Deep Craft – Page 59 – Ethos of Making

Oakland Installation Dispatch

Oakland’s main tidal outwash to the Bay

I’ve had less time to explore lower Oakland on bike as we bear down on the installation of Oakland Fusion, but have made a few early morning tours of the Embarcadero in searchÂ of waterways connecting Lake Merritt and the Bay. I find that a bicycle is the perfect research tool for learning about a city’s watershed, both rider and water under the direct influence of gravity. Finding Oakland’s main tidal outwash (pictured above) gave me insight into the shape of the City from the perspective of water flow. As I stood over the flood of water draining out to the Bay I realized the City of Oakland is essentially a basin, with downtown flanking the banks of the Lake, and the surrounding neighborhoods branching mostly uphill, like spokes connecting to the Lake’s central hub.

I began to think of Oakland’s watershed as a tree structure, or more exactly as a root system in the broader context of its relationship to a larger body of water. There are few remaining oaks in town, but I also began to wonder where they would have naturally grown.

Oakland Installation Dispatch

So far this week we’ve completed the murals facing one direction and half of the first image facing the opposite direction. Ene, James and I have established a productive rhythm that should allow us to complete the project by early next week. We’ve learned to use the shadows and the position of the sun to our advantage, trying to keep the panels cool in order to prevent the adhesive from ‘kicking off’ too quickly as the tiles are laid.

Each of the eight images for Oakland Fusion has 560 hand glazed tiles, each with a corresponding number to indicate its position within the grid. I made the tattered numbering chart (above) about eight months ago, and it has remained in tact despite daily use over the intervening months. We are still using the chart on site to orient ourselves, and it has earned the nickname ‘The Shroud of Turin’. The crew decided to take the day off today to recharge for the final push after a chain of strenuous days.

The Week in Bloom

Rhododendron at their loveliest stage

This Week in Bloom is tempered by my recent, prolonged absence from our natural environs over the past two weeks as I focus on the installation of our public art project in Oakland, where I have been living and working from Sunday nights through Saturday afternoons. Itâ€™s been about six years since Iâ€™ve temporarily relocated for such an installation and three years since we moved from the City to our rural idyll on the Sonoma Coast. I did not anticipate the degree to which I would become attuned to the subtle daily changes reflected in the flora and fauna of our land and the surrounding bioregion, or the extent to which I would rely upon this for daily nourishment. When I arrived home last Saturday the ground felt unfamiliar, the meadow grasses higher than expected, and the twilight sounds sharper, more staccato and melodic after late spring rains and a string of balmy days. The overall effect was both welcoming and disorienting.

My initial interest in tracking the progress of countryside flora and fauna is a kind of backlash to my default mode of observing subtle changes in fashion and social patterns in the â€˜urban villageâ€™, having spent most of my adult life coolhunting in cities. It is simply human nature to seek out pretty, bright things as well as odd aberrations, and negotiate a sense of oneâ€™s place accordingly. The contrast of rural/urban and nature/culture that informs my recent days has given me new insight into the significance of the hand in the decorative arts, which bolsters my appreciation for the perennial role of the decorative arts in the built environment, however neglected in contemporary life. Hereâ€™s whatâ€™s been happening around our neck of the woods, culled from the past two weeks: Continue reading “The Week in Bloom”

Oakland Installation Dispatch

Ene and James lay tiles for the Kente pattern

I’m recouping from a second challenging week installing our Oakland Fusion project. By the end of the week we had laid up the first quarter of two murals, and got over the hurdle of working off the ground, using a new adhesive with a shorter pot life. I measure and mix the epoxy in a shady spot on the ground, then James ‘butters’ the panels, slowly combing the gew with a saw-toothed trowel. Ene applies the tiles in rows, beginning at the bottom and going up. It took us a day to get the proportions right and choreograph the moves, with the adhesive kicking off quickly in direct sun, applied to warm metal, but we were relieved to find a comfortable groove yesterday, which will carry us through the remaining installation over the next week and a half.

chef Lacey Sher, Andrew McLester (seated), Linda Braz and chef Eric Tucker

The highlight of the week was when Ene and I were invited to attend a five course, vegetarian meal conceivedÂ of and cooked collaborativelyÂ by chefs Lacey Sher and Eric Tucker, currently Executive Chef at Millenium Restaurant in San Francisco. The meal featured pairings of unusually distinctive wines from the Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties, distributed by Andrew McLester of Real Wines Company. Lacey lives in the building hosting our ‘residency’ where she will be opening a vegetarian wine bar this summer called Encuentro. The meal and flight of wines was intended as an introduction to the future offerings of Encuentro, and Lacey and her collaborators did a superb job introducing each new dish and flavor. The food was inventive, original, healthy, delicious and fun, and the wines tended to be mineral-y, low in alcohol and strong with simple, fruity nose and deep texture. Ene and I both had a wonderful night and left feeling oddly happy and alert. Here’s the menu:

Appetizer: sweat pea cakes with curried cashew cream; pea sprouts and crisp spring onions; crispy baby fava beans; pickled baby spring vegetables

Soup: cream of stinging nettle with lemon thyme cream and popover

Salad: potato terrine wrapped in braised leak leaves with smoky pimenton aioli atop a spring salad of strawberries and marcona almonds

Entree: crisp filo purse filled with farro and goat cheese with a fava bean/asparagus and morel mushroom ragout

Dessert: a selection of cheeses; dried black mission fig tart; vice chocolates

Oakland Installation Dispatch

This is to introduce James Crosby, a very talented sculpture student and former Skateboard Pro, who we’ve hired to help with the installation. Thanks to James’ incredible focus and good humor, we’ve been able to stay pretty much on schedule even though we lost a day and a half due to rain. By the end of yesterday, we had installed all four steel panels as substrates for the tile mural. Ene arrived yesterday afternoon, and the full crew will begin to set tiles today.

Oliver Ranch

Steve Oliver inside Ann Hamilton’s tower

I took a break from our Oakland Fusion Installation over the weekend to recharge, touch base with family and friends, and take advantage of a rare opportunity for a private tour of Oliver Ranch. Our group met in Healdsburg at the home of our gracious friend and host, Cindy Daniel, and carpooled through a late season downpour to the 100 acre home of Steve Oliver in Geyserville, where he has commissioned one of the worldâ€™s finest collections of site specific, outdoor artworks by the likes of Richard Serra, Martin Puryear, Anne Hamilton, Bruce Nauman and many others.

The group explores Richard Serra’s ‘Snake Eyes and Box Cars’

My Yankee sensibility normally limits my capacity for effusion, but I found Oliver Ranch to be one of the most awe-inspiring experiences in recent memory, especially in the context of contemporary art. Despite a steady rain, Steve took the time to personally usher us around the entire site, regaling us with his amazing stories along the way, conveyed with the freshness of improvisation. We were captivated by his quick mind, easy wit, persistent nature and generous spirit. It became evident early in the day that Steve has played more than a collaborative or curatorial role in facilitating these works. He has pushed the limits of feasibility itself by contributing his seemingly boundless technical and financial resources, natural enthusiasm and lack of interest in the â€˜art marketâ€™ to the artistsâ€™ vision at the outset of each project. Despite the consistent themes of metaphysical precision and sheer permanence linking the collected works, Steve took pains to emphasize the significance of relationships, and the value of hosting artists over the dinner table with his children and grandchildren.

Martin Puryear’s ‘Untitled’ is built from local stones and others from around the globe

Like the Medicis during the Italian Renaissance, Steve has succeeded in laying down the gauntlet of human potential when resources align to support pure imagination, and the site communicates at the level of wonder usually reserved for the magnificence of nature. When serving posterity, Great Art seems to simultaneously compliment and contradict nature.

Detail of Serra’s ‘Snake Eyes and Box Cars’, one of many 41″ x 41″ x 7′ blocks of solid cortens steel, pounded to increase density.

The only troubling distraction Iâ€™ve experienced after having been so viscerally inspired is that collectively, the works at Oliver Ranch ultimately function as a kind of memorial to uncertainty, as a potentially cryptic message sent from an otherwise temporal present to an almost impossibly attainable distant future. Then again, this only adds to the fascination simply by framing the dilemma.

The Week in Bloom

This week I asked my old friend the ‘sometimes painter’, Ben Llaneta, to report on the Week in Bloom from his home in Crystal Lake, Illinois, near Chicago (if you would like to report on ‘The Week in Bloom’ from your neck of the woods, please fill out the PARTICIPATE form and send a note):Â

Greetings from Crystal Lake, Illinois.
Weâ€™ve just come out of a particularly incessant winter, where itâ€™s been consistently cold since mid-November, without the fluctuations between deep arctic chill and warm thaws that usually characterizes mid-continental winters. Weâ€™ve had significant snowfall until the end of March, and there was sleet as late as this past Tuesday. Given that, warm weather has returned, and suburban sights of springâ€”robins, daffodils, squills, and squirrel roadkill, have been common the past week. Continue reading “The Week in Bloom”