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Early in 1976 I decided to go to Nevada City, California, to work with some friends I had met in Boston. It wanted to explore northern California as a place to find my own spot and sort out what I wanted to do as an artist, as well as how to support that.
Unfortunately, all my time went into working to make money to live. The Wilderness Grubstake, a camping equipment and hiking and skiing tour business, floundered due to lack of capital and lack of snow. I then went to work first in a new restaurant in town, then for a great friend, Faith Havard. I worked in her greenhouse and garden, got very healthy and loved learning from the land, the plants, the animals, and the precious people.
The decision to return to Lacoste was easy although it was not easy to leave “Mt. Havard”.
In Lacoste, my first project summer of 1977 was to clean the Wings piece I made in 1975. It had been sitting in the quarry under the tree since then, and although the dark, grey patina had a seductive velvet quality, I felt that the patina dulled the ability to read the forms as wings with the ability to move, perhaps just opened or about to close, and that this could be better seen when there was a range of white surfaces and gray-to-black shadows playing on them. Re-stating the case of this piece to myself as I cleaned the surface was a good way to reconnect with working with the limestone, and create a bridge back to and forward from the work of 1975.
The two pieces that I had started in 1974, “Mistral”&“Autoportraite/Two Dancers”, were also still in the quarry, and I continued to work on both of them.
“Mistral” was not finished until 1979 –with texture, and then “finished again” much later –without texture. Mistral had a long tenure in the school quarry. It was there until shipped to Samantha Dalkilic’s Steeple Gallery in 1993.
“Autoportraite/Two Dancers” was finished in 1997 and it went to PierrotLapelerie.
