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Saturday, August 22, 2009 - Red Rock, East Chatham NY

Stainless steel art series #3 - Berry Lamp 2, ca. mid 1990's, photographed March 18, 2001
Stainless steel art series #3 - Berry Lamp 2, ca. mid 1990's, photographed March 18, 2001

About fifteen years ago I started playing around bending wire into bird, animal, and human figures and some inanimate figures as well. Back in April I was showing some of them to Kate and with her encouragement we spent a sunny morning photographing them. I've presented a few of those images in a series here and now I'm adding some images of a few pieces I didn't have with me that take my art in some new directions using stainless steel wire and sheet.

Here we're seeing a transition toward larger pieces using wound wire "springs" and stamped metal.

Night camp

On my property off Less Traveled Road - The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY

Five Trillion Spiders

Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.

From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69

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