Wacky "art works".

I'm obsessive about loading dishwashers. The result is highly ordered.

I occasionally take 'found' objects and place them somewhere.

Found a traffic flattened fork, and stuck it in a lgiht pole.

Found peices of smashed mirror (like a side view car mirror, I'm certain) with the adhesive backing still on... stuck 'em to a bridge railing.

At work there is a plastic flower still impaled on a small bit of barb wire years later.

At the beach near the ancestral summer house, there has been someone who has been influenced by Andy Goldsworthy who has mysteriously fasioned cairns and odd piles on the boulders. I help him in my own way...

I'd have to say... yeah.

I still haven't done my dream of suspending bicycles from trees...

Or trees from bicycles.

Yeah, I do art everywhere I can. Even absent mindedly. When I put food on a plate, when I throw away garbage, even where I step I am always thinking about aesthetics. I think it's just become part of my brain. In order to clean, I need to see the space as becoming more beautiful (often rearranging pictures and whatnot when I do.)

I was notorious in my school cafeteria for arranging my plastic forks and cups and frenchfries whatnot into abstract sculptures.

One time at work we had eaten birthday cake that had blue and white whipped cream icing, and I noticed how some of that icing on the paper plate of a co-worker was swirled in a way that looked a lot like white caps on the sea, kinda like Van Gogh had painted in a seascape of his. I asked if I could keep it, and she gave me this look while handing it over. I kept it hanging on my cubicle for a while until a cleaning lady came and trashed it. It was uncanny how much this arbitrary swirl of whipped cream looked like a choppy sea.

I had a terracotta lantern that was in the shape of a koi. It's tail broke from it's body and I stuck it, upright, into the garden. Looks like a breaching goldfish.

The Berkeley shoreline's art
This spontaneous art site has been beloved in the San Francisco Bay Area for decades. ---BBB

Sample art:
http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:LMNyPtEQZ0wJ:www.baynature.com/2002julysept/ott_2002julysept.html+Berkeley+shoreline+driftwood+sculpture+art&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Outlaw art
In the name of green space, artists out at the Albany Bulb landfill could soon find their works destroyed and their workspace off-limits.

By Rachel Brahinsky
THE VIEW FROM the winding path bordering the Golden Gate Fields racetrack in Albany is breathtaking. San Francisco looms misty and dreamlike across the bay. Over the ridge of a peninsular park, the trails are teeming with a wild mix of grasses, flowers, and overgrown fennel - and art.

Mural-size paintings dot the edge of the marshy bay shoreline, and an unusual mix of sculpture and other installations is scattered throughout the park, among massive chunks of concrete and piles of twisted, rusty metal shards and pipe - abandoned here years ago when Albany used the spot to dump construction debris and municipal waste.

The murals are the work of Sniff, an artists' collective that has been painting at the Albany Bulb - so named because the peninsula resembles a lollipop - for the past four years. All around the 31-acre site, other artists have made sculptures and carvings from clay and Styrofoam, installations of shopping carts and rusted bikes, and abstract structures of stones and wood.

For sure, it's an unusual scene. Soon it will probably be gone.

It has never been legal to make sculptures and murals at the Bulb without permission, but so far the city of Albany, which owns it, has allowed the artists to work undisturbed. But ever since state and local officials announced plans to include the Bulb in the nascent Eastshore State Park, the artists of the landfill have become an endangered species.

The park plan so far calls for creating an 8.5-mile stretch of protected shoreline, from Emeryville to Richmond. The state has already spent about $30 million in acquisition and planning costs. When the planning phase is done, probably sometime this fall, officials will determine how much more will have to be spent to finish the project and when the next phase can begin.

Until then the Bulb remains the haven it has been for years. It's a place where dogs still roam off-leash and where outlaws and outcasts have found a home. For the artists, that's part of the appeal.

"It has that sense of a bit of freedom, that kind of stepping out of society," artist Josho Sominé says. "That freedom is something that's particularly heady. You go to this spot, and nobody tells you what you can do there. There's a creative juice in that."

Sominé has been making art and exploring the landfill for about eight years. Recently he built a hut from massive stalks of dried fennel wound together with wire.

His hut is one of the art installations that planners are saying just might be a liability when the state takes on responsibility for the Bulb. Plus, they say, art has a place in state parks, but it must be regulated.

Programs in the parks "need to be of statewide significance," says Ron Schafer, head of the Bay Area district of the California Department of Parks and Recreation. "We can't carve out pieces of the park for exclusionary use. There's only so much room out there. There would need to be revolving exhibits."

The impending art eviction is, perhaps, the inevitable change that comes with regulating previously unpatrolled space. But it's the lack of regulation that has made the place so alluring for artists and dog walkers alike. In defense of the freedoms they currently enjoy, a group called Albany Let It Be is fighting the push toward regulation.

"[Many of us are doing this] because of our dogs, primarily," Let it Be spokesperson Sasha Futran says. "But we're all adamant about the art as well. When a committee gets together and decides about a piece of art, you know that it will be the tamest and most boring. You have to give people the space to take risks and be creative, and fail even, in order to get something good."

Working with a community to define how to use public space is often a delicate task. For an agency as large as the California State Parks department, it's sometimes tough to negotiate local battles. State parks are already chronically underfunded, and planners still don't know how they will find the money to complete the Eastshore State Park.

With about 90 million people visiting California's 267 parks each year, the state mandate is to create spaces that are available and appealing to as many people as possible. "We have to manage state parks for the entire state," state parks spokesperson Steve Capps says. "So we can't cede parts of the parks to special interests. [The Bulb] is an area that some people might not find attractive."

More appropriate, staffers say, would be well-tended trails, carefully fostered native plants, and space for wildlife and walkers. "A lot of people are afraid that we are going to grade it and sanitize it, and that's really not what we're going to do," Schafer says. "With state parks, wild is what we do."

Still, there's an irony in trying to turn a landfill - a place that may be tainted with PCBs, metals, pesticides, and volatile organic compounds - into a pristine park.

For 20 years, from 1963 to 1983, the Bulb was a dump for construction debris and household trash generated in the city of Albany; Berkeley dumped its waste nearby. Not long after it was closed and capped with soil, artists began exploring and creating works out of the trash and driftwood they found there.

Over time the landfill became a haven for the homeless and the disaffected (many of them artists), serving as a home to as many as 70 people in makeshift shelters in the mid '90s. At times young people threw impromptu parties there - using old car batteries to generate power for their stereos.

When a deal was struck to incorporate the area into an official park, Albany's leaders - who had tacitly allowed the camp to linger - decided the homeless could no longer stay. In 1999, in a highly publicized eviction, the landfill's residents were forced out.

After the eviction, artists erected a monument to the homeless: a massive pile of shopping carts.

Since then, the landfill and its artists have inspired a passionate following. A documentary on the homeless camp is in the works, and calendars and Web sites have been dedicated to the artwork.

If there's one overarching theme, it's watching life decompose.

"There's kind of this visual ecological history of the postindustrial debris gradually decaying," Sominé says. "All of that process of reclamation becomes something that's part of the expressive environment. Burning Man provides a similar kind of space where people's creativity is encouraged. It's a kind of a psychic pressure-release valve."

In a sense, environmentalists have already fought and won the right to keep the Bulb and its surroundings undeveloped. The finished park will culminate decades of environmental battles over the fate of the shoreline. As a result, a big chunk of the East Bay shoreline won't be clotted with high-rises or shopping malls, as has been proposed in the past. (There may be more fighting to come, though. Last week the owner of Golden Gate Fields announced its intention to build a conference center and hotel adjacent to the site.)

Now, in sorting out the park's future, Let It Be types have more than a half dozen agencies to win over. Five cities border on the park, and the planning process is a collaborative effort between the state parks agency, the East Bay Regional Park District, and the Coastal Conservancy. Among them, so far only Berkeley has spoken out on the artists' behalf.

And just two weeks ago the Albany City Council outlawed the landfill artists' work. It's unknown when or how the city will follow through to enforce that decision. One of the council's complaints: art materials are encroaching on areas designated as environmentally sensitive.

Sniff painter Bruce Rayburn was infuriated by the decision: the materials the artists use, after all, come from the landfill, with the exception of water-based paint. "You know what they'll do when they make this a park?" Rayburn asks. "They'll build things - benches and buildings - and they'll paint them. How will that be for the environment?"

Also not so environmentally friendly: the soccer fields the state is probably going to agree to locate right next to the Albany Bulb, on more landfill.

Originally, planners opposed including soccer fields because the state isn't equipped to manage them. But after community members organized and demanded that a recreation space be reserved for their kids, planners responded with a compromise. The land will be leased to an outside entity to manage the soccer fields.

Which raises a question: couldn't a compromise be struck that allows the Bulb to remain untamed?

Perhaps, but so far no one has stepped forward with an idea that could appeal to the artists, other than just leaving it alone. As Rayburn puts it, "We don't even want to hear the word 'regulated.' There is a beautiful park right now, today, one of the most beautiful, self-maintained parks."

The final draft of the official state plan for the park is due out in July, and a public workshop is tentatively scheduled for August. The public can comment on the park Web site at www.eastshorestatepark.com.

One summer vacation, about 10 yeaRS AGO, `I needed to burn off some pent up energy, so , while up in Maine, I built a large cairne of stones and each year, since then, I add a few more stones. Ive noted that other people are piling rocks on the sides and top also, so its turned into a community "art" project.
It can be seen from the deep cove near Kendalls Head on the South side . You can only see it by a rather treacherous walk from the point , or getting there by b oat at high tide.

One guy thought I was doing it to mark a fishing spot for flounder."
No, its just a sculpture Im workin on"
"whats it gonna be when youre done?" he asked me a couple times
Now, whenever I see him my only answer is "bigger"

I hadn't thought much about it before but I agree! I hate housework but the 'making more beautiful' bit is so true - I too rearrange paintings and stuff and change the paintings to different ones and that all seems to be so much more satisfying.

and i play with mini sculptures with wrappers and stuff in cafes.

My garden is a sort of painting as well, the way the colours and shapes and shades of green blend.

.....