Art of the Outdoors

My classmate, Hass, and I were standing on a rooftop on the lower west side of Manhattan watching a dance performance taking place in a vacant lot across the street when he nudged me and whispered, “That’s Robert Smithson.” The tall guy to my left at the parapet, in a cowboy hat and black trench coat, was solemnly staring down at the ground, along with a couple dozen other bohemes of the downtown art scene who had climbed four flights of rickety stairs in a derelict, cheese warehouse to view the show.

Fire Circle Square

The design and layout of Fire Circle Square highlights quartz boulders by turning a collection of them into a fireplace and four adjacent perches. After positioning the stones, I carved depressions into them to create smooth sitting places. The fireplace stones were also cut, ground and polished, and then assembled into a plinth to hold a steel fire bowl. Between the plinth and seats I laid a floor with flagstone from a local quarry. The location of the piece was chosen to take advantage of a preexisting wall corner and a western overlook facing the mountain-ridged horizon.

A Ripple Effect in Stone and Steel

As part of its 40th anniversary, the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont commissioned me to create a permanent, interactive, environmental art piece. The result is a 1,000 sq. ft. dry stone and stainless steel sculpture that rises like a geologic upthrust from the open space alongside the museum entryway. Visitors can walk, climb and sit on the undulant surfaces of the work, or, simply view it on their way to, and from, the building.

Finn Island at Landmark College

During the month of May, a 22 meter long sculpture surfaced on the quad at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont. The dorsal fin of the granite and earth construction rises 2 meters above the MacFarlane Science, Technology & Innovation Center lawn. Once the cover plants are established on the earthen swells of the shark body, the piece will become an inviting land feature for students and faculty to congregate for outdoor classes and conversation.

The Shadow Hill Concept

With a strong northwesterly wind whipping “snownados” up from the frosty ground outside, I’m in the studio devising hypotheticals for an unfrozen future. There’s time enough for a wonderland of “what ifs” to decorate the internal landscape when the porch thermometer reads 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Most are just a smokeless pipe dream, but sometimes an idea takes hold and won’t let go until it attains some semblance of reality. Nothing is real to me unless it achieves three-dimensionality. Even at ¼”-1’ scale, a concept materialized in modeling clay is enough to make me a believer.

Montshire Museum Raindrops

A raindrop splashing on still water ripples the surface with expanding wave rings that grow in number as they diminish in height. From the purity of the physics involved comes a simple beauty. Liquid in motion is mesmerizing to watch because it’s constantly changing while remaining the same. For the upcoming project at Montshire Museum I will petrify an instant in the life of two raindrops.

Artist Statement Stone Clouds

Stone Clouds is a tribute to the sustainable agriculture practiced by generations of Mettawee Valley farmers who've picked tons of stones from their fields, all by hand.

Every year, the plow turns up more stones in Ken Leach’s cornfield. It appears they’ve floated up through the rich Mettawee Valley soil from below the surface when in fact they’ve floated down upon the face of the earth from far above.

Stone Clouds Materialized

The shape of a project is pointy at opposite ends and lumpy in the middle. The spark that starts things off may be as quick and simple as seeing a cornstalk-stubbled field sprinkled with the till of a bygone glacier, and thinking, “What would it take to put those stones back up into the sky from whence they fell?” In between that thought and standing under Stone Clouds at Shelburne Museum yesterday was a year-long ride’s worth of lumps and bumps. The unknown is an uneven landscape. Highs are best employed to gain speed for the roll up out of the lows ahead. Uncertainty provides its own propulsion.

Rock Springs

Like other environmental art works I’ve done, Rock Springs is in, of and for its home place. The 32’x44’x5’ sculpture invites exploration. The interwoven coils of dry stone walls rise and fall underfoot as they’re traversed. Broad top stones elevate viewers above deep fissures separating the walls. Hand trimmed and set sandstone blocks comprise the double-faced walls, with architectural remnants repurposed for top stones.

Amphitheater Studies

Amphitheaters have been an interest of mine since the early 1980’s when I applied for and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study them. Soon after, I was commissioned to build amphitheater-like seating behind the home plate backstop of our local softball field. The granite terraces have become a well used addition to the summer scene in Brattleboro, Vermont. Since then, I’ve been able to design and build lots of stone seating arrangements but nothing quite like a classic, half-shell amphitheater of old, until now.

Stone Clouds

“Permanent” is one adjective I associate with my dry stone constructions. When I was asked to make a temporary installation on the grounds of the Shelburne Museum for the upcoming “Eyes on the Land” exhibition, some very different affiliations sprang to mind. And so, as I became acquainted with the Vermont Land Trust properties in the Mettawee Valley that I was partnered with for the show, I sought out examples of land formation and land use that might be described as “short term”.

Lilyfield 2

The Pictish symbol for time depicts intertwined spirals, spooling outward in every direction from a centerpoint. They saw their movement through time as a dance with the past, in the present, with a nod to the future. For them, where each step is experienced looks and feels different from every other, but all are part of the same expanding destiny.

Lilyfield

The whorling pattern of convoluted forms in the signet carved on the Cadboll Stone has a deep history. Before the pattern became emblematic of Picts culture, the earlier Celts employed a similar iconography in what is understood to be their graphic representation of time. If I think of the signet in terms of time, I see that for the Picts time was not linear. Time pulsed in a rhythm. Time unfolded and turned back on itself. The Cadboll signet lays out all of time’s manifestations in one picture. The concealed is present with the revealed.

Art, Stone, TravelDan SnowMay 10, 2015cadboll stone, celts, featured, pictish stone carving, picts, stone carving

Pumpkin Seed Winter Garden (what I did on my winter vacation)

There’s a certain satisfaction in doing something yourself that can’t be achieved in any other way. It’s not that other satisfactions have less strength or value, they’re just different. Each and every stone laid in the creation of the Pumpkin Seed garden enclosure passed through my hands. I say that with pride but also in the full knowledge that a team of wallers under my direction and following my design could have built the structure to a high standard without my lifting a finger. So, for me, it’s not the final result that distinguishes the piece, it’s the process I went through in the past few months to get it there. The daily figuring-out of what needs to happen next and how to get it done under the prevailing field conditions is what the Seed is made of in my mind’s eye.

Stone Clouds Forming

Every year, the plow turns up more stones in Ken Leach’s cornfield. It appears they’ve floated up through the rich Mettawee Valley soil from below the surface when in fact they’ve floated down upon the face of the earth from far above. There were once great clouds of ice between earth and sky. Ken’s stones were tucked into mile-high blankets of frozen water vapor. They’d been plucked from the even taller mountains that used to reign here, and carried in alluvial fans out across glaciers that were thousands of years in the making and thousands of years in the melting. When the land that is now a Vermont Land Trust protected property said goodbye to its last glacier, twelve thousand years ago, all the sediment and rock that was riding its coattails settled to the ground, creating the dark soil that farmers like for growing corn, plus, an unwelcome bounty of stones.

Diamond Mines

My land art piece, Diamond Mines, is now in a happy marriage with Glenmorangie distillery. The Diamond Mines from 2011, with photo by Peter Mauss/ESTO, has been licensed for a Glenmorangie Signet print advertising campaign. See below for the TICKON Sculpture Park Catalog text.

Art, Environmental Art, SculptureDan SnowJanuary 12, 2015dan snow, diamond mines, esto, featured, peter mauss, tickon sculpture park

Place or Space

This week celebrates the publication by Aalto University of a ground-breaking Environmental Art book. Edited by my friend and comrade in art, Markku Hakuri, Place or Space (Paikka vai tila) tells the story of places, spaces and situations that the contributing writers encounter when reflecting on the potential of art as a provider of social commentary, and as a shaper or a challenger of the visual appearance of our environment.

Art, Books, Environmental ArtDan SnowNovember 3, 2014art, books, environmental art, featured, finland, markku hakuri, nature, place or space, teaching

Vermont Arts Council Award

Fifty years ago I won a blue ribbon in the Brattleboro Sidewalk Art Show. Thirty years ago I won a National Endowment for the Arts award for designing a local amphitheatre. This week I received a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council. Some might say, the awards in my artistic career have been few and far between. I believe their rarity makes them all the more precious. Being recognized by my beloved green mountain state is especially dear.