Water as Glass

“There’s something about a big beach fire many miles and mountain ranges beyond civilization that nourishes a recollection of the primordial,” Wrubleski said. “Singing around the fire, cooking, warming, drying clothes, drumming, and dancing. Throwing a little cedar on the fire to offer prayer.”

Hard-core kayakers with a spirit of adventure and pilgrimage they were; gear junkies they were not. Trash bags served as drybags. Sleeping bags were army surplus and so big they hardly fit through the hatches. Cast-iron fry pans and fires were used for cooking, not high-tech backpacking stoves and nested aluminum pots. Kapok life jackets were bought at the thrift store. The important thing was getting out on the water and spending time on those distant beaches.

Stevens' art combines his fascination with glass and water.

Wrubleski considers kayaking primarily a means to reach the wilderness coast. That he paddles there under his own power, in a traditionally styled boat that he built himself, is only natural. To fish for cod and salmon, to cook and dance around driftwood fires, to step out of the tent on night-chilled sand and howl with the wolves—that’s what it means to go kayaking for him.

“What I like most about it, apart from a self-powered means to paddle wilderness seacoast,” he told me, “is just the way it puts me close to the water. To feel it, viscerally, you know, as it pulses underneath. And dragging my hand in the wetness, the coolness, is . . . cool. To try and capture, or reproduce, the essence of water in my work, I have to know it intimately. So I make the sacrifice and paddle whenever I can.” He laughed and sipped his tea.

“Joking aside, though,” he continued in earnest, “that sacrifice is really about forgoing a steady, secure income for my family, which could have been achieved a lot more easily had I not elected to live here in the islands. I decided to stay on this little island that I moved to as a young man, and accepted a smaller field of influence as a consequence. It’s been a long haul clearing the land and building our house. Make that houses.” He laughed. “We didn’t know anything when we landed here, and it took a couple of iterations to get it right. I’ve pounded nails to make ends meet from time to time, juggling the life of an artist with the need for cash flow and the practical exigencies of a land-based existence.”

Later, paddling among the outlying islands in the southern San Juans, Wrubleski and I had another chance to talk. He may live a reclusive life, but the man is anything but provincial in his thinking.

“A body of water is an expression of the totality of its watershed,” he said. “A river, for example. Its course, speed, volume, and shape are a product of the terrain and type of bedrock it flows through. The river flora is an expression of the temperature and mineral content of the environment and soil. The river’s voice expresses the overall energy, a gentle murmur across a gradual slope or a strident cataract through a steep defile.”

Wrubleski likes glass, he told me, because of its similarity to water. “I consider glass a slow-moving liquid,” he said. “Glass is one of the finest materials there is to convey water’s essential nature. You know how light looks on the bottom of a swimming pool? How it wrinkles? Well, glass does the same thing with light. Stained glass is about transmitted light mostly. Glass plays with light the same way water does. Some goes through, some bounces off.”

Though Wrubleski is strongly attracted to water, he also has a healthy fear of it. “I learned to swim with my eyes shut tight,” he said. “It wasn’t until I was an adult that I finally opened them. Now I’m as interested in what I can see underwater as I am in what’s on top. Next step is to learn to dive. In the meantime, I want to spend as much time as possible on the oceans and beaches and rivers of the world. Art and pagan revelries aside, kayaking and canoeing represent a deep primal connection with the world of water that serves my soul.”

As we bucked the flood tide at the rocky tip of James Island, Wrubleski said, “I’m also fascinated by the contrast between natural/organic and man-made/geometrical forms, and the dynamic relationship which exists between the two. The rhythms created by changing forms and the harmonies of color dynamics continually remind me of the relationship of music to visual pattern and design. I can’t look at a picture of a ripple pattern without thinking about rhythm.”

When we headed ashore that evening toward waterfront homes whose lights winked behind the Hunter Bay dock, I asked the ultimate question: “What do you hope to achieve through your art?”

Wrubleski looked at me and laughed. “You’re serious,” he said. After a moment’s thought he replied, “Well, my hope is that some form of nourishment is drawn from my work. That some feeling of fluid connection or harmony is triggered in a viewer. We are of the natural world, you know; this animal has lived in harmony with natural rhythms and imagery for millions of years. We are energetic beings. We have been bathed in natural stimuli all this time, and only recently have we become separated from our root environment. It’s not just that we can’t go out and play in nature whenever we want anymore because we’re surrounded by concrete, but that our basic nervous system is barraged by abrasive, disconnected, and fragmented stimuli.

“So . . . my art is made in the hope that in some small way I can help remedy that. I try to include an element of mystery in my work so a viewer’s process of discovery and free association is continuous. The hope is to entice the mind’s eye while the germ of the image slips in to . . . create a subliminal effect, not unlike that when we are out in the natural world, and on the water, of course, in particular.”