I'm on You Tube!

And I don't even know, exactly, how to spell that place's name.  One word?  Hyphenated?  Got me.  But there I am anyway.

The Sunshine Coast is remarkably filled with artists.  Not that much of a surprise, I guess, because it is a beautiful place and a bit off the beaten path and exactly what artists would like to see every morning when they get out of bed.  These are the kind of artists who aren't pushing hard for a New York or Toronto show.  Which doesn't mean they are less talented, but just ambitious in a different way.

Anyway, one of them, Paula O'Brien, who operates in most media, is now in the You Tube slideshow mode, and has put together a very nice collection of work from 125 Sunshine Coast artists, including moi (which was very kind of her because I'm only a part-timer there on the Coast).  The work ranges from ice floor design (the kind you are going to be seeing very soon at the Olympics opening ceremonies: Gordon Halloran, who is from the Sunshine Coast, specializes in this work) to painting, pottery, photography, jewelry, metalwork, cabinetmaking, woodwork, weaving, and wall quilts, and some other media I've overlooked at this moment. 

You can see it here.  Brightens a gray day certainly.

Indoor Orcas

When you are a quilter exposed to the public, the public tends to give you things. As far as I can tell, every household in the world has a closet where it keeps bags of special fabric. Might be leftovers from a couch re-cover, scraps from a dance recital, or remnants from bridesmaid dresses. One way or another, it’s something that had enough meaning in its original use to make it not possible just to let it fall to the trash or the thrift store. And, eventually, much of it comes to quilters.

I have had virtual strangers arrive at my door with a small bag of black tulle with embossed flowers, suitable for some part of very fancy evening wear; with a bag filled with 2 tweed jackets and 2 fabric purses, including one that was entirely covered with gold sequins; with a carefully folded two-yard piece of batik the owner had bought on foreign travel and had never found a use for, but who was now filled with the conviction that I, somehow, will find for her fabric the higher purpose it deserves. And I try to fulfill those beliefs. It’s all great fun, a chance to talk to people about fabric and their attachment to it, and a chance to get some excellent fabric that I might never, otherwise, run into to. Sometimes it’s even more than that, discoveries of things I’m delighted to discover.


So it was two weeks ago at the Art Walk when a couple came up to me to tell me that they had a bag of fabric they thought I might be able to use for the quilts with people, specifically, for the skin parts of the people in those quilts. We talked, I took down their address, and got round to stopping by their house a few days later to see what they had.

They did have the fabric (leftover from pillows for the couch…and a lot of it: they must have planned for more pillows than they got around to having made), but they also had orcas. In fact, this house was all things orca. It's a 2-story house on the south-facing beach in Point Roberts and, as it turns out, there are two separate telescopes trained on the water to catch sight of any passing orca or orca pod. There are photographs of orcas, paintings of orcas, and stone collage/sculptures of orcas.

The photo at the top is of the orca outside the main door, about 6 feet tall. It is granite with naturally-colored beachstones and shells forming the background. The second photo is over the stove, and is a 'portrait' of J-pod, one of the orca pods that travel by us in the Georgia Strait, and whose members, I was told, tend to stick very close together. The third--heron--panel, made by the same method as the door orca (and the driveway orca, of which I don't have a photo) is a panel in the shower/bath, again, very large. All three were made by the householder whose wife was offering me the fabric. The householder's line of work was software, and these were definitely not part of that work.

Yet another example of knocking on a door in Point Roberts only to find things/people/events that you didn’t know were there, but are very happy to know are there. I try to imagine doing this in Los Angeles, e.g., and I’m sure that there are lots of unusual things behind those doors--some of which I definitely wouldn’t want to see--but I suspect there are a higher percentage of the delightful kind in Point Roberts, especially the kind that people have made themselves out of a need to create. Or at least it pleases me to think so.

Mandala Day

Last week was Mandala Painting Day in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast. Each year, the community repaints the mandala which, because it is right out in the open and immediately in your path if you are walking to the beach or the pier, needs to be repainted. But more than re-painted, each year it is re-designed in its shape format and then entirely re-designed in the contents of those shapes. Everyone in the community--kids, adults, artists, novices--is invited to come and participate, to claim a space, to pick up a paintbrush and to make their marks for everyone else to see and appreciate for the next 365 days. And then it is time to repaint the mandala yet again.

It’s a great sight to see, not only because of its size but because of its variety. And because of its size, its variety is essentially a mystery because unless you spent a lot more time at the beach/pier than I do, you could never really get a handle on all the things that are there within the mandala. Well, you can see them all, but you can’t really internalize much of what you’ve seen. For that, it would take living with the mandala. But that’s okay, because it’s not meant to be absorbed in its particularity entirely so much as to be absorbed in its wholeness and informed by the suggestion of its particularity.

It’s a terrific community exercise and Roberts Creek does it proud each year. It stands out from the host of festivals that clutter the calendar in the summer months in the sense that it is entirely participatory. Even watching the completed project feels participatory, whereas going to the jazz festival or the fibre arts festival, say, feels like being a member of the audience, like being an observer.

Point Roberts has a little of this in the so-far yearly Art Walk, which happens next Monday from 10-4. Unlike the Mandala Project, though, it doesn’t focus on a single event that stays with the community. Instead, a half dozen or more different individuals/groups offer people who come by the opportunity not only to see some completed art, but also to take a run at doing some of it themselves, in at least a limited way.

The quilters have participated in this for the past three years. We make up small fabric books with blank fabric pages, and people fill up the pages with cut up pieces of fabric (collage images or abstracvtions) which they glue on to the pages, with stamps and ink, with ribbons and glitter. And they take their book away with them. But how could we manage to do something that would involve a final product that, like the Mandala, would last for a year and then would be replaced the following year?

Obviously no time to think sufficiently about this before Monday, but there is next year to think about. Certainly everyone who comes could make a painted quilt square and the quilters could subsequently put the squares together for some temporary (i.e., year-long) purpose. Or, perhaps something else that incorporates the other artists. Ideas would be appreciated.

Being Prepared at the Lutheran Church

The local church (this picture was taken in March of 2005, and it looks like it was a much more kindly March than we are currently experiencing) has been designated a shelter in time of need by the Emergency Preparedness group here on the Point. Of course, one might expect that a local church would not need to be designated ‘a shelter in time of need,’ because that surely is its mission at all times. Nevertheless, it has this new particularity in that designation. Which is to say, should the world except for Point Roberts disappear, we can go there to experience light and heat and food and a place to lay our weary heads.

In order to provide this, however, the church needed more than spiritual resources; it needed a generator. So Lucy Williams has organized a series of fourteen or so concerts over the past two and into the next three months. They are held at the church, in the sanctuary, a sweet and simple room that holds maybe 150 people if sardined in. I like the space, even though I am not much of a churchgoer. What it lacks in mystery, it makes up for in sincerity. And it’s a nice place to hear a small ensemble perform.

This week, we dispensed with the more routine woodwind, string, or recorder groups, and were treated to a haiku poet, a modern composer/keyboardist, and a sumi-e (japanese brush) painter, all of whom were working, for the day, in haiku-like forms. About fifty people showed up, mostly in casual Friday attire, even though it was Sunday in Church. It is one of the charming qualities of Point Roberts that there is so little dressing range. I mean, there are gardening clothes and there are event clothes, but it isn’t a long trip from one to the other.

A lovely performance was had from all the performers, all of whom live in Point Roberts. In fact, most of the concerts are provided by local performers because there’s an awful lot of musicians, painters, poets, weavers, quilters, ceramicists, beadmakers, photographers, and general artists and general crafters living here, away from the commercial frenzy of the ROTUS. We could entertain each other, in one form or another, every weekend of the year, I suspect. Long past the need for generators. Maybe Lucy will need to become the Sol Hurok of Point Roberts…

Christmas Decor

I was driving east on Benson the other day and turned to look through the Drewhenge Arch as I passed it. I usually do this because I am interested in discovering where Mr. Drew’s black-and-white-spotted metal cow is pasturing from day to day. This realistic objet d’art sometimes is facing the road, sometimes has his back (or side) to passersby, sometimes is close to the arch, sometimes is far back. I imagine that at night he crosses the road and crops the grass closely in the field opposite. I imagine this because that field is always close-cropped and I’ve never seen people or machines cutting it. Must be the work of an artistic cow.

Anyway, there was the cow. But, on the other hand, the cow was not exactly the cow I expected to see. Today, the black and white spotted cow has become a Christmas cow. He is red and green spotted. Not a bright and garish red and green, but instead a subdued, tasteful red and green, the kind of Christmas colors you see in high-end stores.

I have to laugh to think of Mr. Drew thinking to do this. If I had a metal cow, I probably wouldn’t move it around, and I probably wouldn’t change the color of its spots to celebrate the season (will they be yellow and lavender for Easter?). But I am glad to know that he is thinking of these things, and now he is making me think about them, too. I am wondering what else he could do. Will the cow have a mortar board with tassel when we come to graduation time? Will the cow get a parka for the winter? Will the cow ever get a friend? Does Mr. Drew need outside help in thinking about this? I am also thinking of knocking on Mr. Drew’s door and asking him what he’s about. Probably an inventor not only of locking stones but of something even more amazing. Something to do with cows, I imagine.

Big World

We went out to the big world tonight. Point Roberts is thirty minutes from Vancouver Airport, thirty minutes from Richmond with all the malls that Vancouver’s Hong Kongese immigrants could ever want or imagine, and thirty minutes from Steveston’s Silver City, an 18 or so screen movie complex. Also, we are 45 minutes away from Bellingham’s world of shopping and medical care. Thus, we can talk about our isolation, and we are isolated down here, but an end to all that is very nearby if one chooses to go there.

I am occasionally chastised by friends and acquaintances who feel or perhaps even think that ‘I don’t get out enough.’ But, I think I get out just about enough. Somehow, traipsing back and forth between two countries seems quite a bit of ‘out” to me, even though Roberts Creek and Point Roberts share the same sense of isolation. But today, we did make it to the world of art and culture because we made the thirty-minute drive to the Richmond Art Gallery (The RAG). We were there to participate in the big trading night following the one month exhibit of artist trading cards from all over the U.S. and Canada.




I’ve described ATC’s here, but in brief, they are like baseball trading cards in size (2.5"x3.5") but instead of cards picturing guys with chewing tobacco, they are each a little bit of handmade art. They can be in any conceivable medium—oil or acrylic paint, collage, pencil, crayon, watercolor, fabric (not so common), metal (even less common), toothpicks (very rare); and they are traded not sold. The RAG has an open exhibit each year: you send them nine cards in a regular trading card sleeve, and they put everything they get up in an exhibit. It is wonderfully interesting to see hundreds—actually thousands--of these cards, each one different, each one worth looking at for a bit. But of course, you can’t look at them each for very long or you won’t make it very far into the exhibit and your brain will close down from sensory/response overload.

Nevertheless, some of the cards are particularly noteworthy. At the end of the show (which was tonight), everyone who exhibited cards offers the cards up for trade. Even if you aren’t from nearby, you can have someone at the gallery do the trading for you. Last year, I didn’t make it to the trade, but this year I did. My cards (one of the themes, this year, was 'Life As Art’) had a series of fabric elephants who wore their art on their sizable sides.

We arrived just as the trade was about to start. There were maybe 30 people trading their own cards, plus the many cards from the show that were being traded but not personally because the people who made them were from far away. The trading is always a little intimidating. You have to walk up to people and thrust your cards out and while they peruse them, you say, ‘Want to trade with me?’ Everyone always says YES, but there’s always the feeling that someone won’t and I just don’t know quite how I’m going to respond to that if it happens. Probably, I’ll just say OK, and move on, but still.

Tonight, most of the traders were adults, but there were a number of kids with terrific cards. One card I came home with was a brush painting of mandarin oranges, done by a 12 year-old Chinese-Canadian. The kids’ work at every trade I’ve ever been to is the freshest, the most spontaneous, often the best, if not the most technically skilled work there. Another card I brought home is a lovely little painting of a woman holding a cat. That was particularly pleasing not only because it was beautifully executed but because it was made by a woman who lives in a small town in Missouri, right next to the small town in Missouri where my younger daughter lives. I’d been to the cat-painter’s home town, in fact. I’ll probably email her to thank her. Most of the artists include their email addresses and home towns on the back of the cards, along with their names.

People were trading not only their exhibit cards but also other cards that they had brought, so I came home with 24 new cards. Not only that: I got to see the two other exhibits at the gallery. A veritable banquet of art and culture, enough to last me for awhile. Thanks to all the traders and to the very idea of ATC’s itself!

Art/Life/Art/Life

A Point Roberts real estate agent said to me once, ‘You never know what you are going to find when you knock on a door in Point Roberts.’ She was talking about the fact that although the outside of a house may be simple cottage, inside it may be startlingly sophisticated design. Other contrasts also happen, as today demonstrated.

Friends had invited us to visit the home of a local artist who did assemblage. Nobody was quite sure what this translated into in this particular case, but I was thinking something like Louise Nevelson. Instead, more something like Andy Goldsworthy by way of a really good thrift store, and both indoors and outdoors. And certainly not what I expected when we arrived at the house. It’s an ordinary looking house about 2 blocks from us, a house that I’ve walked by a thousand times, always admiring the peach trees that grow so vigorously behind the front fence. I spoke with the older, Canadian owners some years ago when I was out on a walk but they sold the house some three or four years ago and I had never run into the new owners.

We entered into a typically old-time kind of Point Roberts house, 4 or 5 small and crowded rooms and a yard also crowded with fruit trees and plants. But the rooms of the house--all the rooms--were filled not only with the required furnishings, but also with arranged pieces: dozens and dozens of them. Many small containers, often with their lids closed, all to be opened and investigated. A box filled with other boxes, each bearing one or two small pieces of old-fashioned jewelry, each with a story that the artist/gatherer could tell, but each reminding me of a similar piece I own or had once owned with a story that I could tell. A checker board with pieces that were never part of any checker game I’ve ever played, but clearly a game I could play if only someone would help me to find out the rules. Kitchen objects arranged carefully on a tray, drawing attention to qualities they share other than their practical purpose, although also including that. A small, old-fashioned travel case inhabited by a few, well-worn stuffed animals. I had a travel case like that 55 years ago when I went on a train trip, and beloved stuffed animals even longer ago. They would love to have lived in such an elegant home.

Outdoors, the yard was filled with many fruit trees, including a gorgeous pear whose fruit seemed as carefully arranged as the pieces in the house. In addition, every otherwise available area of the yard was filled with arrangements similar to those in the house, but here using rocks, shells, driftwood, metal, gravel, the objects of the earth, rather than the objects of human making. A small rock whose shape accommodated another and much smaller rock in only one precise location. Carefully arranged bird feathers gathered from the beach. Everywhere I looked, I saw the owner’s/artist’s hand at work, bringing together pieces/objects that had not previously met but that he imagined could benefit by the introduction. Such a great deal of thought and concern in this matchmaking. Too much to see in an hour or two, but the work easily conveys an attitude toward being on this earth that is genuinely inspired. We are here; other things are here; pay attention to them: see them as well as use them, respect them, enjoy them, take time for them.

No small surprise to find that the author of all this is a physician who lives here only part of the year and otherwise travels the world. He is, he says, an arranger of things. Right behind the doors of a perfectly ordinary little house. You can see his work here.

Fall Events

Even though summer is over and we’re finished with tourist events, Saturday was an at-least 2-event day here on Point Roberts. Probably more events than that, but at least two that all the people were invited to attend. First, at 1 p.m., was the Obama Rally at the Community Center. I needed to go pick up a book at the library and get an envelope in the Saturday mail, so went off to attend at noon, unfortunately, having confused the time. On my way, I saw leaf piles burning here and there, smoke drifting through the air, reminding us all that fall is here—which the recent warm weather has belied--and that others are not committed to saving their leaves for compost. Arriving at the Community Center at 12:15, I took note that no one was attending the rally.

By the time I realized that I was early (not late), I had run out of time and thus left before the rally started. I talked later to someone who said that it was thinly attended, but if a city the size of Salt Lake could drum up only 1,000 people for a rally, how many people would you get in Point Roberts where there are maybe 800 voters (of whom perhaps one-third will vote for Bob Barr)? About 1.3? There were, at least, more than that: another friend drove by at 3 p.m. and reported to me that there were 16 cars in the parking lot at that time, although some of them would be people going to the library. Bumper stickers were available, I was also told.

I don’t know; my idea of a rally is when you go out and yell, ‘Hell no, we won’t go!’ or ‘Down with the plutocrats!’ or something like that. My sense of rallies (too much sixties, I suppose) is that their purpose is to show opposition to someone/thing who seems to have a lot more power than you do and joining together gives you the (momentary) illusion that you just might be in charge of things. I don’t really think there’s a giant McCain majority out there, working to oppress us, given the massive opposition to the current administration and the lack of difference between it and the McCainites.

The second event was the Art Opening at the Blue Heron. The Blue Heron is a long-standing art and craft gallery, run by Kitty and Paul Doyle. Both residents and visitors shop there and many of the items are made by local artisans and artists. Each month, a different local artist is featured, and yesterday was the opening of a new show of fiber art. It’s a tiny little gallery, so work has to be fairly small to be shown, but each month something new and interesting is on display—painting, jewelry, glass work, photography, weaving, wall quilts, ceramics, etc.—and I go to celebrate its arrival. The quality of the work is very high. Also, in addition to the show, there are drinks and desserts. Nice way to wrap up a windy Saturday. Photos of the current exhibit (Artist: Joyce Wensley) are here.

Crayons

In Ha Jin’s A Free Life, the Chinese-born novelist writes about the difference between being an immigrant and being an exile or expatriate. He also observes that art requires leisure. Those two pieces of this fine novel reminded me of some things about living in Point Roberts and Roberts Creek. Many current residents of both places have come as retirees and have come from large cities, just as we did. We are definitely not exiles nor expatriates but we, too, are in some ways immigrants to a new way of life that we do not altogether understand, nor indeed can we altogether understand it. The tendency, of course, for Ha Jin’s characters as well as for those of us who have immigrated to small places like Point Roberts, is to try to understand the new place in terms of the old place and, at the same time, to try to make it the opposite of the old place. First we consider why there are not more of the amenities that we were used to in our old lives. Later, we may think about how we can and perhaps must become someone quite different from our prior self.

I considered changing my name when I first moved here. Never a big fan of ‘Judy,’ I found I was not a bigger fan of something else. Binker Wooten Wilson had a certain je ne sais quoi, but it worked only if all three parts were used, and that seemed more than I’d be able to expect. So, my antique name glided into this new life right along with me. Other things did change, though. I had spent my entire adult life as a writer, so I became an artist. If Art requires Leisure, as Ha Jin says, it may be equally true that Leisure begets Art. With job done and children off on their adult lives, there was all the leisure in the world. If you haven’t learned to keep house for two adults in about 30 minutes per day, including some cooking, you weren’t paying attention. So then there are the other 15.5 hours to consider.

I decided to focus on what I could see, and sixteen years of acute focus on the art of quilting has taught me a great many things, one of them being that the visual arts are more like the literary arts than I would ever have thought. The second is that a little bit of talent and a large amount of focused work will get you a long ways. I’m not the only retiree to find this out, of course. Artists of all kind are thick on the ground in both these places. The artist-retirees have, in common, leisure, a habit of focused work, and relatively little interest in what previously they understood as ‘success.’

They have something else in common, too. All of them that I’ve talked to hear, sooner or later, a friend, relative, or acquaintance say, ‘You’re so talented! I’m not creative at all.’ Sometimes these are reversed: ‘You’re so creative; I’m not talented at all!’ It’s a world-class conversation stopper. What is one to say? ‘Yes, I am and no, you’re not.’ Or, ‘No, I’m not, and yes, you are?’ I’ve learned to say something like, ‘Well, I work very hard at it,’ and just let it go.

But I think there’s a better way to say it: Creativity is like a seed. If it sits around in a seed package, nothing is going to happen to it. If it's planted, and gets some water and some warmth, it’s likely to start growing. If it’s in the wrong kind of soil or other external conditions are too harsh, it will die or just struggle along, inadequately. If it’s well nurtured and the conditions are made right for its development over a long period time, it will bloom well and beautifully. If it’s neglected, or nourished only fitfully, it won’t. The retirees with leisure who are working hard to foster that seed: well that’s one choice. There are lots of other choices in life that won’t get that seed to flourish, but that will allow something else to happen. It’s choice and focus, I think, at this point.

Which brings me to crayons. Yesterday, a friend sent me an interesting link to a recycle site. Many things there that I hadn’t thought about recycling. My favorite one, though, was crayons. If you’ve got crayons around that you have no use for, you can send them to this woman and she will generate new crayons from them and give them to those who need crayons, whoever that may be. Or, if you’ve been thinking about how to get that seed of talent and creativity to flourish, you can just take the crayons out and use them yourself.

Holy Cow!

One of the very nice features of the post-60’s world is the reintroduction of folk art into our lives. I’ve written previously about Patrick Amiot of Sebastopol, California (June 15, 2008), who has peopled that area with wondrously fantastic metal sculptures, and about Axil Stenzel of Roberts Creek, B.C. (June 23, 2008), who has peopled his yard with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of strange metal beings. Those who make the trek down the I-5 to California from up here have doubtless seen Ralph Starritt’s rusty cow sculpture to the east of the highway near Yreka in an endless stubble field. It is a life-size cow of welded sheet metal named ‘MooDonna,’ and it’s been in that field for well over a decade.

Down in Sebastopol, Patrick Amiot also has a semi-realistic metal cow sculpture (in addition to his fantasy creatures) that lives in a field populated by real Holsteins. According to the San Francisco Examiner, ‘At dusk, the live cows congregate around the artwork and use it as a scratching post, frequently moving it a few feet a day. Amiot has worried that they might knock over his creation. Which would probably be a first: a cow-tipping with cows as the perpetrators.’

If you google ‘metal cow sculptures,’ you will find that there a lot of them in the U.K., so it’s not just a U.S. thing. But now, Point Roberts has joined all these other excellent towns in having its own metal cow sculpture. [Correction: A reader points out that this cow (referred to as a 'lawn cow') is more likely to be fiberglass or resin than metal.] On the south side of Benson Road, just before you get to the admirable Aydon Wellness Clinic, there is DREWHENGE, where the homeowner and patenter of some kind of interlocking blocks has interlocked them to create an impressively large arch over his entranceway. On the large, grassy field that constitutes Drewhenge’s front yard, stands the cow in the photo above. You can’t always see the cow right from the road as you drive by because the cow moves around. Not under its own momentum, of course: it's a metal sculpture. Nevertheless, one can only hope that, someday, the Drewhenge cow meets up with the Point Roberts’ Marina's cows. I have, of course, no real understanding of why the marina has cattle, but maybe they’re folk art, too, even though they do move on their own and are eventually headed for an abattoir.

Casting Off Chains

One of the things about living in an out of the way place like either Point Roberts or Roberts Creek is that you are oblivious of much that goes on the in world. I seldom experience traffic jams or daily newspapers or even traffic lights. I don’t know anything about the kinds of things that are advertised on billboards. Since I don’t have a TV, I largely don’t know anything about most of popular culture. The tabloids at the grocery store are filled with headlines about people I’ve almost never heard of except in those (repeated) headlines. I’ve never been clear about whether Paris Hilton actually does anything other than be Paris Hilton. I know who Regis used to be, but am not clear at all about who he is now or who is the Kathy who is so frequently attached to him. I remember Oprah largely from ‘The Color Purple,’ and although I know she has a TV show and an eponymous magazine, I have never seen the one or read the other. She changes size, I know from the tabloids. And I know she endorses and causes to be sold large numbers of books, mostly about victimized people who eventually triumph over adversity. I’ve learned, over the years, to avoid the ‘Oprah's Book Club'-labeled books. Not that I have anything against triumphing over adversity. I mean, are not many if not most of the great 19th Century novels—Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskill, even Trollope—about people triumphing over adversity? It’s more the whininess of the adversity part than the triumphing that I object to.

In any case, all these things, I am untouched by. But what I receive in full measure are the chain letters of wonders that circulate endlessly around the internet. Virtually every day someone somewhere, someone that I actually know, sends me some series of sayings, or pictures, or videos meant to amaze or amuse or educate. The internet seems to be a hot medium, in the McLuhan sense, because I find it hard not to look, at least a little, at these wonders as they unfold via my email screen. Only yesterday, I was being counselled that all the wonders of our world were intended by God to do honor to humans: walnuts, look just like brains, and good for thinking; grape bunches, the shape of a heart, and excellent for lowering excess blood pressure; celery, like bones, and a real contributor to preventing osteoporosis;oranges prevent breast cancer; olives, you can imagine; etc.

Today, Ed got a video of a carnival ride in Texas that combines bull fighting with an Octopus ride; by the end of the video, people had been flung off the octopus and were being chased by the bulls. Yesterday, he got a b&w video of an Italian uniformed motorcycle drill team that looked like its routines had been devised by Albert Speer or whoever choreographed all those military drills in Triumph of the Will (or maybe it was in Riefenstahl’s Olympic Games film from Nazi Germany).

Ed’s chain letter gifts from others are largely action videos; mine, more like art stuff. I’ve received numerous examples of toothpick art, of street painting, of peachpit carving, of painting on feathers (feathers, I might add, that were much more beautiful before they were painted on than afterwards). There seems no end to this stuff. Today, I was visited (for the third time this year) with the fabulous series of painted cats. When I first saw these, my reaction was, ‘Amazing!’ Most of my family tends to respond with ‘How could they do that to cats?’ Perhaps this is because I take it as a given that nobody does anything to cats that cats don’t choose to have done to them, but perhaps I just don’t take cats seriously enough. In any case, sometime after the second email visitation of the fabulous painted cats, I had occasion to track down the pictures to show to a grandchild. Imagine my surprise when Google offered me, high up, a link to Snopes and the painted cats . Turns out the painted cats are a stunning example of (and might as well be a brilliant advertisement for) Photoshop: a fraud, a hoax!

I like those cats, though. Even photoshopped, it seems like a very interesting idea. When I first saw them, I couldn’t imagine how they got the cats to submit to it, but I walked right into believing that it was the real deal. Now, of course, I don’t know about any of those other things. Carved peach pits? Maybe not. Spectacular sand sculptures? Dubious. Italian drill teams, octopus rides with bullfighting thrown in? All of unknown status. If I have to check with Snopes before I look at every one of these chains, I might at last find a way to keep from looking at them. Unchained, at last!

Mine, All Mine

Another tourist festival here on the sometimes sunny Sunshine Coast. Rain welcomed the 5-day long, Gibson’s Landing Fibre Arts Festival, which has been an August feature in Gibsons for the past eight or so years. It includes classes, an exhibit, a merchant mall, a film evening, a reception evening, and a variety of demonstrations. It focuses on all the ordinary fibre arts (knitting, lacemaking, rug hooking, quilting, ornamental clothing, weaving, felting, crocheting, embroidery, paper-making, fabric jewelry, and wood-working, because wood, too, is a fibre, as the promotional materials inform us.

The exhibit is the part I’m mostly interested in, but it has a checkered record. The goal of the exhibit is to attract high-quality stuff from off the coast, but that has not been easy to achieve. There are no significant prizes, no significant publicity, and no significant ease for getting your work to and from the festival. It is a juried exhibit, but some years the jurying appears to be non-existent with plaintive letters going out to various fibre groups on the coast begging for submissions. Other years, the quality is very good. I’m just one of the tourists they’re attracting so I don’t know much about what’s behind it all, but this year, things took another turn downhill from my perspective.

The exhibit was excellent. I took my camera with me because I have lots of friends who would like to see what was on display, friends who don’t live on the Sunshine Coast, but who might try to get here if they saw the quality of the display. ‘No Photographs,’ I was told. ‘Copyright issues,’ was added vaguely, as if that explained everything, as if there were no such concept as ‘fair use.’ One of the attendants went on to explain that I, personally, could give the Festival permission to use a photograph of my quilt (I had one quilt in the exhibit), and that a professional photographer would take such picture. Hardly a response to my request, I thought. In any case, since I had just sold that quilt, I suppose the ‘copyright’ (whatever that might mean in this situation) would be going to the person who bought the quilt.

Intellectual property is what we were dealing with here. Thoughts, images, ideas: all mine, or all somebody’s, never to be touched, seen, thought, or even imagined without giving that unknown ‘ME’ credit or getting ME’s permission or providing ME with money. I heard that the festival had run into some difficulty earlier when they had used a photograph of a quilt from a previous year’s exhibit in their publicity materials. Apparently, the quilt was made from a copyrighted design (dear lord, you can copyright almost anything, including the simplest quilt design), and the brochure had not given credit to the copyright holder nor, I guess, had anyone asked the copyright holder's permission to use a photograph of a quilt made by somebody else in the festival’s brochure: I mean, why would they? TOO bizarre for me. I take a picture of a deer in someone’s yard. Does the image belong to the person who owns the front yard? Surely not. Maybe we should be getting the deer’s permission to take the photo in the first place, and then pay or give credit to the deer when I put the photo on my blog, in the second? Does the image belong to the deer? Have I captured its soul? Should Dorothea Lange’s estate have ensured payments to the woman whose photograph Lange made famous throughout the world?

I know there’s another side to all this, but I’m not persuaded much by that side, at least not when it's exercised in unreasonable ways. I’m happy to think that images (and information), as the phrasing goes, would like to be free. That’s what is destroying newspapers, I am assured, but it seems to me that newspapers, e.g., have done a very good job of destroying themselves by their mediocre display of journalism. I hope the Fibre Arts Festival doesn’t go the same route. Images are what is on view at an exhibit. Surely, the purpose of an image is to be seen?

Sedentary Art

Today, B.C. Day, marks the 150th anniversary of British Columbia. Considerable fireworks last night, followed by a very hot day that provided much beach celebration. Also, this is the Monday of the Art Meander (previously called the Art Walk, but people got a lot slower, I guess). Last year, it was organized by one of the local glass workers (there are a higher percentage of artists in Point Roberts than in most places, I suspect). This year, the glass worker who did such a good job of publicity and enthusiasm generating was elsewhere, so this year’s Meander seemed to have a smaller turnout. Could this possibly be caused by global warming? Or election fatigue? Or the fact that the temperature in mild P.R. was about 85 degrees?

The Point Roberts Quilters--a hardy group of about 11--take part in this escapade. The idea is that the local artists/artisans set up shop somewhere (in their own studios or in available public spaces) and do their thing while the local non-artists/artisans walk around and look at what the artists do. It’s a kind of artist/artisan zoo experience. But, it has the added feature of allowing the spectators to do some art zoo things themselves. So each place has some activity that kids and adults can participate in. Down at the Maple Studio, people were painting rocks in aboriginal dot painting formats; at The Blue Heron, they made artists’ trading cards, which can be traded at a later date. The quilters provided lots of fabric and lots of scissors and glues so that people could do fabric collage.

It surprises me how enthusiastic people get about doing this kind of thing. It is as if no one but the artists/artisans were allowed to have paints or markers or glue or fabric scraps. Of course, the explanation is that few people think to include in their schedule that kind of laid-back activity, and many adults would be hesitant to put themselves in that position because, as they are always telling me at shows and exhibits: ‘You’re so creative; I’m not like that at all.’ I always want to pummel them with timbits when they say that. Because it’s all untrue. Creativity is largely a matter of focus and on having a problem. You find a problem (or a problem finds you), you focus on it, you find a solution that wasn’t in your mind before. That’s creativity.

Sometimes the problem is ‘How can I pay my kid’s college tuition?’ Sometimes, it’s ‘What can we have for dinner tonight that I haven’t cooked ninety times already?’ And sometimes the question is ‘How can I make a really leafy-looking tree using this green fabric that’s in my hand?’ The willingness to focus on the problem and think up an answer is all creativity. If you are lucky, somebody else gets to see and to appreciate the results of your creativity. And having our quilts at the Art Meander is one of those lucky parts.

We quilters set up shop with 20 or 30 quilts around and the quilters themselves working on projects. I took my 11-year-old granddaughter and taught her how to make crazy quilt squares: she was my project. And people came by to look and to talk with us.

Some people looked quickly at the quilts and moved on and out as if they had just checked us off some list. Others looked long and if they did, one of us would go over to them and tell them something about the piece they were looking at. They have terrific questions, reminding me how little people know about the process of quilting. Everyone knows the objects, but that knowledge is pretty much limited to straightforward traditional bed quilts. It’s fun to see their eyes opened to things beyond that, and I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to talk with them this afternoon, as we meandered around the room together while the art stayed very, very still.

Recycling Remnants

There are a lot of small and large pieces of fabric sitting around in Canadian and U.S. houses. Not just the fabric that is in dresses and sheets and upholstery, but loose pieces. Some eyelet that someone bought once to make a baby bonnet but never got around to actually making and now the baby for whom it was intended is graduating from college; some remnants from a beach cover-up that was made of fabric too cute to throw away, and even though the cover-up was eventually cast off, the remnants remain in a drawer. A fancy fabric piece from a South Pacific vacation. That kind of thing. If you are a quilter, people eventually give you this fabric. And if you are a quilter, you accept it because it’s absolutely possible that someday you will need it, even if that day is far in the future.

If you are a quilter known to use unusual bits and pieces of fabric in a quilt (as I am), then even other quilters give you fabric. It is the fabric that they can’t imagine ever using themselves, so it tends toward the unusual and the exotic and the not-cotton or not dress-weight anyway. And you accept it because you are doing them a favor taking it off of their hands and it is always possible that some day…etc.

In just that way, I have acquired left-over stretch bathing suit fabric, fiber-glass screen, indigo blue landscaping/shade cloth, many and varied pieces of silk and satin and lace and velvet and velveteen, and an entire large paper sack full of excess prom dress or fairy costume materials (not obvious which). Costumers for theatre companies send me small boxes of fancy costume stuff. There is no end to it and I have many boxes of it in my workshop, nicely labeled as ‘Exotics’ or ‘SILK/SATIN’ or ‘Miscellaneous.’

One of the largest caches of such fabric comes from interior decorators or friends of interior decorators. Apparently, the decorator fabric companies put out new lines regularly and send sample books to two or three million interior decorator stores or free-lancers. Then, when their next line comes out, they send out another two or three million, and the previous sample books get given to me. Sometimes, especially if they are elaborate prints, the samples can be quite large and in that case, they can be quite useful. Mostly, however, they are small, emphasizing texture more than design, and then a sample book may be around 6”x10”, and not so useful. A sample book can contain 20-30 different pieces or, more likely, slight variants of the same piece. Each sample has a heavy and permanently-glued paper label that covers about one-fifth of its surface, further rendering this fabric not so useful.

Nevertheless, I and many of my quilter friends have entire boxes of these things. Beautiful fabric, beautifully designed. Must be useful for something.

Today, I spent about five minutes looking at them, trying to figure out some better, higher use. I had actually been using them to make disposable booklets for an Art Walk in which we are participating in Point Roberts next week. In my five minutes of thinking, however, I figured that if I doubled the samples, used rag bond for the inside paper, and ribbons to protect the central paper seam, I would have a very classy little blank book. Which would take me about ten minutes to make.

So now I’ve found a super use for all these small fabric samples. If only I had a super use for large numbers of very classy little fabric covered books with high-quality, blank paper pages.

Elephants and Art

We have no elephants in either Point Roberts or Roberts Creek. Just as well, perhaps, as they are hard on trees and we have a lot of trees for them to be hard on. But they are such unusual animals. Emotional, communicative, communitarian, intelligent, maybe even thoughtful. And such good memories, of course.

Elephants are on my mind for two reasons. First, I got an email message providing me with a link to elephants painting elephants. In order to do this, however, they need training. And second, because the Richmond, B.C., Art Gallery suggested I send them a set of 9 ATC’s for an exhibit on the theme of ‘Life as Art.’

ATC stands for ‘artist trading cards.’ Like baseball trading cards, they are 2.5x3.5 inches, stored in plastic sleeves, and are traded. Unlike baseball trading cards, they are each original art and are never sold, only traded. At least, that’s the basic idea. Started about a decade ago in Switzerland, the practice of trading ATC’s quickly spread to North America, and now throughout the world via the internet where many trading groups exist. (You trade the actual card by mail, but you make the trading deal via pictures on the net.) The kicker to it all is that there is no required media for the card: if you can get it on a 2.5”x3.5” card and put it into a plastic trading card sleeve, the method is up to you. I’ve seen them made of plants, plastic, fabric, sand, beads, and metal, as well as painted with acrylics, watercolors, oil paints, collaged with anything that can be flattened, and drawn. In my reasonably large collection, there are cards made by old people, by little kids, by professional artists, and by untalented amateurs. And all the in betweens.

So, I’m thinking elephants for ‘life as art’ because elephants' lives are surely artful when they’re allowed to have their lives and when they’re not destroying trees. Furthermore, elephants have wonderfully broad sides which could be used directly as a canvas or covered with a canvas. Thus have I set myself to making a crowd of elephants whose life is art. Like the elephants who, with training, have learned to paint elephants, I have learned, with training, to ‘paint’ elephants with bits of thread and fabric. Now completed, they go on to the Richmond Art Gallery, and after the September-November exhibit, they will be traded one at a time for something that other people have been thinking about these days and have also sent to the exhibit. And then they will live in their plastic sleeves in my collected ATC books.

So strange, elephants. Because we don’t have them in North America, we don’t know that much about them. Circus animals, largely, even if where we see them is zoos. I know four wonderful books about elephants: White Bone by Barbara Gowdy; Silent Thunder by Katy Payne, Elephant Memories by Cynthia Moss, and The Cowboy and His Elephant by Malcolm McPherson. The first is a novel in which the main characters are all elephants. The second and third are accounts by women whose research interests took them to Africa to study elephants. The last, the story of a man in Colorado (the man who was the photo model for the original Marlboro Man) who came into having an elephant of his own. Definitely not circus elephants.

What Are You Growing?

I think the first farmers’ market I ever went to was in Los Angeles, about 60+ years ago when, in a post-WWII extravaganza, my parents—accompanied by 4 children—drove to southern California to visit relatives. One of the places we definitely went was the Farmers’ Market (at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly) in West Hollywood. I had never seen fruits of such size or of such abundance. Although I very much doubt we actually bought anything, it was plenty wonderful just to look at it all. In those days, you got lots of fruits and vegetables in the summer, but of a fairly narrowly-defined variety. The Farmers’ Market had things I’d never seen: artichokes, giant dates, limes, strange varieties of berries. It had more different kinds of cheese than I could have imagined existed in the world, let alone in a single market. It was amazing.

Fifteen years later, on a summer visit to Pennsylvania, I went to an Amish Farmers’ Market near York, PA, as I recall. They had eggs in a bowl—eggs that came without shells, twenty different kinds of lettuce, strange sausages, molasses pie (called ‘shoe fly pie’). Farmers’ markets in Massachusetts, many years later, were mostly about the many different varieties of local apples I’d never heard of and certainly never eaten: the macoun remains my best memory of an apple, although it might or might not be as good as the fruit on my own jonagold tree. Two weeks ago, in Sebastopol, CA, every crossroad seemed to have a little farmers’ market/fruit stand with all the wonders of central California edibles on display.

So, today, I wandered over to the Sunshine Coast’s Farmers’ Market in Sechelt to see what we had growing here. The weather has been so cool, I didn’t expect there to be much of anything at all, really, and I was not much surprised. There was one stand with four cartons of tomatoes (grown in a greenhouse somewhere locally, I imagine, as the nighttime temperatures are barely warm enough to permit fertilization of a tomato blossom, let alone growing and ripening of a fruit; another with garlic ‘scapes’ (the long green leaves of the underground garlic bulb which are sauteed and garlicy of taste) and ‘sea asparagus’ (this salty delicacy will be found wherever sea kayakers lurk. Carpeting the water’s edge on mud flats, sheltered coves and estuaries, sea asparagus … say no more, I think); yet another had some lettuce and other salad greens. No blueberries (yet), no strawberries (yet), no raspberries (yet)…not much of anything edible, really, and very little promise of too much more in the days to come.

But there were many, many booths, because, for the most part, the Farmers’ Market is a craft sale. There were lots of stands with jewelry, with hand-knit scarves and hats and kids’ sweaters, with garden rocks, with pottery, with more jewelry, with wind toys, and with driftwood decorations. Tables with carved soapstone, with potted plants, with yet more jewelry, soap, locally ground soft wheat flour (!), paintings, drawings, and finally tables with a palmist and a quick-sketch character artist and a busker playing the accordion.

This is what happens when you try to do a Farmers’ Market in an area where there are no farms and where, instead, artists and craftspersons are very thick on the ground. But perhaps we could just think of ourselves up here on the Sunshine Coast as people who farm art and craft, and it appears that we have raised a bumper crop of both.

Visiting the Family Stenzel

Mr. Stenzel lives down the road from us in Roberts Creek, B.C. I take it to be Mr. Stenzel because there is a fancy welded metal sign at the end of his driveway that says ‘Family Stenzel.’ The reason you might notice this when you walk by is that next to the sign is a four-foot heron made of old chain saw blades. Everything that goes to make up this heron is something else: screwdrivers, threaded rods, wrenches, nails, chains, pipe: all that metal stuff that collects in the basement of a handyman and that there is never any way to organize. Mr. Stenzel has organized all this material by re-organizing it into objects. Mostly but not exclusively birds. There are metal birds in real trees, and real birds AND metal birds in metal trees, but they all look like real birds in real trees from a distance.

Mr. Stenzel and his family live in a regular-sized house on a maybe ½-1 acre lot that is covered with Douglas firs, hemlocks, and cedars, which are the three main evergreen trees here, but even more it is covered with his metal sculptures. As a result, it is really hard to take pictures of any of the perhaps 250 objects that are arranged around in his yard because they all appear on a darkened stage, even when it is a pretty sunny day. But there are not just birds. There are warriors and acrobats and elves and jousters and kings and queens and mushrooms and pretty much anything you could think of.

Unlike the metal worker couple in Sebastopol, Mr. Stenzel has, more or less, all his work on display in his own yard, but he, too is happy to have guests. There are pathways around the yard so anybody can walk in and around and get a better look at the pieces. He does have them for sale occasionally at local art shows. And we own one of his pieces. It is the guard dog in the fourth picture.

That came about because Ed had been gathering up the usual metal stuff in our basement and he made a particularly nice selection of unusual pieces and took them down to Mr. Stenzel a few weeks after he had given us a guided tour of the yard. Some months later, we were back for another visit, and Mr. Stenzel gave us the dog, which included some of our parts.

Yet some months later, we were walking by a thrift shop late in the evening when the manager came out to dump some things and, upon seeing us, asked us if we would be interested in a overhead cam cylinder head. (We must have looked like the kind of people that would be out looking for used car engine parts on a late Friday evening.) We took it to Mr. Stenzel, of course, and he made a wonderful scuba diver figure out of it, with the part as the upper torso and tank. I didn’t see it in the yard today, so he may have sold that one. I was thinking about buying it, but never quite got around to it.

Visiting Mr. Stenzel’s yard: that’s what life should be more about and it should be a good deal less about politics, and wiretapping, and invading other people’s yards and countries. More of his very crowded yard here

Art for Art's Sake

Visiting in the middle of California’s wine country, I am surrounded by rolling hills, small truck garden farms, cows in every small field, strawberry fields and farmer’s markets. Lots of collapsing wood barns and even collapsing metal barns. Narrow roads. It has some echoes of Point Roberts but the area is much drier and way more touched by its neighboring towns and cities. In fact, seeing this area makes me realize just how untouched Point Roberts is by the close-yet-far urban and suburban areas to the north and south.

The nearest small town to where I am is Sebastopol, which carries to the visitor no memories of the Crimea, where I believe the original Sebastopol was located. Nor does Sebastopol remind me of the slick suburban areas I know from southern California, where every house appears to be either a recently built or a recently remodeled Spanish hacienda.

Instead, Sebastopol appears to be filled with small stores and small, functional and beautifully maintained houses with a kind of spontaneous ambience. On one street, a few blocks long, most of the houses’ front yards feature witty, intricate, recycled-metal sculptures. The ones above are typical, but there were maybe two dozen different pieces. Some were almost as big as the front yards they sat in. It’s hard to believe that every house owner had purchased this art; easy to believe that the sculptor gave them away for the sake of a permanent exhibit.

That’s an idea that Point Roberts, if it had a charitable sculptor of witty, intricate, re-cycled metal pieces, could easily borrow. Photos of more Florence Ave. sculptures here. The metal artists: Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent.

Get a Yurt!

Today, I went up the Sunshine Coast to visit an acquaintance who has set up a new business venture that involves half a dozen yurts and the hopes of a lot of people moving in and out of her establishment. I heard her describe the project a year or so ago when it was very much in the planning stage, but this is the first time I have seen it actually in the flesh, so to speak. I’d heard of yurts before she told me what she was planning, but I hadn’t heard of (or seen) them in the sense she was speaking of them. Yurts with Mongolian residents in various desert areas of Mongolia is what I would have had in mind. Obviously, she had some other idea.

What she and her husband have created are the housing and plans for a fibre arts studio that also provides workshops and gallery exhibitions. The next job is to get the people to come for both and they have made a very impressive start with gallery shows and workshops of many sorts planned for many months ahead. The yurts are stunning. Well, from the outside, they look kind of like what you’d see in Mongolia, I suppose, but on the inside, the space is quite lovely. Three of the yurts are 28-feet in diameter (615 square feet each): one a studio where she does her own work, one a gallery-exhibition space, and one a workshop space. All have electricity, radiantly-heated floors, light domes and windows, beautiful curved walls that feel good. The workshop has water. Two smaller bathroom-yurts are included, plus a 20-foot office and maybe another yurt whose purpose I’ve lost track of. All very nicely carried off. I can only wish them well.

This seems to be one of the things some people can do in this world in which one career finishes before retirement and old age actually start. People have these dreams of becoming vintners, or running a bed-and-breakfast or an art gallery or whatever it is that can help them, I think, to believe once again that work is not only an honest activity but one that can be fully and personally rewarding beyond issues of money, but only if one is largely independent of bosses, bureaucracies, corporations, and the like.

We live in the age of globalization, they’re always telling us, but I think we live more and more in the age of unknown forces that create conditions that drive us all at least a little crazy. Think of Jessica Yellin in the news today saying that the executives in the news media made it clear that the reporters were not to challenge the Bush administration’s war in Iraq back in 2002 and 2003. No, she says, in her second assay at this story. They didn’t say it directly; it was just obvious from their attitude, from their behavior.

We are all of us way too much controlled by these odd forces from above and without who want something of us without saying it exactly: want us to go shopping, want us to go on vacation, want us to just let them do whatever they are doing—in essence, want us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Point Roberts and the Sunshine Coast are both, to varying degrees, replete with people who are hoping for a different kind of life than the one they had before they got here. Putting up a yurt is a very nice start.

Fame

A British weaver of extravagantly beautiful pieces (she weaves with monofilament that is thinner than hair; you can see her pieces here, but photography doesn’t really do justice to pieces so dependent upon ambient light) was visiting Point Roberts this weekend. In fact, visiting another weaver who lives here and is a friend of mine. The two weavers came round to my house this morning so that I could show off my abandoned house quilts . The British weaver was much taken with them and said I should be famous.

It’s always extremely nice for me when someone speaks well of my work and even nicer when they can tell me what they like about it, suggesting that there is some actual communication between creator and viewer. But, I’m glad not to be famous. Of course, it’s easy to say you’re glad not to be famous when you are not famous. You will have to take it on faith that I really am glad. When you are famous, in this culture, you get to spend your time on your fame. Journalists may interview you (and you get to worry about whether the published interview will make you sound self-important or your work look trivial). People who are responsible for programs of some sort will ask you to come and speak to a lot of people, most of whom will never have seen your work, and your slides or your power point presentation will fail to have sound or be visible or some such. People will want you to help them with their work, so they can be famous, too. And so on. What you get is a lot of time spent on talking about your work or preparing to talk about your work, but much less time getting to do it. I think the purpose of doing it is doing it. But I may be idiosyncratic in that respect.

I read a few days ago that Doris Lessing judged that receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature was the worst thing that ever happened to her. At 88, she is awash in interviewers, and fears that her actual writing career has ended because she will never again have enough solitary time to think about and write another book. Sounds about right. Sorry for your troubles, Ms. Lessing, but thanks for all the books that got to us when there was still time.

One advantage, of course, of taking up an artistic kind of career in later age is that you may very well have already had enough success (fame of a sort) in some other career that you don’t really need any more fame or even additional money; or, conversely, you may have come to terms with not being famous and along the way discovered some other and more rewarding pleasures, including the sheer joy of doing what you want without having to think about who will pay you for doing it.

Point Roberts has more than its share of people with artistic careers, but few of them here, like anywhere else, are making a living at it. But now and then you can see their work in one of the local galleries, especially The Blue Heron, or its cross-the-street neighbor gallery, The Maple Studio. Maybe there should be a Point Roberts Artists Association to advise the Community Association on artistic matters? It is an extremely odd thing about our culture that art of any sort (visual, written word, object) is very highly valued only as long as it can be made out to be extremely rare. That’s why artists do better after they die, I suppose: they don’t risk adding any more pieces to their oeuvre, thus diluting the value of the previous work.

On the other hand, there is an enormous amount of creative spirit out and about, and extraordinarily beautiful books, poems, music, quilts, paintings, sculptures, weavings, and other forms of art abound in most places, but most people never see it, and certainly never buy it. Such work is here in Point Roberts (well beyond the boundaries of my workshop), as it is in New York City and in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, too; work that goes unseen and unsung. Art is a commodity that is labor intensive and it is one-of-a-kind. For labor intensive work, we look to Asia; for one of a kind work, we look to the past. So, perhaps I will not be famous until I’m dead; at least it won’t eat into my time.