Day Three

 
After breakfast this morning, the crew headed off the ranch to do some heavy duty gathering of plants and shrubs and logs. We drove down this road behind the house. There are a bunch of these "chunky, clunky" dirt roads going off in all different directions from the house. Apparently a lot of the people who work at the ranch live down one road or the other. The chef is a pretty interesting man and he has some artistic background too! When we first arrived at the ranch, he greeted us and told us all about his ice sculptures. Anyway, we stopped somewhere along the path and everyone jumped out and began chopping things down. We each had some kind of saw or clippers of different sizes so we brought back things both big and small. When everyone had their shrubs and flowers and stalks bundled together on the ground, the space looked like the beginnings of an over sized apothecary store. I left my battery in the charger so I wasn't able to take any pictures of what we collected, but it looked something like this:


I will surely have my camera ready for the sculptures we end up making from the materials.

I've been thinking about the questions I asked myself about environmental art the other day. I'm bothered by the fact that man's reconstruction of nature can sometimes be more interesting than what nature makes itself. However, even if this is true, the real miracle lies with the earth. Otherwise we wouldn't have the leaves and the pods and the thistles to work with. Perhaps part of the allure of working with nature is that it gives the artist and the viewer a feeling of power over the earth. Through environmental art man can produce mysterious and awe-inspiring natural creations as well.

Time is really strange out here. I was a little late to our afternoon class meeting because I was up at the chapel gathering these little pod-ish seeds that come out of the pine cones. The other day I was talking with my sister about how sometimes a person loses the ability to get lost in something as they grow from childhood into adulthood. I'm finding that this just doesn't apply on the ranch. The days just pass on by because I am so entranced by the possibilities of this place and of my art. I don't think I've spent this much time crouched over scouring the dirt for "treasures" in quite a while. It makes me feel very happy and healthy and fresh.



Above is a drawing I did of the dancing leaves I was talking about...pretty cute. And below is a strange little sculpture I started today. Those are the pods I collected today. I also found some balls of sap and bird poop which I originally thought was another seed of some sort. It wasn't until I got back to the ranch and tried to string them that I realized they were tiny digested beads of chewed grass pieces. :)



I can't think of anything else too exciting that happened today except that I forgot to visit horse for the second day in a row. Perhaps our relationship won't be as strong as I originally planned. Oh my, I did see a stampede of elk today. There had to be at least two hundred of them just sprinting across the grass fields. I can't even explain what it was like...absolutely beautiful.