Tag Archives: Found Art

“No Soggy Doggies” and other Found Beach Stories

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My rental house at the beach is no place to socialize three dogs raised behind high walls and accustomed only to their own company.  At home on Lake Chapala, their relationships with other dogs consist completely of sitting on the roof and barking at every dog who dares walk by my house.  I miss them, but they are well-cared for by Maggie, who is housesitting. The found art piece dedicated to them as well as a few others recently completed are shown below. All of these sculptures were assembled by me over the past two months from assorted plants, shells, bones, wood and other objects found on the beach during my morning walks.

(Click on first photo to enlarge.  Then click on each arrow to view other enlarged photos. After viewing all photos, click on X at top left of screen to return to this page.  A link to other found art wall sculptures recently completely is given at the bottom of this page.)

Dressed-up Detritus Bird
Vaquero (sold)
Parrot
I Miss My Dogs.
I Miss My Dogs (detail) This single flip flop found on the beach made me think of Morrie. In truth, he’s only eaten one of mine, but they were my favorite pair of Crocs.
I Miss My Dogs (detail). Any one of my three dogs, left at home with a housesitter, would have made quick work of this bone washed ashore with the tide.

Go HERE to view recently made found art sculptures shown in an earlier post.

I responded to today’s one word prompt, “Object” as a noun.  Here is the link for the prompt, in case you want to see how others responded:   https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/object/

Freshly “Found”

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Here are a few of the found art wall pieces I’ve just completed.  They are all constructed of material collected on the beach of La Manzanilla during morning walks.

(Click on first photo to enlarge all, then click on arrows to see next photo.)

Evolution
The Protector
The Protector (detail)
Dos Aguilas
Dos Aguilas (detail)
Dos Aguilas (detail)

 

Sculptor in the Sand

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                                                                     Sculptor in the Sand

Mario Gagnon is retired from his life as a hospital maintenance engineer in Quebec, but when we retire from our profession, we do not retire from our interests, and his lifetime fondness for what he calls “decorating” comes with him when he comes to the beach.  Like most of those camping beachside, he has made the palapa living area of his campsite “homely” in only one usage of the word.  From hammocks to wall sconces fashioned from fruiting bundles of palm trees, his environs are beautiful in addition to comfortable.

I revisited him yesterday, partially because I’d forgotten to take a picture of him when I met him on the second day I visited, but I was also there because of my curiosity over whether he altered his sculpture each day.  I did find him fussing with the tail of the iguana, but that was perhaps just staging for the bypasser who was currently taking his picture.  When the “interloper” (kidding) departed, it was my turn.

This time it was a female neighbor who translated for us and she explained to me something that I had not cottoned on to the first time we’d met.  “He can’t understand you because he is deaf and he can’t read your lips because he doesn’t speak English!  Formerly, I had thought his friend was interpreting only because of the language barrier, and when I spoke Spanish, thinking it was closer to French, it hadn’t helped much either. Trying to imagine what the beach would be like without its sounds to accompany it,  I asked him if he could feel the pounding of the surf. “Yes, he told me, “because I am deaf, my other senses are stronger.  When I smell a fire, I can tell how long ago it was lit, what is burning and what was used to start the fire.”

This dapper, handsome man was generous in sharing his art, his home away from home and his time.  Here are some of the pictures I took of his world:

(Please click on first photo to enlarge and view gallery.)

The artist––Mario Gagnon
Palm fruiting pod sconces
The artist at rest
When I asked if I could photograph his living space, “Wait, wait!” he cried and scurried around perfecting his environment.

If you didn’t see the first segment I did on Mario’s wonderful beach sculpture of the iguana, to see it, go HERE.

Iguanas in the Sand

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Iguanas in the Sand

One thing I’ve discovered after six years of time spent in La Manzanilla is that it is never going to be the same experience two years (and often two days) in a row.  One year the beach was covered by thousands of crystalline mounds of jellyfish that looked like snow globes that had wound up in the wrong climate.  Another year, the beach was covered with coral, yet another with stones.  One year we couldn’t swim because of a red tide and another due to all the sea lice (miniscule jellyfish larvae) in the water.  Last year, three different mantas and a large sea turtle beached themselves,  I found a blue-footed booby washed up on the sand and helped to set out hundreds of tiny sea turtles to make their way out into the ocean.  There was also a month of feeding frenzy as hundreds of pelicans, gulls and other sea birds dived like kamikazes into the ocean around me and this ritual was repeated day after day.

This year, for the first month I was here, there were practically no birds–a signal as sure as the vanishing of fish tacos at Pedro’s that the fish had moved elsewhere due to those same warm waters that had caused Hurricane Patricia.  In this fifth week of my stay, the fish have come back, although not in the numbers of former years.

But as in other years, there have been a number of rewards that compensated for days I couldn’t (wouldn’t) go into the ocean due to the opening of the lagoon and its drainage into the ocean. The resultant dirty water and odor caused me to walk farther up the beach than I have recently and those journeys led to the three different adventures involving iguanas that are pictured below:

(Click on first picture to enlarge photos and then click on each arrow to advance to the next photo.)

I first came upon this (sadly) dead iguana partially buried in the sand.
It was so beautiful that I couldn’t stop taking pictures of it.
Each part of it’s luxuriously colored body was so vivid.
I loved the golden “comb” on its back
as well as the graceful position it had been arranged in by the tide.
Although I’d seen iguanas in Puerto Vallarta, I’ve never seen them here in La Manzanilla.
And I don’t remember them being this beautifully colored.
As I drew nearer, I discovered that it was a very large piece of driftwood that someone had added split dried palm branches to to form the “comb.”

Today I was fortunate enough to meet the man who created the iguana sculpture.  His name is Mario Gugnon, a retired hospital maintenance coordinator from Quebec.  He says he found the large driftwood piece several years ago and to him it looked like an iguana with it’s left hind foot caught in a trap.  He added the palm fronds and has been doing so each year since.  In between Mario’s visits, the manager of the campground puts it away in safe keeping.  When I asked if he worked in other media he said no, he was not an artist.  He just likes decorating things.  In illustration, he pointed out their tastefully appointed and comfortable little terraza under the canopy.  But that is the subject for a different posting. (Update: I’ve now made that post as well. You can read it HERE.)

La Manzanilla is the perfect town and beach for someone who dreads repetition. It has been a new adventure every day this trip and I can’t type, edit and post fast enough to keep up with the stories.  Another day, another saga.  Thanks for joining me as I try to take it all in.

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Sea lice – stay safe at the beach!

http://www.buysafesea.com/sea_lice.php

are actually the microscopic larvae of jellyfish and other ocean stingers which contain the same nematocysts (stinging cells) as mommy and daddy. In many areas of the Gulf and Caribbean the primary culprit causing “sea lice” infestations is the larvae of the thimble jellyfish.

Dream Jobs

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                                                                        Dream Jobs

I have been lucky enough to have several “dream jobs” in my lifetime.  First of all, I was a teacher. I loved teaching kids and enjoyed the other people I worked with.  My first teaching jobs were in Australia and Ethiopia, which additionally gave me the chance to travel and live in “strange” environments–things I had wanted to do since very small.

I taught for ten years before finally deciding I needed to change my life to enable me to find time to write.  I then moved to Orange County, California, to live with a dear friend and spent two years studying a number of areas I felt had been neglected in my earlier education.  I would go to the library with lists of topics I wanted to know more about: art, artists, places, concepts, psychology, philosophy.

The writing of Carl Jung was of special interest and I allowed synchronicity and the unconscious to guide my life.  This took me to Los Angeles and into film school at U.C.L.A., an apprenticeship at a Hollywood agency and eventually to a job working in p.r. and publicity for Bob Hope’s production company.  It was a job where I was laid off for 5 months of each year, between shows, and this enabled me to write and travel.

After three years of working here, I married and moved northwards to the Santa Cruz area where I became a silversmith and paper maker.  For fourteen years, I traveled and did art shows with my husband.  This was as close to working for a traveling circus as I would ever come, and I loved both the studio work and the traveling.  The people we would meet in various locations across the U.S. became our friends and we slept in our motor home or van in convention center parking lots from California to Ann Arbor to Boston.

As the area of our travels narrowed to the west coast, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Colorado, I accepted a “job” as the curator of a new art center in the San Lorenzo Valley near Santa Cruz.  Although this was a volunteer position, it was both time-consuming and extremely gratifying as I met and worked with artists throughout the Santa Cruz area.  I loved coordinating and hanging eight shows a year as well as teaching classes and handling show themes, admissions, publicity and openings.  It was practically a full time job in itself,  but we continued to handle a full show schedule ourselves.  By then, in addition to my making silver and copper jewelry, Bob and I were making art lamps together. He did the stone and wood work and some of the framework for the sail like shades whereas I made the handmade washi  paper and some of the framework for shades and covered the shades.

I’ve been lucky my entire life to always have a job I enjoyed and believed in and this continues to this very day as retirement has brought time to write more and to shift my focus from jewelry and lamps to mixed media assemblage, which I continue to this day.  While at the beach, I concentrate on collages of found objects from the beach and city streets. It also gives me time to write this blog which consumes an ever-increasing amount of my time.

Here is a gallery of shots that capture, I hope, my process in  collecting, assembling and mounting found objects into my assemblages.  If you click on the first picture, it will enlarge the photos and show them to you one by one:

Prompt: Describe your dream job. https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/money-for-nothing/

No Rest for the Wicked

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No Rest for the Wicked

Now that the art walk is finished and I no longer have to maintain a pristine home, I’ve hauled out my art materials as well as the things I’ve collected from the beach and I’m planning a few dozen new pieces. This is the fun part, with the shells and wood and other elements laid out all over the kitchen and dining room and pushing and shoving into place.  Not glued down or even fully planned, just getting the pieces assembled.

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Why We Believe

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Why We Believe

I think the reason why I believe is probably at the root of it the reason why we all believe in something.  It is just such a miracle that anything exists and that I get to be a part of it. What are the chances out of the entire universe that I would be born  at all, let alone born to the time and place and parents that I was? And what are the chances that I would be healthy and have the benefit of an education and that I would find the courage to live the life I want to and continue to have that courage into my sixties and I hope my seventies and eighties and nineties.

I can understand why it would be hard to continue to believe in the magic of life if one were ill or abused or confined or physically handicapped, yet people do continue to hold onto every scrap of existence.  Life is such an incredible thing and to not appreciate it when we have every reason to appreciate it is such a waste.

There is so much cruelty and oppression and greed and poverty and disease and sadness in this world.  Yes, we do what we can to fight it, but an additional and very important way to fight it is to be as productive and happy as we can be.  Polarity demands its opposite and the world changes for the good by holding onto as much of the positive as we can.  Living it.  Promoting it in others.  Helping each other.  Good mothers and fathers do this every minute of every day and those of use who don’t have children can do it by trying to be surrogates for those children and those adults who need our care and help.  This help may be given in an organized fashion by volunteering and donating or by the way we treat others in our every day life.  We can be observant. We can be helpful.  We can be as kind to each other as possible, given that we are human and feel anger, fatigue, frustration and hopelessness.

At the end of the day–even the worst day–we get to choose whether to give up or to continue to believe, and even if the choice is to give up, we have one more chance.  I think dreams are messages and reminders we send to ourselves–little boosts encouraging us to listen to that deep part of ourselves that will always believe, even if it has to go on without the support of our conscious minds.  It is the part we get to when we write or draw or paint or dance or sing or play an instrument.  That is the importance of the arts.  They connect us to our beliefs.

So when I find myself floundering, whatever time of the day or night, my easiest way to find a reason to keep going is to do what I’m doing now.  To write. Or to make art out of whatever I find around me.  For in this aspect, art imitates life.  It is simply looking around for what we can find around us and making the best of it.  Someone once says “It is the job of the artist to take the detritus that the world creates and to hand it back to the world as art.”  That is exactly what I do in my “found art” collages.  And this, at the end of the day, is enough for me to believe in.

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Click on any one of the images to enlarge and enter gallery.  Can you find “Lord Love a Duck,” a pheasant, frigate birds, the ballerina, puffin, a seal, a sea bird, wild pig or “Found Heart?”  I just realized I left out my favorite, so I’m going to add it below.

DSCF1949 (1)

 

The Prompt: In Reason to Believe, Bruce Springsteen sings, “At the end of every hard-earned day / people find some reason to believe.” What’s your reason to believe?

The Sweet and Bitter Lie

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This is one of 15 creches I’ve constructed of unaltered natural items I’ve found on the beach. For some reason, I am captivated by the gentle side of Mexico best symbolized by her obsession with the Virgin of Guadalupe. I’ve seen motorcycle leathers with an image of Guadalupe on the back! I’ll publish pictures of the others soon. I know. A seeming contradiction to the words I’ve posted below, but perhaps one or the other view is just a sweet little lie!

The Prompt: Sweet Little Lies—As kids, we’re told, time and again, that lying is wrong. Do you believe that’s always true? In your book, are there any exceptions?

The Sweet and Bitter Lie

I think the sweetest little lie we tell ourselves and our children is that of a beneficent and caring God. This belief and the religion that stems from it  is our way of comforting ourselves. It is totally aside from reason. How else could we look at a baby turtle struggling to swim for the first time plucked up and swallowed by a hungry pelican, or a baby suffering with cancer or a horribly deformed child and think, “This is the product of a caring Father?” We all must conclude, if we make use of our senses at all, that nature is impartial and serves only its own cycle. There is no kindness in nature, other than her beauties and comforts; but even they all serve a purpose: to survive against all odds, and to kill or at the very least to depend upon the death of other organisms in order to do so.

I do acknowledge that Religion is probably necessary for many who do not think far enough to recognize the sweet lie. For those who use it to create more compassion for others, I applaud the end. But right now it seems as though religion is being used more as a weapon and political ploy than for the “good” side of its coin.

I don’t know how I align my agnosticism with my belief that there is some sort of incredible synchronicity going on in the world. This is a topic for another day, I guess.

For other posts on this topic, go here: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/sweet-little-lies/