground and applying the primer. I've been wanting to build an outdoor sculpture for a very long time. I've drawn out plans for two that were never built, due mainly to expense. One would take twelve eight foot long four by fours. Sixteen ten inch bolts with nuts and washers. Would have needed a powerful cordless drill. It became unthinkable for somebody living on minimum income. I don't care about selling anything anymore, so I don't think of something like this project for home as having money value. I fixed it in place so nobody could buy it. Justin brought up yesterday the likelihood that somebody might shoot it from the road. I don't care. The circle is so big it is certainly no challenge to shoot at. I think it would be fun to one day find a bullet hole in it. But I don't expect it. The road is no more than twenty feet away. It would be all the more fun if kids would sneak around when I'm not home or at night and commit spraycan graffiti on it like at the Air Bellows Gap Road underpass at the Parkway. If they did that, I'd never paint over it. It's even too good a dream to hope for. I wore myself out putting the parts together today, but it was a feel-good kind of tired. Next, I pick up the mess around it. The paint cans I'll put together in a box where I'll know where they are from year to year to repaint. Then I'll plant the blocks of painted wood to stand vertically around it, and the mailbox post. Fun project.

 

 

 

 

 

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HILLBILLY ART---GETTIN ER DONE

cy twombly

 

 

Jr Maxwell has been with me in spirit today. This morning I picked up some motorcycle wheels from the motorcycle skeleton yard, a frame with a motor, 5 old rusted flywheels from I can't imagine what, a short crankshaft covered in rust. That's my treasure. I want to do something special with it, thinking of displaying it upright like Brancusi's Bird In Space. Might play with putting chemicals on it to make different colors of rust. Everything is possible when I have no box. I've decided to jump out of whatever boxes I've been functioning in where art is concerned. The box gives structure and foundation. I can find them outside the box, as well. I can't lean on the wall of a box. All the more fun. I want to make abstractions, though I also want to make crazy things like flamingos and giant insects, whatever happens. Anything goes. I spent the day in Jr's tractor repair shop that is now Ross's. The shop was built by Jr, has his name on the sign. It will always be Maxwell Equipment. The place smells like it smelled in Jr's time there, the old grease smell covering the cement floor over about thirty years. A mechanic's hands are always black with grease, a thin coat of black remains on everything he touches. Over time the black thickens until the handles of tools are black from much use. The shop was also Jr's man cave.

 

tony smith

 

 

I spent a few hours sitting out of the way by the wood stove not in use taking apart the gears and axles of the two back wheels. It was quite an adventure in bolt removal. I'm looking as much forward to disassembling these motorcycle skeletons as much as reassembling them in original new ways. Saving all bolts and nuts, sleeves, rings of every sort in a particular box. I want to use the bolts and screws from the bikes themselves putting them back together. Getting acquainted with my palette.  Tomorrow morning I'll tear into the frame with the motor and back wheel. Disassemble the whole thing down to the pistons and the rods, valves, sparkplugs, crankshafts. Every part of the entire mechanism I want to have available for use. Break them down to their nuts and bolts and tiniest parts. This is the time of deconstructing the dead bikes to their parts. Axles with bearings could be great for something that turns in the wind. I know I'm not the first to do something like this. Far from it. It doesn't matter. I don't want to look and see what other people have done. I want my own vision to emerge from the parts themselves and my experience putting them together into something new, something worth making. I'll let Ross decide about prices. I don't want that in my head. All this will be worked out conversationally over time. I can see I'll be spending a lot of time in the shop. It's not like we're starting a business. My only agenda will be never to get serious about it.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

It will be fun to make yard ornaments, even wall sculptures that hang on an outside wall or an inside wall. Things for indoors and outdoors. I see houses everywhere now with a black star hanging on an outside wall. I've heard they indicate a retired sheriff. I don't know. Whatever it is, I find it a very unfortunate image to put on one's house. A black star. That's kind of like an upside down cross. Not that it is anything at all, but the emotional symbolism is there. The black stars strike me sinister. They make me pause with a frown, like that aint right. Of course, it is right for the people who put them up and I remind myself it's their right like having a bird feeder in my yard is my right. It's just that they're creepy in my way of seeing. I don't want to make creepy things. I want them to express delight in one way or another. In this period of bike deconstruction, I'm discovering parts, shapes, designs, patterns. I like the rust. I will want to paint very little. Though some things will need painting. That can be decided per piece. No gotta-oughta-should-better-needta-benefit-from. I'll let Ross handle the money totally. I don't want to get mixed up with money. I'm doing it for the fun there is in it and that is all. If occasional gas money comes from it, hooray. Beyond that, I don't care. Even that, I don't care.

 

donald judd

 

 

This project will be done in a spirit of in memory of Jr Maxwell. Inside the shop is a sense that he is living. Jr was important to Ross and Jr was important to me. Ross and I did a kind of male bonding struggle around Jr. Men who don't like each other and have a fight come out of the fight best friends. The fight somehow, maybe even subliminally, becomes a bonding. Hierarchy is important to men. Knowing who can kick whose ass is important among men. I attribute it to 6,000 years of armies at war. Boys grow up to be soldiers and take orders. Boys expected to grow up and be killers for awhile, then raise a family. Warrior society. It's got our working class men, the ones that shoot guns and get killed, believing blind obedience is patriotic, masculine. Yes Sir! Easily manipulated by propaganda. Ross believed I was setting Jr up to rip him off. When I went home the day Jr's spirit left the body, expecting or asking for nothing. What I was there for was done. I never attempted to convince Ross that my intent was what he would want it to be, to allow Jr to leave the body in his own bed. That was important to him, and I was the only one who could make it possible for him.

 

dan flavin

 

 

I understand Ross's suspicion, because everybody around here knows somebody or of somebody who moved in on somebody feeble and alone to get everything signed over to them in the will. It happens. People you'd never suspect. I knew my purpose, but knew I could never be convincing; words are not convincing to anybody of these mountains and I understand. When it became apparent I had not imposed myself on Jr for property or anything in any way, the day he died, then I became ok to all who had been watching: Whitehead. All of Whitehead. I had no idea until the day he left the body that all of Whitehead had been watching. That day I became a naturalized citizen of Whitehead community. One of the great honors of my life, if not IT. In some way I don't understand at all when Ross and I are around each other, Jr is with us. I see Jr in him and he sees Jr in me. In short, we've become friends in memory of Jr. I like that. It keeps Jr alive for both of us. Like Jr said, "Patience is everything." The shop has become a gang of misfits, doing whatever needs doing. Today this old boy from town was there repairing the bottom of a fiberglass canoe and he'd never worked with fiberglass before. The sound of power tools, the satellite radio playing bluegrass sometimes and hard metal other times. The smell of grease and WD-40. Laughs happening frequently.

 

 

ai weiwei

 

 

We're ready to make hillbilly art, put up a sign misspelled like somebody who didn't pay much attention in school painted it, who got passed along year after year until he graduated illiterate. Or quit first chance it was legal, whichever came first, sixteenth birthday or finish eighth grade. That's how it was with my generation. I don't know what it is now. Probably not much different. Hillbilly. I think of it as exploiting expectation. What Ross and I are wanting to do is #1, get rid of his old motorcycle skeletons and parts that go with them, and  #2, have some fun. Humor. Funny. I'm already thinking of what I can do with maybe twenty valves from motorcycle engines, gas tanks, fenders, wheels, frames, handlebars, pistons, chains. I'm excited anticipating taking the motor and wheel off the frame to see what the frame itself looks like. I'm looking forward to having several different frames to see what can be done with them. Spoke wheels, rusted chrome, some with tires, some without. I want to leave the tires. I enjoy taking the bikes apart. It's like a potter kneading the clay before creating the form with it. I am thinking that instead of putting my name on them, finding a way to sign them Maxwell Equipment. That name acknowledges the group effort it is. I may be the one with the designing eye, but maybe not the only one. And everyone involved in the shop will be helping in varieties of ways, if no more than telling me how to use a particular tool, like a welder. Everybody will be involved. I don't want the credit to be all mine. That would be taking it seriously.

I want my part light hearted.  

 

 

frank stella

 

 

 

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ART: SERIOUS NOT SERIOUS

eva hesse

What about Dada? What about Surrealism? What about Abstract Expressionism? What about Pop, Minimalism, Op, Conceptualism, Post Modern? Talking with a guy I've known several years, his whole family, about an art project I'm venturing into involving welding, something I'll be learning as I go. I've wanted to know how to weld all my adult life and never got it done. Now, here it is offering itself to me. Hooray. I'm looking at sculptures made of varieties of steel scraps, wheel rims, motorcycle skeletons. With welder friend Ross, we will make things and put them out by the road for sale. He has all this junk metal that is too light weight to get any money for as scrap metal. Let's have a good time and make some crazy things. Sell them. Friend today said he took a lot of art and philosophy of art---he can't take art that lightly. He has to be serious about art. So he doesn't make any art. I mentioned making some abstractions with the parts. His response was that abstraction was what was happening in the Fifties and has no more relevance since then. I thought: Huh? What? I didn't want to go there, because I believe he has his reasons for his own way of seeing. I've spent my life looking for making art without making art.

cy twombly

The list of questions above were the unspoken questions that flashed through my mind when he said he was too serious about art to be so frivolous with it. I wondered. Twentieth Century art has a serious / not serious divide. The ideal to be serious and not serious to where they cancel each other. Eva Hesse. I talked about inability to do something spontaneous without regard for Art, the kind that is funded by corporations for skyscraper office decorations. I don't want what I do on corporate walls. I used to know somebody who bought for corporate offices in Charlotte and I thought that the best job a man could have. He'd fund a European vacation going around to different cities and galleries and artists studios buying for the Bank. On the other hand, the hand I live my life by, I find it repulsive the major corporations cannot pay workers a living wage, but pay for art in office spaces with millions in their budget, where everybody who works there would prefer Remington prints in ornate frames. I was in a show in Greensboro some years ago and saw a corporate buyer going around looking at things with somebody associated with the show and thought: great job. I didn't want to meet him or suck up to him or anything. Didn't even want him looking at my things. It was at this show I learned that is not the world I want to do my art for. I'd rather sell it at a roadside stall. I'm not breaking new avant-garde territory. Nothing close to it. Just a Joe having fun playing art.

ellsworth kelly

Getting momentum started in the morning toward making some stand up sculptures like John Chamberlain and Tony Smith, though not like either one. We want to make things like swans and other animals and bugs with parts. I want to explore abstraction in what I'll call a Wipe Out series. The whole idea behind it is redneck art, something to put in your yard in front of the trailer. I think of making everything I do Dada. Approach it like nobody has ever done anything like vertical sculpture of any kind. Giacometti had his Surrealist period interrupted by ww2 and he moved to Geneva, just across the border into Switzerland. The artists of Paris had to leave the country. Giacometti in Geneva was alone in his art mind. He decided to start over as if no sculpture had ever been made. He was making first ever. He started carving tiny, one-inch long standing figures, out of soap with his pocket knife. He kept them in small pocket match boxes. He returned to Paris at the end of the war and began making clay figures like he made with soap, carved them with his pocket knife. It was the only tool he used. His brother, Diego, cast them in bronze. I can see I'll be using my art eye, which I can do and nobody will notice. I believe our key word will be humor. All in fun.

giacometti

I found that I have come so far beyond Serious art that I don't even think about art as serious any more. It seems to me like internationally the whole world of art all over the globe is exploring Dada, making it new. My sensing is the next 500 years will run the course of 20th century art again, but all over the world; dada, surrealism, abstraction, pop, minimalism, conceptual. I'm seeing Post Modern the beginning of that cycle again on a bigger scale. First cycle happened in half a year in Zurich, 1915. Next cycle was 20th Century art post-Duchamp for half a century. This is why I suspect the next cycle to be half a millennium. After ww1 Dada transcended into Surrealism through similar excursions all over Europe into the inner realms in art. Abstraction started "officially" with Kandinsky and became a movement in New York after ww2, the same time bluegrass and rock n roll took off. Then the momentum happened in a hurry through the 1960s through minimalism and Pop, Op, et al, until about 1969-70, in my way of seeing the flow. By this time in the world of art, anything goes. This is why I have Found Art images with the blog, photographing things I see out and around, like water hydrants wrapped in black plastic and fixed with black tape. Christo came to Sparta.

christo

I've reeled inwardly since hearing it's possible to be so serious about art you can't do anything. That's too serious. It tells me art is not serious. Maybe I'll be making art for the first time in my life.  I'm seeing this as my own chance to discard what seriousness I have in myself about art. I know I have plenty. To weld something together that looks like a gigantic penguin for the lawn. From what I've seen of the junk parts we'll be using, I am peaking in my designing mind. I already know what I want to do with some of it. I'm ready. In Little Richard's words," I'm ready, I'm ready, ready, ready, I'm ready-y, ready, ready, ready, I'm ready, ready, ready, ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, ready, ready to rock n roll." It's like answer to a prayer I never thought to ask. It's another reminder to myself that I don't have to suck up to anybody about my art expression. Don't have to suck up to a gallery owner. Don't have to suck up to rich patrons at gallery events. I can't do that shit. I cannot look at any art expression having to do with money. To me, they're antithetical. That's not very practical thinking. I feel like the art world is the way it is because it's the nature of the world we live in. I don't care to "make it" or pretend to. It's rather freeing. No two ways about it, I still have much of my own seriousness about art drifting about in my head like space junk. Time to set it free before this lifetime is out. I'll give it the rebel yell of today: Hail Yeah!

tony smith

 

 

 

 

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