Learning Curves: Laying A Forking River Of Pavers

Well, it has been another glorious week spent working as an assistant to Sculptor / Tile Mosaic Artist / Landscaper / Gardener, Janice Rieves. And I believe this week she employed all of these particular super powers on this job (though not all of those that she keeps).

This was actually a first time for us both laying cast concrete pavers! It was to be a challenging learning experience for us, but ultimately, a very rewarding one...


By the time I arrived on the scence, (back from helping the Scrap Exchange move the last of their treasures out of the collapsing Liberty Warehouse), Janice, with the help of some other masons, had already traced the course of the path/s, excavated it, and filled in the cavity with a base of rough gravel.
I couldn't have arrived at a better time!

Not so fast! My first task was to finnish out the french drain, that the previous workers had begun by roughing out.

I actually enjoy this work quite a bit. When I was a kid growing up in the woods of Carolina Friends School, a major recess obsession was building dams in the creek. Of course, the really fun part about building dams, is releasing the flow of water through the stream; watching it ooze and course down the bobsled shoot of its bed.

Assuring this consistant drop in elevation is not always an easy feet!



But it is very satisfying once you obtain it.

Then, to commemorate this (and keep the way free), we dropped into this pit a writhing black serpent to gaurd its course..

Snaky Black Line

A Convergence

and then tied it in to the main drainage line that circumvents the perimeter of the house.

Then we filled it up with Gravel.

The result, a ravine, running parallel to the 'road', beautiful in its own right.

Ravine

Now, drainage in place, we moved on to the really juicy stuff..



This was exciting project for me personally, because, aside from getting to work more with Janice, for more great clients; laying uniform depth pavers (as apposed to natural rock stepping stones) is something that I have always thirsted to try. There is something about the process of 'screeing', or creating a smooth base of fine gravel (on which to lay the pavers), which has always appealed to some part of me (probably the obsessive German part..). So it was very satisfying to finally get the chance to try my hand at this. (though I have done some similar work with cobble stones, which are not as regular or smooth).
It was every bit as fun as I had imagined.


On the other hand, I think Janice and I were also both a little bit reserved and suspicious about these concrete pavers. Would they look too artificial?

Well, the truth is, they do have a quite different feel than the more naturally random shaped chunks of stone I think we both are used to working with.

However, that said, these pavers, in their uniformity, do have their own virtue, of cohesity, a unique capacity for tightness. And of course this knack for the grid can easily lend itself to very rectalinear designs, which have their place, and can be interesting in their own right.

However, if you know Janice Reives at all, you know that, while she is capable of this kind of stitchery, this is really not Janice's style at all.

And so it seemed that she was determined to push them beyond this 'one-liner' mode, into something, paradoxicaly, more flowing...

And I think, in the course of working with them, we both came to recognize,  the potential for grace and dance in a stucato rhythmic river of such 'stones'.

Projecting Super Path Paving Powers

Of course, we had to overcome some steep 'learning curves' in working with this material.

Abstraction

But by and by, I think we came to develope ways to speak, and create with these tools, perhaps even learning curves in a new way....

I think Janice and I discovered something this time around.
And that is that we both share an intuitive sense of line.
And when we have found/devined/struck upon the 'right' line, we found, with some suprise, that miraculously, we both can recognize it/feel it.
I think this was kind of a revelation to us both, that the other could recognize the harmonic resonance of a curve, that just felt just right, in our bodies.

Now thats my kind of learning curve.

A Convergence

How this works is a mystery to us both, but perhaps is something worth exploring in the future.