Extreme

The Sunday Scribblings prompt is "Extreme". This is a "walk" (quotation marks because I was in a wheelchair and others did the walking) last Thursday.

Our walk led to the extreme end of a little lost peninsula that extends into the bay. There are no roads there, and access to the start of its paths is difficult by auto unless one knows the way.

Otto pushes, Candace observes, I enjoy -
and keep camera on hand.

The peninsula has become a junk yard for discarded building materials. Here one can see evidences of extreme poverty, where the homeless have constructed their domiciles of abandoned culverts and pieces of junk lumber. On this blog you will see no photos of their structures, since we felt they deserved whatever privacy they could find in such circumstances. And, much to our surprise, we found evidence of humankind's extreme need for artistic expression.

Here are some of the materials the artists had at hand.

The first inkling of folk art appeared when we ("we" being son Otto, daughter Candace and her daughter, Myrtle, and me) had gone only a short distance along the shoreline path.

I like the yellow butterfly.

Next this colorful hillside of blocks and rocks appeared. Paint seemed to be available to the artists whether it was bought, found, or "liberated". All of our first encounters with art involved paint. The scuptures would come later.

This decorated rock was right around the corner
from the yellow faces.

Whimsical

Increased sophistication
the bumpier the path becomes!

Sculpture. Cute, but not exactly great art.

But then, because Otto was curious and wanted to see, before darkness fell and forced us to return to the trailhead, the end of a steep path leading down from the summit of the hill, this figure appeared over the crest.

Myrtle's approach to the kneeling figure gives one a sense of its scale.

Detail of hand.

Imploring what? A home, perhaps,
as condominium high-rises on the mainland
form a background to his plea?

And then we looked around us, here at land's end, and found a whole colony of clever sculptures constructed entirely of "junk". Here are a few of them.

The artist wields a piece of pampus grass as brush.

Dragon Rider.

Daughter Candace enjoying sculptures.

And the end of a delightful day, as dusk and gathering clouds accompany our retreat to where our car is parked. This is a tiny sampling of the found art that we encountered. I didn't scribble much for Sunday Scribblings, did I? I guess I have been thinking that the photos themselves speak of a universal extreme desire for self expression.