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ArqDirk’s model of my Bluestone schooner. As usual, clicking on the thumbnail will produce a larger image
I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or shout in anger a couple of evenings ago. I switched on an arts programme on Radio 4 and heard a preposterous ‘artist’ explain that she’d visited somewhere and seen a large rock that didn’t belong to the local area. She learned, apparently, that it had been brought from somewhere else and deposited on the spot where she saw it by a glacier or an ice sheet, and was therefore what’s officially known as an erratic – though when I was a kid in North Lincolnshire, I remember that we called them ‘bluestones’.
So she’d seen an erratic and liked it. So far so good. But then I became positively emotional when she went on to explain how she had become ‘excited’ by the idea of rocks being deposited in places where they didn’t belong and said that with the ‘help’ of a well known arts funding body she had now moved as many as three rocks to new sites from their original homes. What a funny old world. Oh how we laughed! I hope the rocks are equally excited about their new homes.
Thinking about this incident has reminded me that someone I know only as ArqDirk deserves some credit for creating a remarkable Sketchup model of my Bluestone schooner design, which, as you may have guessed, I named some years ago after the bluestones of North Lincolnshire because it combined elements I found in both the old Humber dusters and the North American Hampton boat, which seemed to me to be almost an erratic of its own. Perhaps someone will give Arq a grant one day – creating this model will have taken a considerable amount of effort and thought. I’d give him one myself, but I’m considering a new career moving rocks and may be too busy…
The design won a Duckworks Magazine competition back in 2000, by the way.
Click here to download ArqDirk’s model, which you will be able to manipulate and view from various angles once you have imported it into Sketchup .
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