Fire Island Tumbleweeds

Folks, I had to post this.  I went out with my sketch club this evening and we went to the 125 Gallery in Bellport to hear John Perreault and David Adams speak about their work.  

John Perreault did an installation that featured trash collected from Fire Island as his medium.  For those of us that scratch our heads and say "it's trash!," yes it is.  He calls the trash collected from Fire Island, "Fire Island Tumbleweeds," a phrase he came up with to describe what these sea plant-fishing line-trash-encrusted-flotsam bundles look like to him.... He says the "Fire Island Tumbleweeds" seem to resemble their more romantic and adventurous counterparts of the West, but these Fire Island bundles aren't weeds happily tumbling to find a place to plant themselves, these are fallout from a non-caring society that dumps trash pretty much anywhere these days.

For someone like myself that sketches from life and paints life as I see it, I sometimes find alternative mediums hard to take seriously, but I realized as I sketched this through John's talk about his work, that this may not be art in a Monet sense of art but it's a man making a statement through his artistic process and he used trash to make a "city."  The lack of respect the public seems to have for our environment is evident in all the trash he collected.  He commented on how these plastic bottles, containers, jars and such will be here long after we are gone.  There were even a few wine bottles....

John Perreault is a Painter, performance artist, poet and art critic... He creates paintings variously with instant coffee, petroleum-coated beach sand, and most recently acrylic....and trash.