Capture The Clinton

Hey Now!

2006-12-28T11:53:00.000-05:00

Capture the Clinton Art

2006-10-06T10:54:00.000-05:00

"Capture the Clinton" dam

"Capture the Clinton" floodplane

"Capture the Clinton" bridge.

Original designs submitted by Karen Lehrke.

Friends of the Clinton River Trail Bike Outing 9-23-2006

2006-08-10T07:50:00.000-05:00

Folks:

Wander over to http://www.clintonrivertrail.org

Check-out the 2nd annual Biking Event http://www.clintonrivertrail.org/PDFs/fall-flyer-fin.pdf
which takes place Septemeber 23, 2006.

Perhaps we should particpate in their event and additionally make them aware of our past and future mutual efforts on behalf of the Clinton River Trail.

Best,

Jim

2006-07-30T18:05:00.000-05:00

Capture the Clinton River Walk: the Big Day II

2006-07-30T17:41:00.000-05:00

Katie stayed at the park, where Fabian and his friends dropped by and drew. The breeze
made the rows of sketches made by Capture the Clinton! participants look like strings
of flags.

Above: Judy and Martha are admiring the pieces as they hang them. Bottom: Anastasia's

Capture the Clinton! River Walk - The Big Day.

2006-07-30T17:11:00.000-05:00

Far Left: Luke, age 3, helped his grandma
capture an overhanging elm tree...

left: below the dam was in full flood; whirlpools and torrents of water spilling from Dawson's Mill Pond. A week ago it had bee just a trickle.

Here are a couple of moments: directly above, Jim Ross enjoys the magical flood plain. It had been dry on our last visit, but some torrential thunderstorms a few days before sent lots of runoff into the Clinton River. Here is one place where it overflowed its banks, just like it's supposed to do, where it spreads out onto the flood plain, dropping sediments, cleaning the river. Foreground: Jill is capturing the
flooded plain, and a memory, on her paper.

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

2006-07-29T12:09:00.000-05:00

Great to see some old friends, make some new friends, borrow-on some current and past shared-vision experiences, ALL under clear blue skies! Thanks to one and all for the comaraderie and shared kindness. Very artful!

Best,

Jim

Practice Hanging the Sketches at the Park

2006-07-26T21:45:00.000-05:00

Hi and Welcome to the Capture the Clinton! blogsite.

Well, this Saturday's the day! We'll meet at Beaudette Park at 10 am at the pool below the dam, right at the entrance (if you want online directions, it works to search for 888 Orchard Lake Road, Pontiac, MI 49341).

I tried a test exhibit to see if the rope & masking tape method worked for hanging the sketches. I hung blank pieces of drawing paper on a 150-foot long rock-climbing rope that I strung between several trees.

That's the millpond dam in the background...

A light breeze caused the sketches to float a little...

Look for the sign...

... and the dam, where we will begin our walk

Imagine how it will look with dozens of sketches hanging on the big red rope! Come experience the Clinton through both your eyes AND the eyes of all your fellow walkers. For one day you and they will become the Lewis and Clarks of the Clinton River, sketching what you and they see, to share it with your fellow citizens.

See you on Saturday!

Pat O'Connor, Secretary, The Art Experience, Inc.

Capture the Clinton! Hotline: 248.790.5119

Oakland Press Thursday, July 20, 2006

2006-07-20T07:03:00.000-05:00

WALKERS CAN SKETCH, DESCRIBE CLINTON RIVER

Anyone who would like to experience nature in a unique way
will be able to
Capture the Clinton on paper from 10:00AM to 1:00PM July 29.

Walkers will meet at Beaudette Park where the Clinton River Trail crosses Orchard Lake Road, east of telegraph.

They will sketch or write about what they see.

Call 248-790-5119 or e-mail capturetheclinton@yahoo.com

Join The Capture the Clinton TEAM!

2006-07-19T05:03:00.000-05:00

Saturday, July 29^th , 2006

10:00 am – 1:00 pm

"Free and open to all"

Bring yourself, Families & Friends to a new place
to experience nature in a new way; through your own eyes AND through the eyes of your fellow walkers!

(Visit our blog site at: http://capturetheclinton.blogspot.com/)

-Meet where the Clinton River Trail crosses Orchard Lake Road just east of Telegraph Road at Beaudette Park in Pontiac, Michigan and follows the river through a mysterious flood plain and a beautiful woods.

-You will “Capture the Clinton!” along the trail, using paper and pencil (or crayon, or marker), stopping for a few minutes at Special Places to capture the nature you see in a sketch or a sentence.

-Back at the park, we invite you to pin up your 4 sketches beside fellow walkers’ sketches of the trail. You will see the trail through 100 pairs of eyes! Don’t miss this one-of-a-kind wonderful event!

FOR INFORMATION OR TO BE ON THE “CAPTURE THE CLINTON!” TEAM: call (248) 790-5119 or Email: capturetheclinton@yahoo.com

topographic map and aerial photo of the route

2006-07-15T19:35:00.000-05:00

An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: July 19, 2006

“Playing the Piano for Pleasure” is a minor classic of self-help by Charles Cooke promoting musical amateurism, published in 1941 in the upbeat style of Dale Carnegie. It lays out a strict regime of practice and discipline, the musical equivalent to a better body in 30 days. “We will worm our way, expending considerable effort, into the small end of the cornucopia,” he promises, “in order that we may later emerge, expending less effort and having the time of our life, out of the large end.”

Pictures from Pennsylvania State Libraries

A page from the 1827 “Progressive Drawing Book” in the Grolier Club’s exhibition. This manual advertised itself as “embracing the latest and best improvements in the mode of instruction.”

“Teaching America to Draw: Instructional Manuals & Ephemera, 1794 to 1925” continues through July 29 at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, Manhattan; (212) 838-6690.

Readers’ Opinions

Forum: Artists and Exhibitions

Enlarge this Image

Pennsylvania State Libraries

Some dog types from Caroline Hunt Rimmer’s 1895 manual “Animal Drawing,” on view at the Grolier Club.

I was reminded of Cooke while visiting the Grolier Club, where a show called “Teaching America to Draw” provides a refresher course in pencil-pushing and other sorts of sketching as a collective pastime. It’s about that golden era, from the time of the founding fathers nearly to Cooke’s day, when educated Americans drew as a matter of course.

Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.

From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations. Not many of these manuals are still intact because they were so heavily used, worn down like church relics, which supplicants rubbed smooth from caressing.

We’re addicted to convenience today. Cellphone cameras are handy, but they’re also the equivalent of fast-food meals. Their ubiquity has multiplied our distance from drawing as a measure of self-worth and a practical tool. Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.

Drawing promoted meditation and stillness. “A sustained act of will is essential to drawing,” Paul Valéry put it. “Nothing could be more opposed to reverie, since the requisite concentration must be continually diverting the natural course of physical movements, on its guard against any seductive curve asserting itself.”

A century ago it was possible for a Philadelphia educator named J. Liberty Tadd to instruct young women to stand in pigsties to learn to draw animals directly from nature. There’s an illustration in the show from Tadd’s “New Methods of Education” of a girl in a long, improbably immaculate dress sketching pigs on a blackboard.

The exhibition is full of such exhortatory books, many of them discomfiting today because they presume a degree of skill among ordinary citizens — even children — that would now be regarded as noteworthy in the art world. There are exceptions, like a popular manual from the 1840’s by Benjamin Coe, one of Frederic Church’s teachers, who, to judge from his illustration of a maiden in a glen, needed a little brushing-up on perspective.

On the other hand, there’s J. T. Bowen’s “United States Drawing Book,” from 1839, with its moody view of a crumbling cathedral in a landscape, and P. Fishe Reed’s “Little Corporal’s Drawing Book,” a progressive manual from 1869 with bird drawings that Audubon might have been proud to make, conjuring an America in which 10-year-olds are absorbed not by Game Boys and iPods but by the finer points of mastering realism.

Clearly these manuals were aspirational no less than educational or recreational. It’s hard to imagine that most American schoolchildren during the 1870’s could duplicate the leaves and bugs and complicated curlicue patterns that Herman Krusi Jr. drew in his manuals for classroom instruction. But Americans wanted their children to: that’s the point.

Something happened between then and now, and it wasn’t just the invention of gadgets that eliminated the need to draw.

There was also a philosophical change, away from drawing as a practical endeavor and toward art appreciation. From dexterity and discipline to feelings and self-esteem: the shift in values is implied by some of the later books in the show. Consciously or not, they parallel changes in modern art, which threw out the rule books of draftsmanship and proposed a new, free-thinking attitude.

As for expending effort to become skilled at drawing, the post-Cooke postwar generation introduced Paint by Numbers, and the situation has gone downhill from there.

“Drawing in America is as much a basic human activity today as it has always been, even if it is not perceived to be as necessary to economic and cultural progress,” Albert A. Anderson Jr. writes in the slim pamphlet accompanying the show.

I don’t think so. Drawing and doodling are not the same. With the arts, American adults have acquiesced to playing the passive role of receivers.

In a new memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Roger Angell recalls trips to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the 1930’s with his father, who also liked to join pickup games when middle-age American men still did that. Today baseball is like the arts, with grown-ups mostly preferring not to break a sweat. “We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it,” Mr. Angell writes.

So it is with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available that most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves. Communities of amateurs still thrive, but they are self-selecting groups. A vast majority of society seems to presume that culture is something specialists produce.

Rembrandt Peale published one of the drawing manuals in the Grolier Club show. Besides being an artist, Peale became Pennsylvania’s first high school art teacher in the 1830’s, hired by Alexander Dallas Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin. People, Franklin pointed out, can often “express ideas more clearly with a lead pencil or a bit of chalk” than with words. “Drawing is a kind of universal language, understood by all nations,” he reminded Americans.

We have given it up, at a cost that, as Franklin might have put it, is beyond words. Mr. Angell goes on in his book to say that television and sports journalism have taught us all about the skills and salaries and private lives of professional ballplayers, on whom we now focus, instead of playing the game ourselves.

As a consequence, he writes, “we don’t like them as much as we once did, and we don’t like ourselves much, either.”

You can draw the analogy. (And/or your own conclusions)

"Capture the Clinton!" Test Walk-Tuesday, July 11th

2006-07-15T12:59:00.000-05:00

Hello!

The "Capture the Clinton!" team did a "test walk" starting from the Dawson Millpond spillway, a small pond just below the dam, at Beaudette Park.

There was Jill Hollowell from the Clinton River Watershed Council, Katie Serewicz and Pat O'Connor of the Art Experience, Pat's Cousin Martha and Katie's niece, Marlee. We all received a large piece of drawing paper folded into four sections and a large "Sargent Brand" black crayon. Here was the procedure:

1. Everyone picked something to draw (about 5 minutes)
2. We each picked a partner (we introduced ourselves)
3. Then we told them what we chose to draw and showed our drawing
4. We said what we noticed while we were drawing
5. We said what we thought we would remember from that place.

From there we took the trail to 4 more sites: a flood plain, to bridges over the river, and an (optional) bonus site a short way off the main trail on a bluff overlooking the river. We returned to Beaudette Park and spread out our papers so all 4 (or 5) sketches were visible at the same time. So with just 5 people we had 20 sketches! Everyone had a completely different take on each site. Some people wrote on their sketches or made lots of small sketches for each site.

Below are the sketches from the first site, the pond below the dam.

See the lamp pole on top of the dam? the spillway doors? the rock in front of the tree?

Jill imagined the site without the dam, a free-slowing river...

Katie noticed the pond's edge

We walked down the trail to the flood plain, a few steps off the trail and down a shallow slope.
It was otherworldly and mysterious. We all looked and drew what we saw, then we picked new partners to share our sketch with and did it again.

Katie noticed the shape of a plant...
Pat liked the exposed roots and jungle appearance of the flood plain

The next stop was the first bridge; people looked at lots of different things and saw this place in lots of different ways...

Jill noticed the junk dumped underneath the bridge and started planning a clean-up day...

Martha spotted a fishing bobber that had snagged an overhanging branch...

Pat and Katie took in the scene looking the opposite direction ...

Below is a photo of the same place taken two weeks earlier...

We picked new partners, showed each other our sketches, and we saw and heard how our partners were experiencing the place. We all were having very different experiences of the same place. People started sharing with more than one partner, looking at their sketch and listening to what the other person had noticed. Our experience became richer and more varied; we were seeing the place through other people's eyes and experiencing it through other people's experience.

Then we went on to the third bridge. When it started to sprinkle, what had been invisible suddenly appeared . The droplets started sticking and Katie noticed a spider had been busy..

... and then Marlee noticed it

... and climbing a tree we saw a poison ivy vine as thick as a man's arm...

... Jill noticed the rain droplets' designs on the water and the sound they made...

Pat noticed overhanging branches, a sand bar, a cinder block, a basswood leaf, and his cousin Martha in her parka drawing her sketch...

We headed back to Beaudette Park to the pond below the dam and saw this fellow hunting...

... and we took out our sketches and shared them with each other...

On the day of the event there hope to have at least ... a hundred walkers? We'll put up a clothes line and hang everyone's sketches on it and we'll see the Clinton through the eyes of everyone who showed up to "Capture the Clinton!" See pictures of the unfolded sketch papers below...

See you on Saturday July 29th! 10 am at Beaudette Park on Orchard Lake Rd. just east of Telegraph Road in Pontiac!

Capture the Clinton: Flowers & Plants along the trail

2006-06-24T15:58:00.000-05:00

Sunday, June 18, 2006
R Greenbriar
L: Post Oak?

L: young Sumac
Below: galls on silver maple leaves

Sweet clovers: white and yellow

Upper left: Potentilla? Above: which aster?

Left: Fragrant Honeysuckle

Below: staghorn sumac in flower

pics of the Clinton River Trail in Pontiac

2006-06-24T09:51:00.000-05:00

I went out Sunday June 18th and the river along the trail was low, there was hardly any current, sand bars were showing and the banks were exposed. I went out the following Tuesday after 2 inches of rain had fallen. See comparisons between the two days below. The water level on Tuesday was a foot or two higher than on Sunday. the other picture is from Sunday; you can see the high water marks on the tree in the flood plain. The picture of the spillway is Tuesday evening when it was gushing. On Sunday it was barely a trickle and the pond

was very low.
The mother wood duck and her brood (upper right) seemed to enjoy the higher water.

Pat O'Connor

What is "Capture the Clinton!"

2006-06-22T08:11:00.000-05:00

Hello, future Clinton Capturers!

So, what’s July 29th “Capture the Clinton!” about, anyway? Here’s the “Big Idea”….

There is a brand new stretch of the Clinton River Trail just east of Telegraph and Orchard Lake Road. The Clinton River resumes as a flowing stream from the Beaudette Park Mill Pond dam and heads northeast (downstream) under Orchard Lake Road, meanders through a forested flood plain and under a little road, bends 90 degrees and goes southeast under the trail itself, then makes big looping bend and heads south and east to Crystal Lake. The trail runs beside the river through most of that.

We’re inviting everybody with a pair of eyes and two feet (kids, parents, teens, walkers, artists, non-artists, seniors, etc….) to join us to “Capture the Clinton”.

Here’s the idea: we will hand out (or you can bring your own) markers, pencils, crayons, etc. with a big piece of drawing paper, folded into four squares. We’ll stop at four “Special Places”. We’ll look around, choose something to draw, paint, scrawl, scratch, or dab, and we’ll put it on one side of the folded paper. Anything works! Draw the scene, a leaf, the sky, the person next to them, anything. This will take, maybe 5 minutes, I don’t know, we’ll have to take a test walk.

Then, each person will turn to the person(s) next to them,
1. tell them what they chose to draw
2. Show them their drawing
3. Say what they noticed about what they drew and
4. What they will remember about this place. This might take a minute or two for each person.

Then it’s off to the next site, where we flip/fold the paper to a blank space, sit down, and pick something new to draw.

I’m thinking the 4 sites might be 1. the dam and mill pond 2. the forested flood plain (the river will be low and we can walk on the river bottom 3. the foot bridge over the Clinton 4 . A second bridge over the Clinton and 5. a bonus site - a high view of the river from just off the main trail.

5. Then it’s back across the river on a different street either on the trail or past the Dairy Queen! back to Beaudette Park. There we’ll hang up ALL the sketches and everyone will get to see everyone else’s sketches! We’ll look at everyone’s drawings, talk about what we saw, …

And participants will receive an “Official Card” with a CTC logo that says:
“On July 29th, 2006, I Captured the Clinton!”

And maybe this would become an annual or even a seasonal event.
“Capture the Clinton in Autumn” .. in Spring? Etc

We'll post the sketches on this blog site (with your permission, of course)

So, we invite you to blog us back and tell us how you’d like to be involved: as a participant, a sponsor, a walk leader, a chronicler, photographer, sound recorder, video person, etc. We invite any and all sorts of “alternative-capturers”: photographers, video takers, sound recorders, etc.

Thanks! I look forward to hearing from everyone and seeing you on July 29th so we can all “Capture the Clinton!”

Pat O’Connor

PS. We encourage you to wear shoes and socks, perhaps long pants. Bring a water bottle, and positively bring bug spray, just in case they’re out that morning.

Calling All Artists

2006-06-20T12:36:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the "Capture the Clinton" blog-site. Please "post" or "comment" to let us know you have arrived.