Rhonda McClure's felted sculpture of a watermelon with a spigot.

To the right is my favorite piece from the Nebraska State Fair (first time I’ve been in 13 years), which wasn’t even entered in the fine art category. It’s the Fair’s first year to be in Grand Island, recently relocating from Lincoln. The move, of course, caused a ruckus. If I recall correctly, the University of Nebraska wanted some of the former Fair property — just north of its city campus in Lincoln — for expansion. Grand Island was thrilled to be gifted with such an event, as most cities would be, but in some ways it’s already proven to be less than what was hoped for from what I can tell. Which I expected.

Unlike some states, such as neighboring Iowa, the Fair in Nebraska isn’t so much of a renowned event.

It never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology ideas that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

I eat locally when I can because, in general, the food is better and I have a better idea of where it came from. There are people who’ve made eating locally a religion, though, apparently in part because they think it a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Writing for the New York Times, Stephen Budiansky informs us that’s bogus in a little article called Math Lessons for Locavores. “The local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas,” he claims.

Budiansky enjoys eating from his own garden nine months out of the year, but he breaks the energy consumption of foods down for us into layman’s terms. Locavorism has apparently entered pharisaical levels of legalism, resulting in “all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.”

According to Budiansky’s math, driving to the grocery store and then refrigerating your loot consume most of the energy that goes into our food production, even if we can brag about our Energy Star appliances. The diesel fuel to truck or train it across the country uses little energy by comparison.

Guess we have to find another way to boost our own self-esteem.

Work with the painter I’ve been helping out this year has been slow the past couple weeks, so I’ve busied myself with other things as much as I’ve been able (other things that are somewhat financially advantageous in these lean times, things not necessarily sculpture related as I’d prefer). I spent some time in my dad’s shop, The Milestone Gallery, painting walls, signs and staining furniture.

Our Sand Trap walls with a Marissa Lee Swinghammer print hanging on the chimney chase

Dad has noticed that people even want their antique furniture to look and function like new. Doors that are warped or don’t close all the way, the crazed finish of a tabletop or patina from age on a cabinet can deter people from purchasing the unique objects he collects. “I thought that patina was something people liked,” he said.

Indeed, why do we as Americans so often crave the new? The walls in our little house do just fine at what they were built to do, and as I spread “Sand Trap” — a taupe-y tint with hints of rose or purple in different lights — over the scuffed up old walls I began to appreciate their textures. In fact, I’ve concluded that perfect walls are actually boring in comparison.

By saying this I’m not necessarily advocating any kind of trumped-up aging process, no intentional distressing of new walls or surfaces. When you build a new building you should do it properly, straight studs and square corners. The history of a place must come organically; our little Nebraska bungalow may have more of an overall patina than most places, having been a rental for most of its years according to our neighborhood historian.

And now for an uncomfortable question: Does our dislike for the appearance of age or imperfection in our buildings hearken back to the same aversion we have to age in our own person, or in our American culture of human beauty where maturity is not esteemed as it is in other cultures?

My uncle, whose home also boasts whispering plaster walls, took advantage of the patina by exaggerating it, showing it off. I haven’t seen how he’s done this yet, but the idea is intriguing to me. If I feel like I have the time, I’ll probably try something similar.

Over the past few years I’ve noticed that I like hearing certain musicians live better than on their precisely recorded albums. I may have said something to this effect a year or two ago as well, but the idea has become more pronounced in the past six months or so. A few examples.

Last month I heard Leesha Harvey play at Grand Island’s Art in the Park. I really enjoyed the brief set where she played guitar and harmonica, with one person backing her up. I bought her album, and on first listen I was missing the simplicity of her live performance.

In Nashville we were privileged enough to be at an Andrew Peterson concert (I really wanted to go to a Katie Herzig concert the next evening, but on account of the Hutchmoot festivities decided against even trying to make that). I didn’t know who Peterson was but very much appreciated his use of instrumentation. An upright bass, Kenny Hutson playing a variety of stringed instruments. When we listened to the Counting Stars album on the drive back though, it was a bit anticlimactic.

So what’s different about live performances? Firstly, they aren’t perfect. Secondly, they aren’t usually as complex in that there aren’t layers of recordings (from what I understand) such as on a finished CD. Thirdly, the quality of the voices and the instruments is, well, accurate. This last point may be the most important to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love having so much music available to be played on my home stereo, our entire library on one little electronic device — our eclectic collection literally at a fingertip. But I wonder with this luxury we’re missing out on something as listeners. I’m probably not the first person to suggest this, but it’s been on my mind.

Later the same day, however, I got the chance to ask one of the many musicians hanging around at the moot a question I’ve had for a while now:

Why does so much new music follow more or less the same form?

That form goes something like this: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus. Years ago I noticed that my own musical interests were going a different direction from the norm. I grew up listening, well, to what my friends were listening too, and then migrated to loud “Christian music” because I wanted to be more holy, and then in college began to develop my own ear, so to speak, for music. You can see a little more about this progression in the Soundtrack of My Life.

The musician’s answer was interrupted by someone wanting to buy a CD, but the long and short of his response was that that I was out of the ordinary as an artist and thus making these kinds of observations, and that the form is used in order to make it easier for listeners to remember the songs. He made it pretty clear musicians, in general, in Nashville, want people to easily recall their music.

I did learn something in the brief little conversation, but I still have questions. Shouldn’t musicians be working imaginatively with musical form though as “artists?” Shouldn’t they be creating things that are memorable in new ways? The musician I talked to pointed out some successful diversion from the common popular form, but they still seemed like a simplistic solution in my untrained opinion.

Are a lot of musicians creating for the lowest common denominator?

I’m also trying to figure out if the idea of memorability enters into the mind and process of a visual artist, a painter or a sculptor. It never has for me that I recall, not in the way that the musician in Nashville suggested anyway. Of course, music has a wonderful enigmatic superpower that the other arts just don’t. Our minds are drawn to it in a way they are not necessarily drawn into processing colors on a canvas or words on a page.

An interesting musical contrast to the make-it-memorable-mentality might be Herva, who I wrote about last year in a post titled The importance, and trap, of artistic freedom. Herva wrote

I want to make music with my heart and my hands, to paint or write (or whatever) with my insides (intelligence, spirit, guts, soul) guiding my choices. Will anyone pay for it? I have no idea. Will anyone other than me think it’s good? No clue. But I have to allow myself not to care or worry about that right now. Every creator I’m a fan of creates things oozing in singularity, works that rise out of the sludge due to their originality, clarity, and vision.

This is the opposite end of the spectrum, it would seem, from the person I talked to in Tennessee. Is there a right kind of way to make music? Is there a correct way to paint a painting? Or should the questions be reworded, “Is there a better way to make music, or a painting?”

Morning virga over the north side of Hall County Park

I love the slightly bitter, slightly citrus, dry green scent of prairie flora. I breathed it in deeply while cycling south of Grand Island this morning.

Within that aroma I find something that hearkens to how we were created, as creations meant to inhabit this physical realm. And, somehow, it increases my faith in God. How or why I don’t know I at the moment, but that’s beside the point. “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man,” G.K. Chesterton rightly said.

Sounds of the wooded South during summer nights might have done something similar, but not quite as overtly.

Cameraphone image of an untitled Eva Hess watercolor hung at the St. Louis Art Museum

I knew Hesse’s name prior to last week, but I didn’t know anything about her work. Interestingly, I don’t like a lot of it from what I can tell, with the exception of the untitled 1968 watercolor to the right and a 1969 installation titled Contingent, that looks a lot like an installation I did as a college student. The brief at the museum talks about how the two dimensional work was an exploration in light leading up to Contingent.

Both my wife and I were drawn to a beauty within the painting. The shapes reminded me of farm fields adjacent to one another, something I’ve been attempting to incorporate into my own works in the last year or two. But I also took note of her layering. Penciled lines unabashedly bordered and bled through the delicate watercolor wash. Such transparency and layering is something that’s eluded my fledgling attempts to convey the sense of space a person experiences when supercells roll over alfalfa on the Plains. Mmmm, I can smell that distant rain piercing the greeny-sweet alfalfa now.

Hesse’s painting seems to be just the kind of work I needed to see this summer. I’ve started to work on some small paintings, but there was an aspect of these works that was lacking. I was limiting myself to one media and method too strictly — despite referring to myself as a mixed media sculptor. I was only allowing myself to work within an overly basic idea of paint. I realized this before seeing the Hesse artwork, but her watercolor in essence gave definition to my realization.

Now let’s hope I can put some action to this inspiration in the near future!

The long and short of what my skimming told me — I didn’t have time to finish the article — Renewable energy such as wind and solar won’t work for the cars we drive. No kidding! The article also, if I recall correctly, pointed out that these energy sources won’t even provide enough electricity, even if they are developed to the n^th degree, to meet our current electricity needs.

I’ve made the point on the blog before, as I recall, that we need to revamp the culture and our environmental design in order to get to where most or all of our energy needs come from renewable sources. We can’t work from the assumption that we can maintain the cultural status quo while at the same time switching over to renewable sources of energy. Instead, we must become creative in all aspects of our lives. Developing more efficient lifestyles seems like common sense to me — regardless of where our energy is coming from (Per my cursory skim the magazine article suggested nuclear, but I’d still rather see other avenues developed further along with more intentionally efficient living.).

Cameraphone capture of part of a wind turbine, going down I-80 on our way home from Nashville.

On our way down to the Hutchmoot last week, my wife and I were introduced to Rodney and Sidney Wright. Rodney wrote The Hawkweed Passive Solar House Book. He showed us around their house — inserting at least one pun into every sentence — pointing to all of the attention paid to making the home more energy efficient. The energy bill for the home was less than $50 a month for the 1,200 square foot structure in Paducah, Kentucky (a walkable community, he pointed out). The couple paid good money for energy efficient appliances, used prefabricated wall panels with dense foam insulation to build with and of course designed the home with climate and geography in mind, in a passive solar fashion.

It’s going to take this kind of intentionality in our design of life, I believe, in order to make renewables work. Sure some things might cost more now and then, but Wright made a point of saying that even though their uber efficient Swedish microwave/convection oven might have cost them $3,000 they built the home for only $85,000 (doing some of the work themselves, such as painting) just four years ago.

Wright also pointed out that we used to do better at designing our dwellings and communities as they relate to their local environments. What will it take as a culture to forgo the more common and under-considered living spaces we create in the United States?

So far as I know, I was the only visual artist at the Hutchmoot other than Evie Coates, who Rabbit Roomer Pete Peterson, Andrew’s brother, lovingly cajoled into hanging a show of new work and giving a gallery talk (95% of the attendees went to a literature session during the talk instead), despite the wonderfully overwhelming task of cooking for the delegates (which she did a fabulous job of). I was glad though to meet the lady who edits the Stoneworks publication on the last day, Jennifer Trafton. She had spent most of the conference trying to remember why my name was familiar before finding the chance to ask.

Hutchmoot for me was mostly three things:

The Walt Wangerin keynote. I really had no idea who this guy was, other than an author, before this. And he didn’t say much that we didn’t already know, which he kept telling us. I didn’t get all that much out of the weekend related to story like I was hoping, with the exception of Wangerin’s keynote. My wife took notes that I’m going to have to look over later. I wrote down three quotations (some significant paraphrasing involved per my notes):

When art works, it becomes the cosmos [alive] for a while. – Walt Wangerin

You have to know your medium’s history and tradition (all of art moves over a little bit when you create a new work.) – T.S. Eliot

If we think we can create out of nothing, all we’ll create are monsters. – C.S. Lewis

Evie Coates, both her cooking and her artwork. Her assemblages represent a direction my own work could have very easily gone with the use of a variety of rusty found objects. I learned during the course of scattered conversation we were able to have that she has strong family ties to Siloam Springs. Her dad is actually a John Brown University graduate.

Kenny Hutson, a name I had probably read at some point in some Over the Rhine liner notes but didn’t really know. In the scheme of the Hutchmoot, Kenny played what most attendees would consider a very minor role, playing in Andrew Peterson’s band, but I was excited to hear someone who tours regularly with Over the Rhine.