50 years building homestead & sculptor Utopia amid redwoods

Both my wife and I quit our teaching jobs and we came up to rebuild 1812 Russian Orthodox Chapel. What year? 1973. And then Margie got a job at the local school and we just stayed. Like everybody starting out you can't afford land. But eventually you saved enough to Yeah, this was raw land. Yeah. So this is what I call the sculpture yard. It's like out of a storybook. Yeah. Have you taken a peek up? See this tall lookout tower? There's a ladder that goes up inside there. You want to go first or second? Okay, good. Then I'll break all the cobwebs out We're going into the tree trunk. Yeah, that's one of the really wonderful things about this experience in here. Wow. In the hole. It's really great. It's so great. I didn't realize there's room for two thumb arrest pads right here. So this could be two beds. Yeah, you could. Yeah. I've never done it. But then you can stand on this and poke your head out the top. Oh, really? Okay. Okay. That's great. Obviously, there's tree down below. And this is well, this is copper over wood. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Wow. It does feel like you've exited from the trunk of a tree. Just you see the eggs in the nest over there? To the right. Oh, yeah. There's a nest. Is it is the nest part of this structure? The connected? Yeah. Yeah. It's called eerie. Oh, like an eagle's nest. This piece called lookout. It's a big chunk of redwood on a steel frame. What you see is what you get. You know? What did you start off with? What inspired this? The big piece of wood, of course. And when we were trying to load it is a giant loader and had tongs and he couldn't grab it. Finally, he stuck his fork right into the middle of it and started to pick it up. And I thought he's gonna break it. And I said, if it breaks, we need to find out. So I said, shake it, you know? And he shook it and the back wheels of this loader came off the ground and back down like that. So we decided it was strong and then put it to use. So did you think, okay, let's build kind of a shelter in the top? Well, you know, this was an excuse to use the tree as I realized I could hollow it out and actually pass through it. And I raised it up so you could get underneath it. And then I needed a destination, you know? A destination. That's funny. So the idea is it's a treehouse, I guess. Yeah, it's sculptural. But it feels habitable. Yeah. And it's explorable. Kids like it. You'll welcome it. Yeah. Have you spent any time inside? Like it's just working on it, but have you actually come up? It is. It does have, I mean, you know, you could feel it here too. You know, it's like, it's kind of like this little cave, you know, echoes sounds. And yeah, this is all you can see the lines of just basically rows of two by four stacked on top of the corbel stacking and then cladding over the top of that. But you probably didn't think it would become this when you first saw the piece. No, no. It was like, this is an amazing piece of wood. Can we get it on a truck? And when we got it here, I just spread things out and start cleaning off, you know, so I get to know pieces by trying to get down to solid wood. So for you, sculptures are not something passive that just are there. You can do things with them? Well, I mean, for example, this piece right here, this climbing piece right here, that was done in 1981. And it was at the Oakland Museum for 35 years. The decision to actually put climbing rungs on that piece, my daughter was three at the time, but there was like, should I do that? Will it be a liability? You know, will the art world call it art or just a playground? But your eye travels over the piece much more because of it. And I'm glad I did. So did you plant these gardens? Yeah, actually, the orchard is what we planted first. It was pretty wooded. We cleared first and then we could afford apple trees. How long ago? Those are 40 years. At the time, it was fairly affordable to buy. 30 years ago, everything was affordable to buy compared to now. And then you decided to build yourself? Yeah, I'd seen so many artists say, oh, man, I'm going to build my house. And they drift out of the studio for 10 years going, just building their groovy house. And it's like, but I really didn't want to be out of my studio. So we took a year. What's that structure? It was our daughter's bedrooms, but we didn't finish it until they went to college. Originally, the idea was to have a house and a tower and a small cultivated space in between. That relationship of water tower to a farmhouse or the temple to the pagoda, the space in between things is sometimes as important as the buildings themselves. The gate was an old muni poles from San Francisco that my neighbor had. And he says, do you want those? I go, yeah. The next day he came back, he said, maybe I shouldn't have given those to you, you know, and Jones notorious for not doing things too quickly. So I said, well, how about whoever uses them first? He says, okay, like that I got started. This house is more, you might say more human scale than industrial scale, built on three foot intervals instead of four, three foot instead of four foot center. This six foot instead of eight. I mean, it's just, it's just a little idea I had in my head and tried it six inch, not eight inch or four inch, three inch rafters, not four inch, you know, three by three purlins. It's just wonky. There are a few places where, because a hallway is three foot, it's actually not that gracious. It's a little cramped. So it doesn't work all the time, but I never said I was perfect. You know, Just right here, it feels a little barren and it's kind of odd to have a bathroom so close. It's like two people don't get to walk in together, you know, it's just, because this is three feet wide. Yeah. Yeah. And normally it would be usually four or five or six. So this is four and a half here. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's it's huge. So yeah. Tell me about building your own house. You had a blank slate. No, you think you finish your house and you think you're done. And then eventually you, you redo a floor or you remodel a kitchen or, or things like that. So, you know, it's, it's work in progress, but it's all, I mean, or a lot of what, I mean, cause you see wood ceiling, all wood beams, I mean, wood floor it's, yeah, I'm kind of, yeah. And there's copper to be seen too here, you know. What a nice nook. Oh yeah. Do you, that was a thought or a team room, but nobody does. I mean, the grandkids sleep there and they play around. Yeah. So we finally put a bookshelf in there cause we never sat in there. So you just carved a track. It has an inlay of harder wood in the bottom and that's the traditional way that the rollers are nicer. And this is, this is kind of nice too. Where's the switch? Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's, no, it's actually my magnetic personality. You know, can you, can you do that? Any, in any part? I'm doing it. No, you have to touch the metal, something conductive. Yeah. So there's a ground that, how do you have that idea? Actually, I was doing work at the Asian art museum and one of the guys supplying stuff there, this is a palm tree base inverted. And he said, I've got these palm tree bases. Why don't you take one home and see what you can do with it? You know? And, and I went, okay, I'm going to take it home. And I thought, well, if I were to make a lamp, I should make a lamp that's so, so complicated that it couldn't just get ripped off, you know? So I made one and then I realized like, well, who cares if it gets ripped off? I don't want to make lamps, you know? And then, and then this, this table, it's copper and you know, it's also taking a log and tapering. So you get, you get all the textures of grain. It's flawed in the middle, but it doesn't matter because actually I hollowed it out. So it's not so heavy. Nice piece of wood. And this is a great for grandkids because they can jump from, you can just run across from couch to couch, you know? And they do. Wow. So there's nothing sacred about the art. You don't let them play. Well, uh, there's one broken slat in here that from, from the kids jumping on it. So I had to tell them they couldn't jump on that anymore. Did you make your own couches? Actually, these are from the historic wine vats from Fountain Grove, which was a utopian society back at the turn of the century. Since then, they've all burned. That big fire burned everything. But a friend of mine had permission to salvage this stuff. And some of this was on my studio before the fire happened. And I turned him into that. I see some of these joinery you do with the furniture. I also see something similar in your sculptures. Yeah. Yeah. You know, mortise and tenon is sort of a tradition of wood and, and pleasing to me. Yeah. Did you do the, the kitchen cabinetry? Yeah. What kind of wood is that? That's a walnut top. Wow. It's beautiful. And did it come from somewhere salvage or was it? No, actually I milled it when I was in Davis and the table too. You milled it because you had access to milling equipment? You know, back then walnut was just being jerked out along the roads and it was just, yeah. I like these cabinets as well. The doors, copper? Yeah. There's this copper scraps over plywood there. Cabinets originally had fir plywood, but we replaced the doors. So the walnut doors I built. Yeah. How about the copper sink? It looks great, but it's hard to keep clean. You don't want one. Huh. Do you, do you like doing the practical stuff? Yeah. You know, making a beautiful home for one's family is really the best thing to do, you know? And, because you're living in your art. Yeah. You know, my wife was a teacher and she wasn't an artist, but she appreciated having family that's sharing what you've made. Yeah. Yeah. That's special. I love this. Yeah. It even got painted out. Once you can see there's sort of traces, you know, we have to decipher it. Originally this was to be bedrooms. We hadn't planned it as a scranny in an apartment, but when we finally finished it, we put a little kitchen in too. So now can you rent it out or something? We could, I just like, I don't really want to, you know, it's nice to have it when, for the holidays, you know, everybody will be up here and kids camp out on the floor and it's good. Yeah. Big beams too. That's, that's a nice story that when I was building the building, I thought I could really use a couple of big beams. So I called a friend that has this portable saw mill. I said, Hey, do you have any beams? He goes, well, I don't know. I'll go out and check. I said, I need some six by, you know, twelves, you know? And, and, and he came back and he says, no, I don't have any. Do you have any logs? I'm like, well, I do. Yeah. He says, well, come up. And he came up that same morning and he milled these things and we installed them the same afternoon. It was just like, just like that. The diamond plate window sills are pretty nice too. Yeah. Oh, they are. So why put diamond plate on a window sill? Cause it looks good. And actually window sills are really difficult. Wood window sills, they get all the sun and they always just kind of get funky. And these are more bulletproof, you know, and this copper is, is done with hand tools, sinking into sheetrock. You can take a four bar tool and you, you put a piece of sheetrock down and copper on top and then you just strike it. And it sinks into the sheetrock and leaves a raised pattern. So that's a technical secret. I probably shouldn't, as, as we all know, like ideas are free. It's just who uses them best that counts. Did you then, the wood, were you just buying lumber? Oh yeah. Yeah. I buy lumber. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know. It almost looks like one of these cabins. You have some places where you go skiing or it's very cozy. Very. Yeah. Yeah. There, there are those glamping tree houses and things. This was my attempt to build a small sacred space. And it was, did this one originate with the materials as well? Or did that help? Yeah, it did. I actually was working on this Sea Ranch Chapel and the contractor, he had apprenticed in Japan. So he actually is the one that brought Japanese tools kind of into my consciousness. One day after we were at the end of the day, you kind of go back and you go, Oh yeah, it's looking pretty good. And Tommy said, you know, someday I'd like to build a temple, a small temple. And I was like, me too. So this, the idea came first, build a temple. And then I worked on lots of sketches for probably 10 years, but nothing really. And then the materials for this building showed up, there was one big chunk of wood that all the posts came out of and quite remarkable, dense, very dark old growth redwoods. So I was able to take this large kind of fractured log and just freehand cut timbers. And then with a stash of timbers, measure them and figure out what I could build with it. Yeah. Freehand cut, that's important. Yeah, that, that when there's a knot, the grain and the saw follows that. And I let the saw exaggerate that aspect of the wood. So originally I had spoke shave, so almost hand planed, spoke shave is a hand planing process. Some of the posts and, and they got so smooth, they just lost all their vitality. I had to go back and put this add texture. So there's, there's some texture in there that's important. You can't tell how old. Yeah, I mean, it is, it's, it's 20 years old. But no, it feels like it could be hundreds. Yeah. And that pattern of the, is it copper that's turned that? Yeah, the copper, there was a copper roof on a house up the coast that started leaking right after they installed the copper and they spent eight years trying to fix it. Finally, they just tore the copper off and the contractor called me and goes, do you want this copper? I was like, yeah. For a while I was calling this a tea house for lack of a better term. And then I read a beautiful poem by Elizabeth Heron. And I said to my wife, Margie, I think maybe I'm building a poetry house. Mostly because nobody knows what a poetry house is and everybody knows what a tea house is. And there's all these rules for tea house. There's no rules for poetry house. So, so I called Elizabeth up and she ended up writing a long poem in parallel. This is her handwriting and we, with felt pens, took lines from her poem and tagged the whole building under the substructure. So the roof, the walls and the floor are covered with poetry that you don't see. And the only place that it's revealed is in the paper of the lantern. The poem is cyclical and covers four seasons. This is the poetry house for the nameless monk, is how Elizabeth starts. The poet's house is a winter dream of absent fruit, sleek red skin, and crisp sweet meat waiting for the hand, the tongue, the teeth. Remembered and imagined, an apple tree in falling rain, soaked black bark. Imagine apples, remember apples. Book one, apples. And so it goes. So here we see the table. It actually, we've had eight people around here. So this actually, it takes forever, but it eventually winds down into the floor. Wow, you don't seem to be making a lot of effort when you are just drawing it. So it's kind of... Right, right. You can see there's a big acme thread underneath there, but it looks like we just go down, but it takes a long time. That's good. Nobody gets trapped, you know. So it's a meditation, becomes a... Kids love to sit in here and get spun around. This is six foot by nine foot. It would be a three-mat tea space if you were doing Japanese tea. And if you were doing a traditional tea, you would want a flat floor. And during the holidays, we put a futon in here and my daughter will use this as a place to sleep. Or you could bring this down and put a yoga mat in here. You know, at the same time, it's just a wonderful place to gather with a group of friends and have a dialogue. Right, like it feels close enough, but you're not this long table. But then you could probably eat people. Easily, yeah. And it's kind of cozy then. So it really is kind of a poetry house. I mean, besides the poetry in the space, it's also for reading or thinking. Yeah, yeah. Every project, there's that first line. Really, that first line of a novel is also a poem. And three words on the idea for a piece of sculpture is a poem, that sort of kernel of beginning. And where does that come from? It comes from an empty moment. Something arrives, you know. I've sort of thought of this as the empty space where attention resides. The way you peek through the windows is quite special, the way light is going to hit to it. But also, the glass is not conventional either. It's called Baroque glass. Why did you decide to go with it? Texture and light, but privacy. Wow. It feels like you framed this view. Yeah, and framed views, I mean, that's the classic sort of that whole Zen view is that little window that's more precious than the picture window, you know. Is that Christopher Alexander's? Yeah. There is a Zen view pattern. Yeah, pattern language is wonderful. I refer to it all the time. So, the idea of a five-sided building means that I pretty much don't have to fit into, if I were in a gridded typical architectural site with, you know, square buildings or walls or things like that, there's no need to align because it doesn't fit a grid. So, I think that's an advantage for this building. Actually, I built the building up in the yard, and then I exhibited it, and then it came back home, and I created it as much space as I could for it here. I mean, I love the way this rolls. What's it on? Is it just a track? There are rollers underneath. Actually, one of Elizabeth's, the poet's, favorite sounds is the sound of the doors. I kind of, she likes that sound, and then, of course, as it comes to an end. So, I mean, you can feel also how, you know, closing this down has a different kind of feeling. And then, because a lot of recycled materials, the green glass, those are wine bottles stuck in copper pipe. That does not look like a wine bottle. I'll take that as a compliment. Yeah. You said there's always a second door. Usually, there are two in a tea house, which this is a poetry house, but the idea is to have two doors to not end up with a right-handed building or a left-handed building, and then just layers of space, you know, ways to approach a building from different sides. It's the same. It's a mirror image, actually. There's a wonderful mandala on the back wall here, which is the only wall that doesn't either have windows or doors in it. It's also an abstract floor plan of the building. Okay, so here, so this is probably the most beautiful foundation I've ever seen. It's copper over laminated beams. Again, because I was making a building that didn't have a permanent site, I needed to figure out how to take it apart and move it about and put it back together, and the building comes apart right here at that joint, so the center rectangle is one unit, and then the two halves, I figured it out that it would fit on the truck. The roofs come off, and five lower panels in the upper roof. I've often described my work as a cross between Shinto shrines and Stonehenge, you know, so that, I mean, Shinto shrines is this attention to detail and refinement, and Stonehenge is just that sort of sense of mass and energy. So anyhow, the details are just part of ornamentation. Actually, the finial on top is actually where I rigged the upper roof from when I pick it as a mutility as well. It's not just pretty. What's particularly important is the scale of the timbers and the scale of the building. Normally, you would think they're way too big for this small building, but they're not. I had to build it to find it. I had to do the work, you know. And it took three years. It did take three years, but it wasn't like constant three years. It was just like, I need to get some more materials. I better get a job again. You mind talking about the cost? I tend not to keep track of costs or hours. You know, it's like, how do you price redwood? Do you price it at what old growth redwood would be paid for now? No, it was given to me. This house, one of the reasons I built this is because I've had a number of people interested in the poetry house, but it needs to have some sort of daily attention. So when somebody goes, oh, I've got this piece of property like here, maybe I'll put it out there and we'll use it every now and then. I go, no, you can't have one of these, you know. Tell me, what do you call this? I'm calling this an old fence zendo. So basically, it was the materials that inspired this. Yeah, yeah. So a big pile of materials came in and I thought, oh, I could build a nice little building and I sort of need something to offer in lieu of a poetry house and so I did. All this redwood came from a Lucas Valley rec center and it was just old 60s redwood conhard, but it has just a nice patina of color. I, you know, did enough to try to leave some of the original circular saw marks and then clean it up at the same time. And then maybe I was a little extravagant with the copper paneling. The texture of it? It's actually embossed over industrial grating. It's a nice process. And then after sinking it with a rubber mallet, it gets cinched with a needle scaler, which gives this pecky quality, which you can see how this, this door is smooth. You can just feel a difference. Once there's a texture in it, it feels denser and I think more alive. And actually the roof material is all from fence posts. So it's amazing. You find these old redwood posts and if you cut them open, they're actually pretty amazing wood. It's largely old fence material, except for the course of walnut floor. So how large is this space? This is eight by 15 with some tapered ends, something like that. And big enough for eating, sleeping even? Yeah. I mean, as with the poetry house, this moves up and down so that it can be flat and use it for a futon or yoga or something like that. But you can also raise it up and drop your feet in the well and then use it as a place to share food, right? I mean, there's some little storage containers in the floor there. And actually that timber in there is crosses and is what I use to rig the building when I pick it up. The roof comes off and, and you know, I can put it on a trailer and move it and all of that. Are your motifs, the way you are working with things coming from your place here, like your surroundings? Yeah, no, I think, I think actually I, I, I, I've said a number of times that I've almost never sold a piece of sculpture to anybody that hasn't been here. I love the cladding you have in your doors. I've never seen anything like it. It's just roofing, you know, it's just polycarbonate roofing. I used to have glass in here and, and, and wood panels on either side, but as you get older, you just need more and more light, you know. Every wood has its own character. There's a, so mostly redwood here. Yeah, this is a white oak. Everything is about textures and I'm sort of a junkie for materials. So I tend to start with materials. There's a lot of big chunks of redwood here and I bring in a hundred tons at a time. So, you know, semi truckloads at a time. Sometimes I can, you know, I walk around my house, you know, look at the yard and go like, I must be crazy. Why am I doing all this? You know, and then I'll go to an artist's studio and I'll look around and see all their beautiful work. And I go, well, maybe I'm not crazy enough. You know, this piece is called Moon Circle, but during COVID we did the Celebration of Life here for my wife. And we set this up to, uh, so we were in a big circle. It was nice. Form and energy. That's my website. That's what sculpture is about. There's an interaction. I think there's a resonance between those. That's one sound. And that's sort of the test. It's like, you look at something like, do you feel it? You know, all that is working, you know, you can understand it by both by the density of the work, but also by the surrounding of the trees. And, and, uh, I'm very fortunate to live right where I do.