Dangerhart's Studio

High Pasture

Drove up to the Ranch this weekend to move the herd from Dave Anderson's "lowland" ranch up to Alpine Meadows- about 15 miles on horseback: a long way for the new little calves. There was three feet of snow up here just a week earlier, and snow squalls and rain since-  the grass has barely started.
 

Funniest Cowboy Shot of the Day

Trailing the Dogies

Bucolic Pastoral

Keeping Everyone Together

Heading across that gap...

Entropy Bale III: finished

I may be done. Hard to say. Just because there are some areas that I'm unsure of doesn't mean that I should work them more.

Entropy Bale I: finished

This one was worked more while working on Bale II. The digital process has really gutted them both of life and color (Bale II below is closer than the two above)- On that note, I submitted Entropy Bale II & Elizabeth with Heavy Ball to a state show- the museum curator was excited to see E w/ Ball and hoped it would get in. Neither piece was accepted, so I'll drive down tomorrow and pick them up.

Entropy Bale: day 5

The background has taken most of my attention so far. Today moved from the foreground into the bale. I started with too small of a brush and lost my sense of mass, then backed up with a larger brush and started pushing around with the shadow areas- getting just far enough to leave a nice mess.

Entropy Bale III: back to bale

Entropy Bale III: background

Entropy Bale III: blocked in

Yes, she is still pretty damn fun to drive.

 When last we talked cars, I had just changed her spark plugs and oil and was wondering how much real work she needed. I brought her in for a Spa-Day at my trusty local monkeywrencher and it turns out she just needed a little bit of this, that, and the other. She even passed safety with the old crappy tires I had put on for $10 apiece last fall, as her old set from 1986 during my Senior year had rotted off. Now she has nice new whitewalls, and feels like every gal does after a fancy pedicure- ready to burn off a toe!

I took her out for a spin to the Marina on the Great Salt Lake, driving into a 50mph headwind of an incoming storm. She did just fine, and begged to go faster than a piddling 80mph- she has always baited me like that.

Coming back through town she burbled and thundered along, and gave me that crazy massage she does when waiting at a light.

All that smoke in the pictures is bad gas going through a caramelized carburetor- fresh gas, clean jets, and a few more hours running should clear it out.
.

1

2

0

This is an excerpt from a essay I created during my MFA to parody Conceptual Art, creating a premise wherein a post-Post Modern aesthetic is applied to creating round hay bales. This flowery little ditty was created at my father's kitchen table on a bright summer day in late July of 2001- it was written to be a bit over the top, as a journal entry of one of the characters who is smitten with a percieved romance of the Montana ranching lifestyle. It does, however, point toward my current work.

    the form of the bale is an infinite spiral in a finite space. the bail encapsulates verdant spring in all her glory of alpine wildflower and rich meadow grass. the bale is a talisman of Persephone to keep the earth from despair when she is gone to Dis. in their Montana homeland they are life itself in the depth of northern winter. they are formed by one man and many machines, formed to care for his herd. they are a testament to a life lived in harmony with seasons, of a man who lives his bond to the earth. when he was young the work was done with horses and a family of eight. now, with the aid of machines, he runs the ranch alone. the individual working in isolation with machines in a landscape that wants to swallow up all signs of man.
    the fields of baled hay hold a mathematical symmetry, a cosmological grouping, a sense of the underlying structure of the universe, man’s conception of the LOGOS in tangible form, man’s existential desire for form and meaning and harmony.
     multiple objects made by machines, too large to be moved without machines, yet they blend into the vast landscape and offer no affront to nature. they are of a relationship of man and earth, of plant-life and season and faith in nature, of man understanding self and world and his own constant animal effort. they are a bridge, not only man and earth, not only of summer in winter, but of humanity through all seasons. they are a pure conception of time as spiral, space as curve, mass as direction, and the mysterious simultaneity of gravity and electricity which is best sensed when the self is in motion around the static bales so that the relativity of time, distance, and perception bespeak the physics and metaphysics of the particular. the deep aesthetic of science arises with this motion, twin to the deep aesthetic of art.
    they are objects created to be unmade. in the depths of the northern winter they are unwound, rolled backwards to their spiral under a cold sun that dazes the night for a few short hours before the earth returns to darkness and the sky to stars and moonlight and silver tendrils of Aurora Borealis, spring is uncapsulated and devoured by the harsh winter gods, the Norse apocalypse of endless dark winter destroying all creation crushes inward with the cold, but faith of seasons is offered in the Greek trust of Dionysus’ annual resurrection, even after his death that heralds all tragedy.