For a well-considered visual environment
30 October 2011 Leave a Comment
I walked through the prairie this past week for the day job, taking photographs for an ad. It’s a 2+ acre site west of Grand Island where the ruts (swales) of multiple wagon trains can still be seen. This lovely piece of vegetation caught my eye as I paced the prairie.
19 September 2011 Leave a Comment
This will be a beautiful thing for downtown Grand Island, Nebraska.
The Chocolate Bar has been a long time in the making, a project of one of my brother’s good friends. My sister (JRN Designs) worked on the interior design with them. They seem to have a really strong business model so I’m hoping the place will stick around for a long time!
31 July 2011 Leave a Comment
Yesterday my wife and I drove two hours north to the very small town of Clearwater, Nebraska. One of the seven or so yarn stores in the state happens to be in this community of 300+. We had a great discussion with MareLee, the proprietor of the business, about creativity, community and the unHurried prairie life.
Prairie Threads (website down at the time of this writing) opened about two years ago. When she told the town council she planned to open a fiber arts store they thought she was crazy but supported her anyway. Clearwater, like so many other tiny towns, is on the verge of dying.
Hannah & Maisie & threads
Her good friends back in Washington State, where she had recently moved from, thought she was nuts as well, certifiable. Why would someone move from a lush, populated, coastal state to the landlocked Great Plains, to the edge of a grass covered desert, to a sleepy little town?
All of those Washington friends have since visited her in the Nebraska Sandhills, and none of them are questioning her sanity any longer. Upon visiting, her friends realized how productive she was artistically after getting away from the frenetic city-dweller mentality. They realized you can sit and have a real conversation without the pressure of somewhere to go, someone to see, something to do. They saw how she is now a real part of the community she lives in — crazy or not — in a way she never experienced living in the big city.
We talked about Kathleen Norris’ book Dakota
I drew a lot of parallels to the Scissortail art center idea during the conversation. MareLee pointed out that the yarn store venture was a lot of work and required years of persistence preceding success. Teaching is a key aspect of her business (she has 40 years of experience to draw from across all fiber arts: knitting, spinning, dyeing, weaving, etc). She was able to purchase a home and place of business for a song (her son, living and working in Washington D.C., pointed out that what she paid was barely a down payment on a place in the city).
If you’re ever in north-central Nebraska, make it a point to stop into this prairie gem. While you’re up there, have a meal at Green Gables in Orchard, Nebraska, a barn converted into a restaurant.
16 July 2011 1 Comment
I often refer to myself as a wannabe storm chaser, but a more accurate description would probably be that I’m an aspiring storm-gazer.
When a person here’s the term “storm chaser” they automatically think of someone, in this era of cable TV, who is trying to get as close to a tornado as they can without dying. I don’t need to see a tornado to feel as though I’ve had a successful outing storm-gazing, although tornadic storms are often the most picturesque. In fact, in most cased I’d rather be miles away from the storm, looking back at the supercell in full. I want structure such as the updraft, anvil and mammatus to be clearly visible so I can sketch or photograph them and put them into clay.
I’d like to be able to chase storm-gazing opportunities, and have made very mild attempts at doing so a couple of times the past couple of years. Storm-gazing from home, from Grand Island, has been very poor so far this season. We’ve had a few storms roll by, but it’s either been at night or while it was overcast to begin with.
Yesterday evening a nice little supercell formed just south of Grand Island, and in my unfortunate hurries I somehow missed its birth until it was more or less just a gray anvil overhead. The rear flank was visible to the west, but it wasn’t photogenic with the bright, late afternoon sun still bearing down on it, aiding in the storm’s development.
A couple of hours later some of the structure was quite nice, though, as the cell slowly floated north over Grand Island. An acquaintance from high school posted this stellar capture to Facebook, and I stitched together the following panorama taken from my driveway with DoubleTake.
5 June 2011 7 Comments
Abbot, Albaville, Burkett, Berwick, Cameron, Easton, Home, Junctionville, Loyola, Marengo and 10 more. These were the towns in Hall County, Nebraska, that didn’t make it. Each one had its own post office. Some were personal ventures, other cooperative and still other were business related. Many were around for a very brief period of time, hoping the railroad would come through. When it didn’t, they died off. Some were around for 50 years.
In the scheme of the developing western United States, the challenges small towns face now look a little different. The rails have already been laid for the most part, trucks allow people to live in remote places without growing all of their own food. The internet allows people in rural America the option of living with the same luxuries, if they have the money, as the people in large cities.
Small town America as a charity case
Last week, Damaris at the Internet Monk suggested the church in America make small towns a new mission field. She lives in a small town that just lost its grocery store. The owner retired and there was no around to replace him. “Where are the wealthy churches willing to back a small business operator in a rural area as their mission project? . . . running a doctor’s office or grocery store in rural America isn’t typically considered missions by many Christians. But if caring for people’s daily needs is a means of mission work in Burkina Faso, why not here?” That in itself is an interesting question, but it’s not the question that really prompted this article.
In the comments following Damaris’ appeal, a few people began to question the validity of saving small towns in the first place, let alone with church monies. Some people were suggesting we should, perhaps, just let them die — maybe even help them close up shop.
Should a small town try and be revived, or should it die?
Life in a small town — and by small here I’m thinking 2,500 people at the very most — wasn’t something I ever really wanted in life. My idealized space was always the countryside outside of a large city or the actual core of the city. Living in Siloam Springs, Arkansas for more than six years (not exactly small by rural standards at 14,000 people, but half the size of anywhere else I’d lived at that point) probably opened the idea up to my subconscious. Giving serious consideration to Hazelton, Kansas was the first active step in my considering life in a small town, very small. The past month I’ve been pondering a property for the arts center in the even smaller Kansas community of Ada, which appears to be made up of all of 8 named streets.
Who makes the call?
If we say that we think small towns should die, who makes the call? How small is too small? Do some small towns have cultural value that gives them precedence over their peers that might not have a museum or small college?
The debate over the value of rural America is actually already underway. A few weeks ago I heard a news bit about whether or not road maintenance in some of the more the rural parts of Nebraska should continue to be funded, or simply be forgotten at the state level. Fuel taxes are among the highest in the country in Nebraska and they still don’t cover the cost of highway maintenance.
Even if current sentiments and economics seem to suggest certain small towns are not worth keeping around, these may not be the best way to place value on rural communities. Some things about rural life can and have been argued for even as the world becomes more and more urban, and these ideals are worth fighting for.
When I was in college I took a community planning course — unfortunately I only had time for one. One of our projects was to anticipate the growth of our own city, Lincoln, Nebraska. The projects were then evaluated by a professional planner, and after the critique our professor pointed out that we all assumed the city would get larger. Why do we always assume our communities will grow?
What happens if we decide we need to shut down small towns now and then in 100 years see a need for them again?
The new small town
Is there an in between, does it have to be all or nothing? Is there a new look for small towns, can they persist, indeed flourish in a new way that hasn’t necessarily defined yet?
When thinking about Hazelton and Ada, I’ve realized quickly that the internet presents business opportunities that were formerly not an option in rural communities. Hobby farms or organic farming might work as Americans (thankfully) continue to become more and more aware of where their food comes from. Rural places will have to find ways to leverage their less-considered natural resources in order to attract outsiders. A good example of this is the Star Party in the Nebraska Sandhills.
Some sacrifices will inevitably have to be made, but I believe creative individuals — people who think outside the American lifestyle box — will be able to make it work. How would you make life in a small town work?
2 May 2011 Leave a Comment
Reinhold Marxhausen, an innovative Nebraska artist of some renown, died last week. Here he is on Late Night with David Letterman in 1986.
Marxhuasen is known in part here in Nebraska for a mural in the Nebraska State Capital building. You can read a little bit more about this explorative sculptor on the Seward Concordia Neighborhood blog.
12 March 2011 2 Comments
For the foreseeable future I’ll be working 50 hour weeks — more depending on freelance work — most of the time being spent at a desk in front of a computer. It’s all good work with good people that I’m very thankful for after a couple of very lean years.
Lately I’ve wondered how and if this job situation will effect my sculpture. I think it will. I envision bringing more energy to the process in comparison to the past couple of years where I’ve focused more on refining my craft, working more meticulously. My craft is not where I want it to be yet, but after long days at a desk I want to expend physical energy. I want to move around, be active. It seems to me this will translate into more expressive sculptures, especially when I’m working in clay (compared to when I’m working with wood).
In college I was told, in my first ceramics class, I worked like an expressionist. A grad student observed that I worked quickly and followed the will of the material to a large degree. I haven’t forgotten this critique, even though I don’t think my work in general looks much like that of the Expressionists — despite a similar process.
In relationship to working more actively and expressively, I’ve also been thinking about improvisation. I don’t know what prompted the thought, but listening to a Helen Sung station on Pandora earlier this week I heard a piece with Lee Morgan that furthered the thought (can’t find which song offhand). It contained a beautiful and improvisationally inspiring trumpet solo.
So we’ll see where the work goes in the next few months. I want to continue with the figurative works, the heads, but storm season is approaching. I won’t be able to suppress the inspiration that is the billowing storm over the Tallgrass Prairie.
Adding: My wife and I recently cruised through the first seven seasons of NCIS, marathon style. While we watched I took note of how Gibbs goes home to his craft, to building his boats. This might have been where the thought for this post originated.
26 February 2011 1 Comment
Cody Jean Carson Brown's Migration
One of the things that makes central Nebraska really unique is the Spring migration of the Sandhill Cranes. All sorts of events go on during the month of March in response to the roughly 500,000 cranes descending on the Platte River Valley. Earlier this week my wife and I enjoyed the opening reception of Stuhr Museum’s annual Wings Over the Platte exhibit.
It’s quite a good show, worth seeing if you’re in the area. I was glad to see acquaintance Doug Johnson getting Best of Show. His recent work is going in a creative and wonderfully unexpected direction, which is sometimes lacking in Midwestern art shows. Another fascinating piece was the mixed media (but mostly ceramic) wall sculpture by Cody Jean Carson Brown pictured to the right.
However, the most interesting thing at the exhibit was not visual. It was the bio/artist statement from featured artist Jason Jilg.
Born and raised in Broken Bow, [Nebraska], Jason could not leave the Great Plains fast enough. The world pulled with all its exotic lands and cultures, so Jason joined the Navy and traveled the world to see these locations . . .
. . . If I were given the choice of traveling Europe or some location in the American Plains, I’d probably pick the Plains . . . This part of America that is “in between.” In between the American West, American South and the very different American Midwest in terms of not only geography, but also time, place and memory.
This is interesting to me, if you haven’t figured it out yet, as yet another validation of the plains, the prairie: Lampooned by so much of America, loved by so many that have taken the time to observe it.
Jason’s photography is some of the better photography I’ve seen in recent memory. The exhibit wasn’t perfect; it lacked a focal point as a whole and some of the prints were pushed a little too far — a la Ansel Adams. But it’s obvious Jilg possesses the necessary skills to excel at the craft. He’s careful about choosing and composing his subject matter and uses the frame very well. His sense of scale shooting on the prairie as a subject is also very acute. I’m looking forward to seeing more of his images in the near future.
27 January 2011 1 Comment
At the left is a recap of my favorite stormy photographs from 2010 (Props to the DoubleTake photo stitching tool for Mac.). Most of the interesting cloud formations around Grand Island were mammatus — from storm systems that were more than 100 miles away, usually to the south in Kansas. Hopefully there will be a little more variety in 2011.
I find myself already looking forward to the spring storms on this prairie. This surprises me a little since winter didn’t really get going until January around here. We’ve had a few nice snowfalls now; I hope we see one or two more so I can actually take out a makeshift sled I banged together earlier in January.
All of these panoramas were taken inside Grand Island city limits. A few were taken from the roof of a building downtown, the others from around my house. As I recall all of this set were taken with our Nikon D50 (I use my cameraphone at least as often as the DSLR; my phone is always with me.).
My favorite in this little gallery is the one in the middle, Evening Ceiling. The way that wispy edge spread out over the burnt orange sunset was literally jaw-dropping. The space was positively incredible. I’m not certain I can be objective about the quality of the photograph on account of its connection to that experience.
31 December 2010 1 Comment
The first measurable snowfall of this winter graced the central Nebraska prairie early this morning. Not enough to warrant sledding, but plenty to provide the mystical quiet that comes with the white crystal earth-insulation.
Composition: Snow on kiln brick
The same storm system produced a tornado in a very small town about 12 miles south of Siloam Springs, Arkansas where we lived until last July. Reports now say five people died. The community doesn’t have any civil defense sirens.
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