Paintings Paired With Photos In Collaboration at Woodwalk Gallery

Margaret Lockwood, the artist who runs Woodwalk Gallery in Egg Harbor with her husband, Allin Walker, credits him with the idea of pairing her paintings with photography by Rolf Olson. But she suggested they use only his black and white images. One day last year he brought files to her studio and they picked out images to go with paintings.

They didn’t look for the same subject matter, although in one pairing both canvas and print depict trees, but more for similar atmosphere or evoked feelings.

Lockwood thinks the photographs can help some viewers with her paintings.

“Some people who might not understand the painting because they are abstract but when they see the photos and the words — they enhance each other.”



She asked Olson, a poet, to add some of his writing to the display.

“I was not going to write a poem for each and every picture, but I said I would write some thoughts about the combination of paintings and photographs, They aren’t full-blown poems but more word thoughts.”

They have published the collaboration in a small book entitled “suggestions of a correspondence.” On a spread that shows a green-cast painting of trees opposite a black and white photograph in a misty forest during the winter, Olson wrote:  “The trunks/ Defy gravity/ Bearing the weight of the sky.”

Some of the pairings show equal abstraction in painting and photo. A painting of a streaked red and gray sky above what could be a tiny band of horizon at the bottom faces a photo of what might be shadows a fence has cast on snow. Whatever the origins of the images, seeing them together invites a viewer to linger, study both, look for origins and then simply settle back and enjoy the work, casting an eye back and forth for similarities and differences, the elements of composition, the delight in color, the pleasure in shades of gray.

A painting looks like water, especially when seen with a photograph of floating circle of ice off Cave Point. “Water bears/The likeness/Of the day,” Olson wrote and it makes sense with both images. Then again, perhaps the painting is pure abstraction. Does it matter? Does the combination make you look closer at both? It works for me.

Olson’s word thoughts are well done, probably better than poems because they spur your imagination rather than trying to define a single image, or the combination of images. With a red-banded sky over a darker band of earth (reading landscape into a painting that may nor may not be landscape) set alongside a black and white of two trees in a field with brilliant clouds, Olson has written “Light and land/Air and water/There we dwell.”

Plans are to release a related CD by midsummer’s music, but that hasn’t come out yet. Alfred Stieglitz, the great American photography pioneer, did a series of cloud pictures in the 1920 that he called “Equivalents,” and more formally he called the series Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs.

He told his wife Georgia O’Keeffe "I wanted a series that when seen by Ernest Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim: Music! Music! Man, why that is music! How did you ever do that? And he would point to violins and flutes, and oboes, and brass…”

Images by Margaret Lockwood and Rolf Olson at Woodwalk

So I asked Lockwood whether she listened to music while she painted, wondering if she was trying to capture music in her art.

“Yes, but I listen to NPR too.” Oh well, so much for that romantic notion unless someone with with sharper vision than I can find echoes of news broadcasts in her work.

Both of them loved the collaboration and think the combination of abstraction in painting with realism in photography worked well, although Olson’s photographs have abstract qualities, which viewers have noticed.

“I have to explain to viewers that I didn’t paint from the photographs,” Lockwood said. Her paintings were already done when she and Olson sat down to pick photos to go with them. Realistic painting with other realistic work would be more of a problem, she said.

Olson said that in making their selection of photographs to go with painting they looked for photo images that would resonate, not duplicate Lockwood’s work.

“I think it is a very interesting and revealing exhibit because the styles couldn’t be more different in terms of the real soft focus paintings she does and the black and white sharp focus.”

That’s not entirely accurate because while several of his photos are high contrast, several others are composed of grays. Images of clouds on page 26 and 27 are almost equally abstract, qualities Olson captures well in his writing: “Clouds like thoughts/Swirl and reflect/Caught in the moment.”

It’s an intriguing show. Here’s hoping it leads to more collaborations, perhaps reaching out to include sculpture and maybe a more active involvement with music.

Door County's Home To Some Great Contemporary Architecture

The best new buildings in Door County share several characteristics -- they look as if they have been here forever, and they fit in. That’s because they rely on native materials -- stone and wood. A couple rely on the same architects -- Dave Valentine in Sturgeon Bay for Crossroads, the Door County Auditorium and the distillery addition to Door Peninsula Winery while Workshop Architects in Milwaukee did Peninsula Players and Stone’s Throw winery.

Scott Georgeson, principal theater architect for Workshop Architects, described the choices he and the Peninsula Players committees made in arriving at the design for the new $7 million theater which opened in 2006.

“Cedar was a given, the stone was a given and to try to get as much of that in the design was our goal,” he explained of his design. Many patrons worried that the character of the old theater would be lost; once the new one opened they almost forgot the theater’s home had ever been anything else.

The main part of the construction was nothing nostalgic -- the walls are spancrete slabs four feet wide and 65 feet long that were fabricated by Boldt Company in Appleton. A huge crane lifted them over trees and placed them on end where they were bolted down - a process that took about a week, less time than it took to build a ramp to hold the crane.

Perhaps the most successful aspect of the building is its near invisibility. Almost all the trees on the site were preserved during construction, and the top of the building isn’t visible to the people living on the bluff above the theater. For theater-goers, the trees on the site mask the substantial size of the building.

That’s not true of the Door County Auditorium whose bulk is impossible to miss. But for the other buildings listed here, their suitability to the landscape makes them, not invisible but barely drawing notice from casual observers because they just seem to belong.

Dave Valentine, a Sturgeon Bay-based architect and a highly accomplished sculptor, finds most of the design we consider traditional has been developed here. He sees no influence from native American Indians who worked with lightweight materials they could pick up and move. Some Norwegian and European influences appear in the use of wood and plaster, he added.

“The true architecture of the county is the use of stone and heavy timber, but that is not unique to here.”

One of his favorite sites is the library and boathouse on Rock Island, built of limestone and heavy timber construction over water and topped by a steeply pitched roof.

“Door County is fortunate to have such great limestone. It lies flatly horizontal, unlike the stone in Tennessee and other area in the east where geological shifts over the ages have tilted the stone in sharp diagonal deposits which are much less useful for building. Door County limestone splits nicely and makes a wonderful building material,” he said.

He has used stone to great effect at the distillery addition to the Door Peninsula Winery and Distillery on Hwy. 42 in Carlsville.

Valentine said that the round form of the building’s exterior draws visitors in from the parking area.

“We have worked with Dave in the past and we like his uniqueness and his vision,” Pollman explained. “We gave him a shot on the distillery and really like what he came up with -- a design that looks like a barrel on the inside with wood walls and metal straps. On the outside, we wanted to make it look different from the winery and we think he did a really good job.”

Valentine also designed the outdoor second floor bar and dining area at Coopers Corner in Fish Creek, another Pollman property. He said that the old fashioned barrel vault ceiling makes the room softer than a gable or flat ceiling.

For Crossroads, the nature and community center on TT just off Hwy. 42-57 in Sturgeon Bay, he drew on the form he thinks an Indian meeting lodge might have felt like  -- a round stone base and clapboard siding. Inside a fireplace of Door County field stone sits next to a kitchen and above a small comfortable theater in the center of the building. The roof is supported by hand-finished tree trunk poles which in turn hold up large laminated beams. The effect is familiar and comfortable.

Another excellent example of long construction is the suitably named Log Den south of Egg Harbor on H2y. 42. The 10,000 square foot restaurant and lounge was designed and built by the Lautenbach Family using locally logged trees, some up to 70 feet long. The restaurant is a great example of what log construction can be -- the family members also build log homes.









Simon Creek Winery in Carlsville combines a stone base with some massive wood beams. Tim Lowry, the winery owner, said he hired a wine maker a year before they started building.

“We sat down and figured out what we wanted to have in equipment and its arrangement, and then we went out and visited 50 different wineries across the country. From that we gained ideas and talked to other winery owners on what to do and what not to do.”

For example, in the fermentation room where the tanks are and the floor is often wet, Simon Creek has its three-phase power cords hanging from ceiling -- improving safety at the cost of reducing excitement.

The winery worked with Keller Structures out of Kaukana which provided a full range of project management including architecture and industrial design.

“Once we had pretty well laid out the plans, Keller Structures and the architect and I visited wineries to see what we wanted to make it look like and then we worked on the aesthetics.” The fact that Keller had architects on staff made the whole process easier.





Stone’s Throw on County A and E has a stone base, large glass windows reach up to a soaring roof -- Frank Lloyd Wright meets Marcel Breuer at a human scale. In addition to the tasting room, the winery has a bar with wine and light food, vino vino, which offers some of the top Italian wines available in the U.S., and a wide selection of other domestic and foreign wines. An outdoor terrace on the west side of the building is a lovely setting on a summer afternoon, not so much in demand during January for some reason.

Edward Linville had known Door County only as a tourist when Dick Skare and family at The Cookery asked him to design a replacement for their Fish Creek restaurant after it burned in 2008.

Skare had found the architect through a friend who was a restaurant supplier.

“After the fire they were looking for someone local,” Linville recalled. “My friend owned a place in Door County and suggested they talk to me.”

The Madison-based architect said that the whole family participated in the decision to hire him. “We are not great marketers; we tend to get work through association. People who know people who know we could do a good job for them.”

His first step, after an interview with the family, was to spend some time in Fish Creek looking at the village and the context it provided for the restaurant.

“I spent a few days in Fish Creek, walking around, talking to folks, both locals and visitors, and had interviews with the Skare family. The footprint of the old building was rather small but we had to honor it.”

He found the site interesting, “kind of a pivotal point between newer portions of Fish Creek. On the right is very traditional downtown historically, and to the left it is starting to become different. I felt a responsibility to the client and to the community not to be so stand-outish that it didn’t fit. Door County in my opinion appreciates continuity and fabric, context.”

Linville said he sat across the street and started sketching ideas of what might work.

“I started forming the visual along with trying to keep in mind the interior requirements.”

His first thoughts were about the materials on the outside, where he chose local stone.

“People wanted a sense of permanence and I think the stone is really indicative of that, as you can see in the town hall or library, several buildings to the left. Dick said to look at that building. He felt it had some lineage, a reason to be here. It had a lot of stone.” 

The Cookery got a second floor balcony looking over the bay, and a first floor open porch looking at the sidewalk and road, creating an invitation to passers-by.

Owners Dick and Carol Skare, who worked with their daughter Courtney during the design process, are pleased with the result. They discussed their own ideas, including the practical aspects they had learned during 30 years running a restaurant, and they worked back and forth with Linville on the plan.

“Since we built we haven’t had to change anything,” said Carol.

They did have a couple of close calls, though. The original design they had all approved stuck a fireplace on the second floor wall facing the water. As soon as they saw it framed, that realized that wasn’t a good idea. The fireplace came out before it ever got in.

Linville had proposed a circular staircase going to the second flood. Carol, concerned about space, traced out the staircase dimensions in the parking lot along with representations of the tables they were planning to use. It became clear the staircase would take up too much room.

The family likes that Linville works on paper rather than a computer design program because paper made it was easier for them to review the drawings and suggest changes he could experiment with while they watched.

“We had a vision and he would listen to our vision and then come up with a drawing that he would present to us. We would go back and forth to come up with something that would work.”

The building was designed to be energy efficient both in its operation -- it has a very strong insulation package -- and its construction., starting with the local stone.

“One of the great things about the Midwest is that we still make things,” said Linville. “So we looked for products within a 500-mile radius and we were very successful. That’s good for the local economy and good from the standpoint of transportation.”