Gus
Posted: September 25, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Portfolio - David's work, What is an Art Farm 2 Comments
Framing a house rests upon its foundation. Building a whale does not. The whale will be too large to work in my workshop so I need to work outside. I need a series of crates from which to hang the whale, with enough room to work, all of which will be put upon wheels but narrow enough fit through exhibition doorways.
Industrial pipe staging seems an ideal solution but will not allow enough space for the head. Using dimensional lumber – 2x6s for the base, 2x4s for posts – I build a custom crate and double reinforce everything for stability. Weight is less my concern than stability during transit. A pair of 10 foot 2x4s goes on each side, diagonals crisscrossing to prevent the crate from racking.
Plates are installed in each corner where heavy duty casters will be attached when it comes time to move and install the piece. My crate’s dimensions are governed by the entrance doorway of the Bigelow Laboratory of Ocean Sciences. There is no margin of error.
On top of the structure I set an old barn beam – rugged, stout, strong – from which the entire head will hang during construction and every road trip. What I don’t know is that between all the installations, including time in storage, the crate will be in use for more than five years. What I do know is that it needs to be rugged.
As the sculpture grows, I will assemble a section of pipe staging, 5’ wide by 6’ tall by 7’ long, and spacing the staging a few feet behind the crate, will have a rectangle, about 20 feet in length, inside of which I will work. Planks and boarding – a very simple roof – go on top, upon which I lay a blue tarp, 20 feet by 40 feet, to cover the entire workspace. The studio is basic, watertight, and sufficient. We begin.
The Maven spray painted the root ball and trunk white. It is a surprising choice that moves the materials away from tree closer to his “right frame of mind.” The next task is finding the tipping point, from which the rootball/mind will hang. Engineers use a complex calculus of mass, torque and equilibrium to find the center of gravity. The Maven centers himself, goes quiet, then grabs my drill and a 1/2” boring bit and pulls the trigger. Once the hole is bored, we attach an 11” eye bolt with lock washer to the rootball/mind. Together we hoist it up and hang it from the scaffolding.
Next we begin making the skull. As a whale is not a house, so its skull is not like other mammals. Its skull is something majestic. A whale lives in water so gravity affects its skeleton differently than land-based mammals; buoyancy lifts the whale while gravity pulls down upon land animals. The whale’s face and forehead bones telescope as they move backward and overlap. The upper jaw bones taper forward into the snout. The nasal openings move to the top, not the front, forming the blowhole. The ear bones are detached, acoustically isolated. That complexity belongs to the Maven.
He grabs two sheets of 1/4 inch plywood, painted white, and draws a series of non-Euclidean shapes. I take my jigsaw and cut them out. Using the scraps, he draws several more shapes which I cut out. In short order we have our bones, more or less: mandible, maxilla, premaxilla, supra occipital, exooccipital, basioccipital, frontal, squamosal, nasal and tympanic bulla.
The whale root ball/mind hangs at a comfortable working height. During COVID people are encouraged to keep a 6 foot distance, but building inside my crate we enjoy no such luxury. We are outside, on a perfect early July day, and have work to do.
The bones by any name I need to assemble, creating volume in space around, but not touching, the root mind. This is an immense puzzle. When I was a child, a classmate in the 4th grade told me that his father was building a house from the top down. How wild, I thought! It always puzzled me why I remembered that but clearly, it was a premonition of this project: I am building the whale skull from the top down. I have no foundation upon which to frame and the root balls tangle of roots allows no purchase upon which to build.
It is July, peak of the summer, and sour cherries come ripe in our orchard. The Maven wanders off to sit under the Montmorency pie cherry tree. He plucks cherries and gazes off into the distance. Inside my cube of space I am alone, on my own.
Chuang Tzu comes to mind. In his famous story, Cook Ding carves an ox for Lord Wenhui by following the Dao, moving through the empty spaces between the joints, “as though he were performing the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Jingshou Music.” As a young chef, Ding saw only the mass of a whole animal. After three years of practice, he saw it as parts, not mass. Now, his inner spirit guides rather than physical eyes.
In a moment the solution arises: gussets. A gusset is simply an extra piece of material, added to give more space and strength. They are found in clothing, bags, envelopes and construction. For the skull the gusset solves the question of rigid form. To each of the Maven’s various shapes I attach cleats, using 3/4” stock and wood screws. The cleats can be sculptural in shape. What matters is they are a bracket, mass, attached to the left and right hemispheres, to which I can attach the gusset, “the extra piece of material.” I don’t need specific dimensions. The maven can hold the skull bones, then I can mark the gusset length, cut and sand it, then screw it into place.
During the afternoon I busily build cleat blocks which I attach, then secure using the gussets. The skull is a triangle, narrow above the rootball/mind but wide below. The rear is broad, the front narrow. The maven wants curving shapes for the jowl, which is easy given the flexibility of 1/4″ plywood. I simply cut those pieces longer, then bow them back into place. I have given structure to form.
It works remarkably well. So well I name the whale “Gus.”
Once the skull is assembled, the Maven returns and explains he wants bands surrounding the assembly in space, “like gyroscopic things.” We are using foraged materials and he has some boards, so I rip long thin pieces, 8 feet long by 1 inch wide by 1/16 inch thick. I can bend these easily, and gluing two layers together adds considerable strength. Nothing is structural here, and I can pin them discretely to the mandible using 1 inch #8 panhead machine screws, with washer, lock washer and acorn nut; the assembly arcs up, out, and around, creating complexity and mystery.
The Maven explains, “I want abstract decisions, not the idea why, organic decisions by geometric solutions. The “gyroscopic things” …what are they? Without those Gus loses complexity, and that complexity relates to what a whale is, to what a tree is, what anything is. I want a level of complexity that then feels alive.”
All I know is that we are on a roll.
Red Grooms is an American multimedia artist known for colorful kinetic constructions, using sculpture and painting, to depict hyper-detailed scenes of urban life. The Manhattan art critic G.R. Swenson described him as one of a generation of artists who, “took the world too seriously not to be amused by it.” An absurdist impetuous energy, rich with Marx Brothers’ puns, inform his constructions, which can fill up an entire Manhattan loft or office lobby. His work is legendary. He has been referred to as “a movement of one man that is open to everybody.”
In September 2017 Portland’s Artists’ Rapid Response Team staged a “Codfish Funeral” procession down Congress Street, through the Arts District during one of the First Friday Art Walks. Combining moving projections of water and codfish with live music and dancing it was an artistic response to the dwindling populations of the Atlantic Cod.
Among the artists was one woman, a force of nature, whose name is Anna. She was already familiar with Red Grooms work, and saw the opportunity to combine multimedia with science to raise awareness to the warming temperatures in the Gulf of Maine. She framed the problem in terms of an ecosystem rather than economics.
She worked with science teachers to reach more than 200 students at 16 schools, elementary through college level, in Southern and Mid-Coast Maine. Her idea was simple, which she leveraged through scale and reach.
In 2020, just as the COVID shutdown began, the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences asked her to host an exhibit. Nick Record, a senior research scientist at Bigelow became a key ally, “I think both scientists and artists are trying to look at the world through new lenses and show the world in ways people haven’t seen it before. Curiosity and discovery, trial and error, and creativity are essential, whether you’re a scientist, an artist, or somewhere in between.”
The Force of Nature contacted the Maven and proposed the “Majestic Fragility” idea and asked him to build a whale’s head. The Maven did not like her idea, and countered with something else, larger, a complete whale. She agreed. He made a model. She raised the funding. That is where I stepped in.
Because this is COVID, all of the artists work in isolation. Each artist has some component of the ecosystem, but no one will meet, until everyone gathers to install everything at the Bigelow Laboratory. Each artist has one specific component and the ethos is to use foraged or recycled materials. In the Red Grooms spirit, the energy of many colorful parts allows each artist latitude so that the whole will read as one, the individual parts subsumed into the collective.
The idea of foraged and recycled materials relate back to the ideas of Wendell Berry, the American novelist, poet, cultural critic and farmer. “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. My belief is that our life and the world in it are conditional gifts,” he wrote. Life and existence as gifts, freely given not earned, and we do not “own” the earth but are mere temporary inhabitants. From this view the fisheries are not merely an economic input but part of an integrated ecosystem, entrusted to us on the condition of responsible stewardship. Fighting words to some, but common sense to many; the Force of Nature and her collective are using art to encourage dialogue.
Work on the whale skull proceeds well and we prepare to build the spine. We cut the white painted tree trunk into sections 8 inches long. I bore through each, a not easy task, to allow a 1/2 inch threaded rod, 5 feet long, to pass through. Between each section a smaller disc, cut from a narrower trunk, will be placed, like cartilage. The threaded rods are bendable, the trunk vertebrae strung like garlands on a bough.
The maven’s model rests on a table next to my cube of space workshop. The model gives us reference, but the whale as built becomes its own sculpture. Each vertebrae has small paddle-like pieces attached; odd shaped 1/4” plywood with a dowel attached to pin them into place. The thoracic vertebrae near the skull need ribs forming a cage to protect the heart and lungs. An assembly of curving 1/4” plywood pieces frame the rib cage nicely.
The assembly gets less complex, more narrow as it tapers further down the spine. Each five foot section has a coupling nut with an eyebolt attached at its end. We connect each 5 foot section by a lag bolt with hex nut. Common hardware store items source our materials. We can easily detach each 5 foot section when we move the entire whale.
Overnight rains come. As I lay in my bed I can hear the raindrops on the tarp, and repeatedly at 2am go outside to push the tarps up, to remove pooling water. Gus cannot get wet. It becomes a nightly ritual, which almost seems like a benediction; rains fall gently as Gus readies to move on.
The tail assembly is an exceedingly complex challenge. A whale’s head and its tail are dominant features, so the tail, which technically is a fluke, needs visually to balance out the head. I will secure the fluke to logs on the threaded rod so I first need to figure out how to stabilize it, so it does not rotate. To the maven, I leave the question of width that scales with the head.
Cleats screwed to multiple vertebrae, along the curving spine, will lock the fluke in place. The maven, of course, sees the fluke not as one mass, but as three separate pieces, each at different angles and shapes. Gussets again allow me to create volume in space. The assembly is both not a whale fluke and a whale fluke.
The remaining tasks proceed easily. Using birch logs and random shaped plywood we build two pectoral flippers, the short, broad paddle shaped fins on the side. We attach them to the skull assembly and hang it in space using 1/8” aircraft cable and ferrules.
The final step is more of the “gyroscopic things” for another dash of complexity along the spine. Bittersweet is an aggressive, woody invasive vine in Maine that is a bane to gardeners, but a boon to the Maven. He has foraged long lengths of it, which we attach like garland adorning the spine. Two pieces of bowed 1/4” plywood 4’ wide are attached from the tail to the sternum, adding more volume to the sculpture.
By late August we are wrapping up Gus, four months of work from the aggregate yard to completion. My commission is to build “head scratching wonder and irrational decisions.” By unanimous consent, in collaboration we have achieved that.
We are ready to rent a 25-foot box truck and take the show on the road.
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Editor’s Note: Although this story is told using present tense verbs, the whale was actually built in the summer of 2021. The “Majestic Fragility” exhibit was on display at the Bigelow Laboratory of Oceanic Sciences through summer of 2022, then was moved to the Maine Maritime Museum for the “Sea Change” exhibit from February 2023 through 2024. It was moved to Bangor, where the exhibit is expected to become a permanent installation at the Wabanaki Public Health & Wellness center.
The Aggregate Yard
Posted: September 18, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, Portfolio - David's work 1 Comment
On a cool grey morning in April, my son and I are standing in an industrial aggregate yard, deep in the woods off Pleasant Hill Road. To get here we turned off the main road, followed the railroad tracks beyond where the pavement ends and the gravel begins. I have always been happier on a gravel road.
Just before the Rigby Yard we turned right and passed through a gate that is never locked. The Rigby Yard is the 245-acre shunting and switching terminal for rail freight of the greater Portland area and southern Maine. This aggregate yard is adjacent and immense, the sort of industrial zero pocket I tend to frequent.
When my daughter was learning to drive I would bring her here. Long gravel roads, towering piles to navigate around, no one anywhere near, what better place to hand her the keys and say, “go.”
My son and I are here to meet a client, to source wood for my next project. For other jobs I have scoured through wood lots, flitches of American hardwood or exotic species stickered and stacked, like dry aged beef, waiting in a locker. This aggregate yard is a world away, this project of an entirely different beast.
I am going to build a whale. Using a root ball and a tree trunk.
The commission comes during COVID, a strange and surreal time. I am unemployed and homeschooling my son. The chance to build a whale in my yard is a godsend, steady income I could really use. I can walk to work.
The client, a sculptor, is standing maybe 30 feet atop one of the piles, which is about the size of a football field, a heap of brush, stumps, the detritus of landscaping crews. My client could not be happier. His son is down below, sullen, waiting. We pull up and park our car, with trailer hitched behind.
We are looking not for a tree stump, but the tree stump that will be transformed into a 25-foot sculpture of a North Atlantic Right Whale. My client is a maven, I trust him completely. He has a vision. I am his fabricator.
We first crossed paths at a different dump, also off Pleasant Hill Road. He was making a sculpture of a standing black bear using foraged and found asphalt roofing shingles. The old made new, flotsam and jetsam transformed, the call of the wild chafing against the detritus of society – these seem to be elements of his life’s work.
I met the Maven because of my son. The Maven and I have boys the same age, who attended the same pre-school, we both live in South Portland, Maine and our boys are enrolled in the local public schools.
Fathers and sons, we walk. The boys make small talk, I stay silent, the Maven is like an owl. Lithe and athletic, occasionally he runs up a heap, moves brush about and then returns to the gravel road. He knows what he wants and it is best not to ask questions. But why, I wonder, a stump and trunk?
Across New England there are many complete articulated whale skeletons hanging in aquariums and natural history museums. The New Bedford Whaling Museum, the Maine State Museum, the Seacoast Science Center to name just a few. Eventually I would come to realize the Maven sees this not as a natural history model but as a way to reinterpret the whale. Does anyone really grasp all that a whale is? His goal is unexplainable decisions, a transformation that leads to the right frame of mind.
What is the real thing versus the symbol of the thing? Given he doesn’t really grasp all that is a whale in the first place, could another living system be used? A sort of commutative property? A tree that had been growing – the root ball, a thing of mystery, a subterranean life exposed, its tangle of roots and hidden networks – then hung overhead becomes a different perspective again. The right frame of mind.
Regardless, my job is to build the whale.
Specifically, to build the whale, then disassemble and load it onto a 25-foot box truck, drive 64 miles north, offload, hoist and install from the ceiling of the Bigelow Laboratory of Ocean Sciences. We are one part of “Majestic Fragility,” an ensemble exhibit on the Gulf of Maine ecosystem. Seven artists will participate, all using recycled and foraged materials: ghost gear – fishing nets, lines, traps, and pots – become kelp; cloth, wire, pipe cleaners with programmable LED lights become comb jellies; metal and dowels become sea terns.
I am optimistic, and expect the exhibit will tour the region, so I plan to build this robustly, to go the distance. As it would turn out, the exhibit will move three times over 200 miles across the state.
The Maven shouts out, “I have my stump!”
My son and I leap into action. We carry the root ball to the trailer; over some 30 feet it is transformed from brush into object. We carefully set it down. It shall not be damaged under my care. The trunk is chosen. We load that onto the trailer beside the root ball. We grab ratchet straps, tighten and secure everything in place.
Mission accomplished, we say our goodbyes and turn the car around. Out through the gate, down the gravel road, onto Pleasant Hill, then east toward my home workshop, where the cherry trees are beginning to blossom.
We are ready to build a whale.
…to be continued…
Ohm, not om
Posted: February 6, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Portfolio - David's work 3 Comments
The Professor makes house calls.
His full title is the “Pema Professor,” to honor Pema Chödrön, the American-born Tibetan Buddhist. The Professor came to our house and held class in the bathroom, not about Om – the sacred syllable – but about Ohms, the measurement of electrical resistance in circuits or conductors.
We are doing the finish work, finally, in the bathroom we added onto our house back in 2017. For nine years that room has had the basic plumbing but no heat, and a subfloor painted grey. Immense is our blessing to be able to do this finish work now, when masked jackels rampage our community, when our brown skinned neighbors stay indoors afraid to leave their house, more than 200 people having been arrested and absconded during “Operation Catch of the Day,” while so many homeless still live on street corners begging for coins; that we are able to afford such luxury now is a privilege not lost upon us. But still, our addition needs to be finished.
We are laying electric radiant heat on the bathroom floor, and then tiling. The Cadillac approach. The process begins by laying a waterproof uncoupling membrane which prevents tiles from cracking if the wooden subfloor moves. Into the membrane’s grid, we snapped in place 84 square feet of heating cable. That wire connects to a 15 amp Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter circuit breaker. Before laying tile, we needed to test both the Ohm resistance in the cable and its ground fault continuity, to ensure the integrity of the cable and circuit.
An Ohm is the measure of resistance, an object’s opposition to a flow of electric current. That resistance to flow creates friction, which friction creates heat, which is what we desire in the floor of the bathroom. We need to test this before laying tile.
Ohm’s formula is R = V/I, where V is voltage – the push driving the flow of electric charge – and I is current – the electric charge that flows past a specific point in a complete electric circuit. The formula for resistance was discovered by George Ohm, a high school teacher in Cologne, Germany, who published his theory and formula in 1827. The academics rejected his idea, but in 1841 Ohm was recognized and received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal. The unit of electrical resistance, the Ohm, is named in his honor.
In Language Arts my son has been learning the Greek alphabet. By happy coincidence, the Greek letter omega (Ω) is the symbol for ohms, chosen because its sound is similar to Ohm’s last name. Everything seems concordant here at the art farm.
To install the radiant floor heating cable, we made multiple tests of “conductor resistance” to ensure the circuit was functional. We used the Professor’s megohmmeter to take an ohms reading between the two power leads. At the factory the cable tested 14.8 ohms, but our test before installation was 14.1, after cable installation was 14.2, and after tile installation was 13.4. The manufacturer allows a 10% variance, so we remain within that range. Our test was positive and we proceed.
Of note, if the tester uses his fingers to press the megohmmeter leads against the copper lines, then the resistance reading shows the resistance through his body; he has become a part of the circuit. As a homeschool experiential, my son tested the resistance that way and got a reading of 4.3 ohms. The Professor did same and had a 4.7 ohm reading. The lower the ohms the easier electricity flows through a circuit. The circuit breaker was off so he was not at risk. Salt and magnesium in my son’s body can account for the difference because they are conductive electrolytes which increase the flow of electricity. My son does take a magnesium supplement so there is a line of reasoning here.
And so life goes here at an art farm. Ohms not om, our homeschool tutorial was one step the toward tiling the new bathroom. Updates to follow, as this journey continues.
Closest to the Sun
Posted: December 12, 2025 Filed under: consciousness, Permaculture & Home Renovation, Portfolio - David's work | Tags: ecuador 1 Comment
Chimborazo is a snow covered inactive volcano, the highest mountain in Ecuador and the 39th highest peak in the Andes mountains. Located at the equator, its summit is the farthest point on Earth’s surface from the Earth’s center. To the locals it is “the closest volcano to the sun.”
Ecuador’s biodiversity is nearly unparalleled with diverse habitats and a high concentration of species. The Galapagos Islands, a province of Ecuador, inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Republic of Ecuador’s vast richness was acknowledged in 2008 when the country rewrote its constitution granting citizenship rights to natural habitats, embracing ecological balance, recognizing ecosystems as living entities and allowing citizens to sue on their behalf.
The Constitution’s Preamble states: “We women and men, the sovereign people of Ecuador; RECOGNIZING our age-old roots, wrought by women and men from various peoples, CELEBRATING nature, the Pacha Mama (Mother Earth), of which we are a part and which is vital to our existence, INVOKING the name of God and recognizing our diverse forms of religion and spirituality, CALLING UPON the wisdom of all the cultures that enrich us as a society, AS HEIRS to social liberation struggles against all forms of domination and colonialism AND with a profound commitment to the present and to the future, Hereby decide to build: A new form of public coexistence, in diversity and in harmony with nature, to achieve the good way of living, the sumak kawsay; A society that respects, in all its dimensions, the dignity of individuals and community groups, A democratic country, committed to Latin American integration—the dream of Simón Bolívar and Eloy Alfaro—, peace and solidarity with all peoples of the Earth….”
The basic principles include:
- Sovereignty lies with the people…with national unity in diversity
- Ecuador is a territory of peace
- The human right to water is essential and cannot be waived
- The Ecuadorian State shall promote food sovereignty
- The right…to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment that guarantees sustainability and the good way of living (sumac Kawsay), is recognized.
- The right to aesthetic freedom; the right to learn about the historical past of their cultures and to gain access to diverse cultural expressions.
- Education…shall guarantee holistic human development, in the framework of respect for human rights, a sustainable environment, and democracy.
- The State shall guarantee elderly persons…Specialized health care free of charge, as well as free access to medicines
- The State shall guarantee the rights of pregnant and breast-feeding women with free maternal healthcare services
- The right to migrate of persons is recognized. No human being shall be identified or considered as illegal because of his/her migratory status.
There is trouble in paradise, though, as corruption is endemic. Ecuador ranked 121st among 180 countries on the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index. That put it among the most corrupt public sectors, and below average among countries of the Americas. By comparison, the USA was tied at 28th out of 180 countries, its lowest score since 2012, and its trend has been negative since 2015.
Ecuador is a hub for smuggling drugs produced in neighboring Columbia and Peru. The police, judiciary and executive branches are linked to crime, drug-trafficking and extortion. The World Justice Project’s 2022 report “The Rule of Law in Ecuador” found that “Ecuador saw the largest increases in the percentage of respondents who believe that some or all of the actors across [law enforcement, the executive branch, and the judiciary] are involved in corrupt practices. Among respondents in the Andean region, on average, Ecuadorians most often [three-quarters of all respondents] felt that top government officials engage in authoritarian behavior.…” The constitution speaks of noble ideals while the government is rife with graft.
Anthony is a young man who grew up on Chimborazo. He is a father of children growing up in the Andes mountains, but because of the gangs and corruption he lives now in Massachusetts. A roofer, he works all around New England, traveling south to Rhode Island or Connecticut or as far north into Maine and Vermont.
Most all of the roofing crews in Southern Maine now are Hispanic. I see them driving their vans, loaded high with ladders and wheel barrows, doing all of the roofing jobs. For one job on the coast, I needed to remove a chimney on a very steep pitch. I asked the home owner to hire that out, and a Spanish speaking crew arrived. They had no safety equipment but climbed up without hesitation. Growing up in the Andes gives them a natural ease on heights.
The crew did not have the correct equipment and so I called the roofing contractor. Not surprisingly he showed up in his big truck, emblazoned with decals advertising his business. Dressed in sandals and shorts, it seemed we had interrupted him from working on his boat. He stood on the ground, looked up, doing nothing. The crew worked quickly and finished in about 3 hours. Most certainly the $1,500 paid to the boss did not include profit sharing. Every carpenter I know has similar stories to share.
We hired Anthony for the Tiny Cathedral, and by-passed the big-truck contractor. He and his cousin arrived, having driven two and a half hours north from Massachusetts. They did the job quickly and well and were paid cash for a full days wage, travel time included. The home owner still came out ahead, we avoided back-breaking labor, Anthony got a good break.
We shared pizza and beer over lunch. Between his broken English, and my pidgin Spanish, Anthony spoke about his roots, growing up in a small town closest to the sun. He described the exquisite beauty and how the ecotourism industry offers only a sanitized view while avoiding the gang and crime-ridden areas. Opportunity drew him north and he had not seen his son for seven years, nor did he expect to return home for another four years. He misses his son’s childhood but sends home money monthly.
That lunch was more than a year ago, and the self-righteous today likely would regard our act of civility as aiding and abetting. Ours is a transactional age where might makes right, where greed governs the strongmen, where earth is rare only in its industrial and financial value, but history is littered with the names of fallen despots, empires that came to pass. King Xerxes held such commanding power that after a storm destroyed his pontoon bridge, he had the sea whipped 300 times with chains, the engineers beheaded, to punish the sea for its disobedience preventing his Persian Army from conquering Greece. Long forgotten he is while daily still the tides rise and fall.
Wisdom endures on the side of “our age-old roots…the Pacha Mama of which we are a part and which is vital to our existence… diverse forms of religion and spirituality, …of all the cultures that enrich us [in] struggles against all forms of domination and colonialism.”
Closest to the Sun is closest to the light of truth.
Tiny Cathedral
Posted: December 5, 2025 Filed under: Permaculture & Home Renovation, Portfolio - David's work 1 Comment
Not long ago we built a tiny cathedral at the top of Meetinghouse Hill. The hill was so named back in 1733 when the Purpooduck meeting house was built. “The old Meeting House was a large, square, two-storied, unpainted building, without a tower, with a porch on the front end which served as an entry. There were two outside doors, reached by two steps which ran the entire length of the porch. It was a great barn-like looking structure. The pulpit was an elaborate affair. It stood on one post elevated about eight or ten feet above the floor. It was reached by a flight of winding stairs.”
Our tiny cathedral was, in prosaic terms, the conversion of a non-conforming 106-year old garage into an apartment for a Mother-In-Law who lives in Switzerland. “Non-conforming” is a term of art of the Code Enforcement Office for a legally established building that no longer meets the current zoning laws. You can renovate but can neither expand nor replace those structures. There was not an inch to spare.
The 106-year old garage had serious issues but exactly one positive: it could provide the Mother-In-Law with the privacy of a 220 square foot bedroom “suite.” We had a chance to make something majestic. In order to effect this transformation we jacked up and moved the building off its existing slab, dug down to excavate and pour new stem walls with footings then used a crane to lift the garage back into place, exactly where it had been.
The Copp Brothers from Cumberland accomplished this Herculean task. For three generations they have been jacking and moving buildings and, like the “Ghostbusters,” the Uncles and Nephews arrived in a converted ambulance filled with tools of their trade. In less than 90 minutes they rolled the structure onto the street and onto the side yard. The crane lift back took less time.
The Professor – who currently teaches my son science by means of welding and small engine repair – was the mastermind of the project. When he showed up we got to work on the carpentry, plumbing, insulation, heating, roofing and siding. The electric work was straightforward, but the plumbing and bringing water to the garage was a challenge. Thankfully, the professor owns every tool known to mankind and has consummate skill using them all. No problem was insurmountable.
Because the space was limited, we added insulation to the outside of the building. The building remained exactly on its original footprint, and we expanded outward and upward, adding recycled foam insulation – 3” to the walls and 6” on the roof – to create a weathertight envelope that exceeded the new energy efficient Code requirements.
The homeowner, a trained architect who makes sculpture, designed the suite to maximize light, by means of windows, sliding glass doors and skylights. More than 20% of the wall space is windows, and that is how the garage became cathedral-like. Titus Burckhardt, a Swiss artist and art historian, has written, “When a Byzantine poet says, of the fullness of light in the vast inner space of the church, that it seems that ’the space is not illumined by the sun from without, but rather the illumination originates within,’ he is expressing an artistic ideal which Gothic architecture also sought to realize in its own way, by the introduction of transparent walls of stained glass.”
We did not use stained glass, but the amount of light filling that tiny suite is simply majestic. The story is told in detail here: https://npdworkshop.com/the-mother-in-law
The tiny cathedral represents one solution to the housing crisis. In 1850 the average American home was 888 square feet for 5.5 people. By 2015 homes had ballooned to 2,496 square feet for 2.5 people, on average. McMansions average 4,000 square feet, can grow upwards of 6,000 square feet, housing an average of 2.5 people. The trend shows a culture drunk in our profligacy.
The State of Maine needs 84,000 new housing units by 2030 to meet demand and to support the workforce. Maine’s median household income is approximately $90,730, while the median home price is $355,000. Affordability clearly is a major issue. The “supersize me” culture needs to wake up, and rather than build larger, we need to build smaller and smarter.
In Maine H.P. 1224 – L.D. 1829 was recently passed as “An Act to Build Housing for Maine Families and Attract Workers to Maine Businesses.” The law both increases housing density by 2 1/2 times while decreasing the lot size to 5,000 square feet per unit in areas with public water and sewer. This means smaller homes on much smaller lots, which makes the Tiny Cathedral a herald of things to come.
Empathy
Posted: October 10, 2025 Filed under: consciousness, Portfolio - David's work 1 Comment
When I was a child growing up in Deerfield, Illinois the ancient saying “Money is the root of all evil” still held currency in the culture. People actually thought that way, but now, decades later, that quotation seems less often spoken. An AI search reports that the phrase is popular on social media, but I would not know this since I do not frequent those haunts.
The sentence is a misquote from the Bible 1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.” So money itself is value neutral, while its craving and lust are the stuff of sin, a defining trait of this dark age of Mammon.
When I was a child growing up in Deerfield, Illinois there lived a young woman, whose father was from Guatemala and her mother an Anglo, a bi-racial family in a very caucasian Judeo-Christian small town. When her father died young, her mother’s strength held them strong and taught them to take pride in their work, meager as it may be. When that young woman came of age her work ethic and ambition lead her to food service, and eventually to found a catering company – with $300 dollars – called “Food For Thought.”
I worked with that company at its beginning, serving endless platters of Chicken Dijonnaise and Phyllo-wrapped Baked Brie, in the era when the Silver Palate Cookbook was changing the rules of the game, and American Cuisine was taking root. “Food For Thought” grew over the decades to become Chicago’s leading provider of corporate, social, and cultural event services with revenues now exceeding $22 Million per year.
In our Wise Women writings, we have discussed the “Commanding Intellect” – which this young woman had in abundance – but more fundamentally her’s is the gift of “Empathy” which is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Empathy’s first cousin “Forbearance” is “restraint and tolerance” by “demonstrating patience and showing tolerance toward others who are imperfect or have wronged you.” This woman built Food For Thought but what she did next is the story that bears mention, that demonstrates her wisdom. Commanding intellect built her first business. Empathy expanded her reach.
$80.7 Billion dollars are spent annually in the United States on public prisons and jails. Approximately 4,000 companies work in the for-profit prison industrial complex generating $5.2 Billion dollars in revenue annually. It costs more to send a teenager to a correctional facility than to put them through Northwestern University. Our Heroine reasoned that she could give the “throw away kids,” the gang-affiliated, the pregnant teen mothers, the dispossessed, the least among us a chance, to learn a trade through food service, at a cost less than $10,000 per child. She leveraged her food service savvy toward social justice by opening Curt’s Cafe, in Evanston, Illinois.
Curt’s Cafe (Cultivating Unique Restaurant Training) works to “improve outcomes for young adults (ages 15-24) living in at-risk situations through work and life skills training.” Over 650 students have completed the Cafe’s work and skill training, learning how to prepare and serve a full menu of breakfast and lunch items, how to work the cash register, how to do basic accounting, how to open a checking account, how to find an apartment. Nationally, the recidivism rate for ex-convicts returning to prison is 86% but at Curt’s Cafe only 1% having returned to prison. 1%! The average wage of incarcerated workers is $0.86 per day, but Curt’s Cafe provides its workers a living stipend and hope. These numbers only scratch the surface. The human stories are richer, deeper, and more meaningful.
It is best now to let Susan Trieschmann tell her own story:
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In other news, this week I helped install a sculpture down in Kennebunk. Jesse Salisbury is the esteemed maker of this seat carved from Basalt, a hard black volcanic rock. Heavy lifting 1.5 tons up that hill, but well worth the effort in the end. Ars long, vita brevis.
Wild Maybes
Posted: September 12, 2025 Filed under: Art & Healing, Portfolio - David's work, What is an Art Farm 2 Comments
We interrupt our regular “Wise Women” programming to bring this special report of the “Wild Maybes of the Long Green Between.” The polymath maker, Chris Miller, has struck again, siting “visitors from an ancient Earth, as unknowable as the far future,” on the grassy knoll of Levine Park, in Waterville, Maine.
The Wild Maybes are “honorary crossing guards where the deep past and far future meet.” The public welcomed to roam “…in the richness and vastness of time beyond reckoning.” The four Maybes face the cardinal directions of North, East, South and West proudly beside the mighty Kennebec River as it flows ever to the Gulf of Maine.
Modeled upon the earliest mammals, just post the dinosaur age, Chris conceived this public art installation as “a puzzle…based on shaky assumptions about dusty old bones.” They were made using a welded steel armature, foam, and structural concrete. I am honored to have been mere fabricator: building forms, cutting and stacking foam, mixing mud, troweling concrete, helping to load and then install: 15,000 pounds hauled 96 miles north.
There are four Maybes:
- Uni, the Uintatherium, a beast of the herbivorous Dinocerata mammal that lived in the now United States during the Eocene period;
- Eo, the Eocondon, of the triisodontid mesonychian genus that existed in the early Paleocene of Turtle Island (North America);
- Cory, a Coryphodon, named from the Greek “peaked tooth” an extinct genus of pantodont mammals, also local, speaking in terms of continents;
- Barry, a towering Barylambda, also of the pantodonts, from the middle to Late Paleocene era.
Tick-tock clock time is of man’s making, while Natura moves in other orbits. Chris wrote, “When 2.8 billion seconds ago (in 1934), historian Lewis Mumford pronounced that ‘…the clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age,’ he went on to point out that there are still many other ways to mark time, and surely better ways to experience it. This long, narrow strip of grass, for instance, is a between place. It is the perfect kind of place to escape from the kind of time that is measured in seconds and minutes. Here in this long green between, time flows in seasons and eons, in eras and generations.”
And so Waterville is transformed, and kudos to them for stepping up, underwriting the permanent installation. What a marvelous life unfolds along the rocky coast, Northern terminus of the lower 48.
For more information about the Wild Maybes, click here: https://npdworkshop.com/wild-maybes
The Anti-Readymade
Posted: May 30, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, Farming off the Farm, Gallery - Visual, Portfolio - David's work | Tags: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, brancusi, dada, duchamp 2 Comments
Marcel Duchamp, arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, turned the art world upside down, in 1917, when he submitted a porcelain urinal as art for the inaugural Independent Artists’ exhibition in the Grand Central Palace of New York City. “Fountain” signed by R Mutt was rejected, which only drove that readymade sculpture to define the dada movement.
But wait…the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven more likely was its actual creator. R Mutt, a/k/a Duchamp elbowed her out. The Baroness embodied Dada, fought at the vanguard of the avant-garde to expose the irrationality of conformity and capitalism. Jane Heap, a publisher active in the development of modernism, described the Baroness as “the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, lives Dada.” The Baroness Elsa appears to have been R Mutt.
108 years later, when social media breeds conformity and capitalism reigns supreme, we are proud to present the Anti-Readymade: an object of exquisite natural beauty rendered into a utilitarian object of limited practical use. A countertop in my new office.
The slab is 2.25” thick American black walnut, which I happened to espie last December while at a lumberyard buying odd-lot flooring for our loft’s “charcuterie board” floor. I was seized by its commanding poetry, and given that my corporate bank account had excess capital, a tax write off was available. In our loft I had framed a wall using original boards from our 1840 barn, torn down when we first renovated the house. Boards cut and milled in 1840 would have sprouted circa 1700, so the history here equals the poetry. I sit here now as I write.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then consider this from my childrens’ eyes. They remember when our loft was being framed, my son shoveled snow out the empty window openings. Just before COVID a friend helped me hang sheetrock, so when the shutdown began my wife had a home office. The nook wall is built of 325 year old boards, given a new life. Friends have loaned tools, John Hart built a bookcase then helped inlay the bowtie joint, my son helped clean out the many divots and found a walnut! The wild wood grain shouts out, and the hole speaks of the unknown where the “unusable” has been made beautiful in a community effort.
And what about that hole at the center? It screams of the void. Our zeitgeist, it seems, is a call to leap into the void. Musashi, the 16th century Samurai Master and strategist, considered a “sword saint” in Japan, taught that one must “strike from the void.” This means to strike using a calm, natural, intuitive approach, free of tension and over analysis. When stillness and clarity coincide, the body and spirit are in harmony.
And so our Anti-Readymade now stands ever ready, willing and able to remind us that stillness and clarity are keys to navigating these turbulent times.
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Even the slab cutoffs are sculptural. When squaring the slab’s end, this piece was cut off, which sings of Brancusi. It will become yet another piece in our mix-it-up loft.
Art Ark Redux
Posted: March 21, 2025 Filed under: Portfolio - David's work | Tags: Art Ark, Carousel Cosmos, Chris Miller, New Paradigm Workshop Leave a comment
The Sea Monster Adoption program continues! We delivered last week Wendy the Whale to the Children’s Room at the Portland Public Library. Truth be told, donations are a daunting challenge. All was at a dead end until last minute Chris learned the Public Library is a “quasi Public institution” and thus, not under the direct domain of the City Government. The flood gates opened, the truck rolled and Wendy arrived at the loading dock. The Library staff, patrons and children were overjoyed!
The Art Ark also rolled north, delivering Dottie the Dragon and Wanda the Walrus to their new home at the Children’s Discovery Museum in Waterville, Maine.
Senior Chairman of the Board; lunch in lower Manhattan; Dakota’s Coda
Posted: March 14, 2025 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, Portfolio - David's work, What is an Art Farm 2 Comments
Fred Turner was a titan in American commerce. 1956, in Des Plaines, Illinois, Fred started flipping hamburgers for Ray Kroc; while other young men were hustling to become a corporate Vice President, Turner saw his future: Kroc had a limitless vision, and Turner had the skill and drive to pragmatize the operation, globally. 38 years later, he was the Senior Chairman of the Board of Directors but I knew him as a neighbor, the father of classmates at Holy Cross School, I played the drums in his wife Patty’s jug band.
I wrote a letter requesting a meeting, and mentioned that I had lived off-grid recently. Douglas excoriated me, leaning in slowly, he spoke, “You…can…not…write…that….David! this is…the Chairman of the Board…of McDonald’s!!!” Brazen, I mailed the letter to the headquarters office, but then called Patty at their home.
Cautious at first, Patty happily arranged our meeting. Over a breakfast of eggs and hash browns, I explained my business concept. Fred listened politely, then replied, “If you are going to quote me, say ‘I don’t get it.’”
I always found that phrasing of interest. Having spent a career on quarterly earnings calls, convincing skeptical bankers and financiers of the promise that McDonald’s held, he had been quoted regularly in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, any paper reporting the news. Although it was just him and me, he still used that lens, “…if you are going to quote me…”
Having made his fortune selling hamburgers, the digital future was less clear. It was hard, then, to envision Google + You Tube + Starbucks, which essentially is what GDC encompassed. The power behind Global Data was less the media offerings and more the back-end data; with a growing user base the scope would become transformational, as proven in the real world financial success of Facebook and Google. But imagine all profits redounding not to stockholders but to the peoples of this planet, whereby “dignity credit” could be extended based upon local civic participation. GDC was an arbitrage of money and information.
Having met with Fred, it was arranged that I would speak to Edward R. Stavitsky. I had been told that his Uncle had financed Samuel “Goldfish” Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Marcus Low, as well as Cecil B. DeMille; with Chase Manhattan Bank, he had financed 100% of 20th Century and 25% for Universal and United Artists studios; had structured the financing of McDonalds Corporation in 1954, “invented” the trilogy structure: operations-franchisee-real estate holding company, which launched the venture. As of 2025, McDonald’s is believed to be the third largest holder of real estate in the world. Bill Gates owns nearly 270,000 acres, while the Catholic Church owns 177,000,000 acres of land.
We spoke on the phone and I was invited to fly out to Los Angeles, to meet in a hotel lobby just off Rodeo Drive. The meeting went well, he was quite friendly and supportive, but “others people money” would be the key. A moment of significance, I stood on the edge of the abyss: I needed to raise $38 Million USD.
My challenge was great. The absolute condition of the Information Alliance was no venture capital, which meant no equity sold. Debt was no option – negative cash flow can service no debt – so the model needed to be an endowment, the academic approach, an asset base generating yield to fund the venture. Progress was slow, very slow, as the calendar turned from 1994 into 1995.
Laurie’s star was ascendent. Employed as a business librarian at Altschuler, Melvoin and Glasser, an accounting and tax-audit firm on Chicago’s Wacker Drive, she was offered a job at Spencer Stuart, a leading global executive search firm. Laurie was lured to London, and so too Douglas, where he enrolled in the London School of Business, a globally respected MBA program, ranked higher than the Business schools of Harvard and the University of Chicago.
The transition was hard. The change complete. Douglas had gone global, on the road, again.
CODA
Our blessings can be our curse. The brilliant mind one wild tiger hard to tame. Douglas was mercurial, like quicksilver: when we were together, he was focused and present, but once apart, he was gone, completely gone. Years passed when we rarely spoke.
I recall standing, after the London move, on a beach in Rogers Park, Chicago, gazing out at the horizon. He spoke of his dream of becoming a college professor. I suspended disbelief until a few years later he was hired to teach at the Kelley School of Business at the University of Indiana. His was the gift of manifestation. Not surprisingly, he became a favorite of the students, annually ranked among the top professors. His light would fill any room, whether a small kitchen or a university lecture hall.
I pursued the endowment for another ten years. Like Sisyphus in an ice storm I struggled to climb that hill. I did deliver funds to Ed Stavitsky and we flew to Wall Street for meetings and meals with the banker, fine red wine not white with fish; contracts were signed but he failed to perform. Whether a potemkin or the real-deal remains an unknown. Ed died in July 1999. I attended his funeral, among many, laid a spadeful of dirt upon his casket.
Eventually I found my way to Maine, to build furniture for Thos Moser Cabinetmakers. I worked the A-shift. It was grounding. I collaborated with my sister on a pair of essays about heirloom furniture – my story was the making, hers the receiving – published in the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday edition. Tom flew me to Chicago to give a demonstration on chair making, then asked me to write an essay about his Customer-in-Residence program. I arranged for Tom to fly to his hometown, Chicago, for a tour of the estate of John Bryan, a major collector of American furniture.
At no one’s request I recruited the Head of the Art History Department at Yale University to create a course on three generations of New England/New York chair making: Hitchcock in the 1800s, Stickley in the 1900s, and Thos Moser into the future. And then on 9 January 2009, after the financial collapse which brought the Great Recession, I was laid off along with half the Thos Moser work force. Profits before collaboration. Money the measure of the man.
I found my way, working as a carpenter, fabricating public art and now, managing the plant and property at the Friends School of Portland.
On 21 December, this past solstice, I called Douglas and we picked up where we left off. We were immediately in synch, as though no time had passed. As our conversation ended, Doug laughed and said, “Hey man, let’s keep in touch more often!”
An opportunity presented itself. I have been thinking about launching a new community project, to teach furniture making to recovering addicts and former convicts. The act of making is at once both practical and therapeutic. My wife is a registered Art Therapist and a Licensed Therapeutic Counselor. I have an idea, she has the credentials, and a woodworker friend is getting a degree in counseling; the elements seem in place.
On 7 January 2025, just before the dawn, as the light returned over the horizon, I found myself thinking about Douglas. There is no one here with his energy, his spark, his purifying flame, and so I thought to reach out, to ask “can we rekindle our flame, chart a new path, ride together, again?”
Five hours later I received the call that he had died.
Bereft, I sat down to write this festschrift “celebration writing” for a deep true friend.
Would that he ride shotgun once again, in spirit, this time.
