These new sculptures comprise a series of work begun in the spring of 2018.  Having just moved to Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, I approached the owners of Elmore's Landing with the idea of doing an artist's residency.  Elmore's is  an indoor/outdoor gallery preserved in the memory of it's founder, Joe Elmore, a well-known folk artist and sculptor.  Given the go-ahead I cleared out a section of Joe's workshop, brought in my tools and began sourcing materials.  I wanted to materialize my reflections on my new environment, so I went to the woods.  The teeming trees shoulder and twist their ways upwards, taunted by choking vines and sometimes savage winds from the Gulf of Mexico.  And I went to the piles of trees, magnolia, live oak, slash pine and more, felled and pushed aside by the rapidly spinning machinations of corporate development.  And from the Choctawhatchee Bay I pulled remnants of pylons, docks and boats washed ashore.  I gathered these materials and began to shape them.  Instead of running the wood through machines to produce straight, square lumber I hewed them with hand tools and a shaving horse and joined them with mortises and tenons.  To invite participation  I endowed some of the sculptures with moving parts, hinged or jointed as the limbs of marionettes.  To reflect the colors of this environment - and to embellish the moods - I painted parts of some of them with oil paints.