Untangling things

Michael Rosch at Keyes Art Projects:

Visiting Michael Rosch's studio is sort of like entering a museum of decisions. There are the roads taken over here, the roads less taken over there, and, of course, all the other roads -- and they all swirl around a central focus that is constantly shifting, mutating, reinventing itself. I met with Rosch earlier this month to talk about his art, his visit to Japan and his show at Keyes Art Projects now on view in Chelsea. We sat down in his studio for a chat and a cup of tea:

MR: When I bought my house the land was just scrub oaks; some big, some small. The land was totally untouched. I spent a month pulling out bittersweet. 

JG: Bittersweet -- that's the choking vine?

MR: Right, yes. Perfect name for it. Some of the vines were 4 inches in diameter. It got to the point, though, that I liked the vines so much that I'd climb to the top of the tree to unravel the whole thing. That's the memory, and that's where this work really comes from -- from the physical experience. I didn't save it, I just liked doing it. We constantly unravel and wrap things up. 

I always felt the bittersweet has just as much right to strangle the tree as the tree has.

The work at Keyes Art Projects is selected small sculptures that reiterate this idea along with assembled canvas paintings and works on paper. The watercolors achieve a sort of gestural Surrealism where form rises out of darkness like the words inside a Magic 8 Ball. Lines ravel and unravel in swirls of color. Some appear biological. Others look like automatic writing -- elastic and fleeting -- like light traces left on the retina after a flashlight waggles in the dark.

During a visit to Japan, Rosch took a watercolor class and purchased dozens of water based pigments -- probably some of the finest pigments in the world. We looked at the huge array of powders that came in glass viles, corked at one end. 

JG: What's the difference for you between oil painting and watercolor? 

MR: I think we have an intrinsic understanding of water. We are mostly water, after all. With oil paint there are ways to be clever, but watercolor is pretty honest. 

JG: Your trip to Japan seems to have had some impact on the way you look at your work.

MR: Well, yes. We went to so many cultivated gardens and every one was extraordinary. Everything has its presence in Japan -- nothing is taken for granted.

You can't capture the experience on film or in print -- it's a physical space. It's a revelation. It's transformative -- you have to walk it, be in it, move through it. 

It's the magic space of real space that interests me. Intuiting real space.

Rosch installed curls of steel throughout the hallways of Keyes Art Projects, to stunning effect.

MR: The gardens, over time, are tempered. When you're walking through the spaces there's an amazing cohesion. Probably the garden that affected me the most was the smallest one. The way it walked and the scale of what you saw when you walked it really made you spatially aware. I'm not Japanese. It's just a crazy idea of mine. 

Rosch seems to have a sixth sense for bringing focus to unknowable things -- he's a sort of übermensch who finds himself contemplating string theory while bending metal.

Installation view

Small Curves Watercolor No. 6, 2010

Small Curves Watercolor No. 24, 2010

 
 

Michael Rosch, Small Curves. On view thru January 4th.                                                                                                                                                               JMG

The Island of Rota

Stunning book arts: The Island of Rota, a collaborative effort between the designer Ted Muehling, the world's most interesting neurologist Oliver Sacks and the photographer Abelardo Morell is now on view at the The Drawing Room in East Hampton.

                                                                                                                                                                                   photo by Loring McAlpin

Organized by MOMA's  May Castleberry, the book is one in her ongoing publication series that is published in conjunction with the Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art. Under  Castleberry's keen eye, The Island of Rota now takes its place among some of the world's most seductive and sought after limited-editions. In her tenure as New York's preeminent publisher of artist's books, Castleberry has sought to bring artists and writers together to reinvent the book as a work of art, or, as Ted Muehling put it, to create "an artful book."

                                           L:Ted Muehling, R:May Castleberry

"It doesn't always happen this way," said Castleberry, "but this time I knew it (the collaboration) would happen organically."

The text was selected from Oliver Sacks' The Island of the Colorblind, in which the author examines a neurological abnormality that has resulted in total colorblindness among a century of island residents populating a tiny Pacific atoll in Guam. In the book, Sacks explores the adaptive vision of these islanders and, at the same time, reignites his youthful passion for botanicals. 

Micronesia is home to jungles of prehistoric cycads, a plant species that has existed there for over 500 million years, since the Palezoic age.

At last week's presentation of the book, Ted Muehling talked about many things, cycads among them:  

Ted Muehling: Oliver has an amateur interest in botanicals and this text is basically about him exploring specific islands in Micronesia and their ancient plant forms -- plants that have endured for millions of years. I was very taken by it.

TM: One of the first lines in the book goes back to his childhood -- it was during the second world war. He grew up in London, and his beloved mother took him to the gardens at Kew...writing about this later in his life, Oliver still has this childlike wonder. It's a wonderful text. He quotes Darwin frequently, and he tells stories back and forth about plant forms and explorations. We chose to take this quote -- the last line of Darwin's Origins of Species. I think it sums up Oliver's enthusiasm -- it's quite beautiful: 

 

"...whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." evolved."                                                                                      Charles Darwin

cliche-verres by Abelardo Morell, photos by Jonathan Singer

TM: Abe Morell was very enthusiastic to do the book. Oliver's text is full of visual possibilities -- from early map making to ships that sailed the Pacific in 1500 and all these different plant forms. We went to the New York Botanical Gardens and met with the head of cycads...Abe took some plant material...the photographs -- they are cliche-verres -- really suggest fossils. Some of them are extremely abstract. They look like outer space. 

My job in putting the book together was to combine this very deep text and these beautiful images and to create a seductive 3-dimensional artifact. The text is so worth reading -- I started thinking about Micronesia and what might represent these atolls, islands, plants -- and what Oliver was talking about. I worked a lot with Dieu Donne -- they do exquisite work -- and a brilliant man there named Paul Wong. We pressed the paper pulp on to sea fans so that each one is unique, and that's what we made the cover with. Very textural.  

                                                                                                                                                                             Photo by Loring McAlpin

May Castleberry: May I tell them, Ted, how completely obsessive you are? 

Ted found a silk paper that he loved, but he felt it needed something more explicit and so he would crinkle it up. Then he spent nights ironing it -- I would call him up and he would say, "I'm ironing" -- until it got a certain rattle when you touched it. No other designer that I've ever worked with had such an impact on the design of a book.

Ted Muehling: The book is in black and white. For Oliver, being a neurologist he actually went to these islands for various reasons, one of them being that  there are true "achromatobes" there -- people that are truly colorblind. Most people that are colorblind see color wrong, but these people see only black and white. They have developed an extreme sensitivity to light. They also have a a pan-sensitivity to texture and their ability to see is very precise. And so, I wanted to keep the book in the sepia/black and white range and still make a very rich book. So the texture is important -- the sound of the paper -- the silkiness of it. It was another layer of thinking about design and the experience of going through the book. 

The Island of Rota is an edition of 135 with a deluxe edition of 25. The deluxe version comes with an extraordinary bookcase milled from Polonia wood. Muehling then addresses the wood -- drilling myriad patterned holes and randomly inserting mother of pearl, abalone and tiny seashells across the surface. The result: a subtle but dazzling surface that glistens with things of the natural world.

TM: This box is made from Polonia -- my friend Chris Lareke makes them for me from a tree he milled. It's the type of wood that the Japanese and Chinese use for precious lacquerware and ceramics. It's used to hold precious things. The perforations -- I'm doing them. 

MC: You can hear Ted's drilling all over Sag Harbor!

TM: (laughter) There are mollusks called Teredo worms and they ate through a lot of the early ships that sailed. The Japanese celebrate this kind of wood -- they'll often make objects from this type of deteriorated wood. I collect pieces of wood like that -- these boxes remind me of walking on the beach as sand dabs disappear into the sand. I inset mother of pearl, abalone and pearls, tiny seashells. Being a jeweler, I have all this raw material in my studio. Each box is different.

With typeface by Leslie Miller, Dieu Donne handmade papers both inside and out, breathtaking cliche-verres and fantastically absorbing text...you won't find a better stocking stuffer this year.                                                                                                       JMG

David Slater at Islip Art Museum

Every Body Needs Milk, 2008, oil on canva

David Slater, Subterranean Blues

at Islip Art Museum November 27 through January 25, 2011. Opening reception is Sunday, December 5th from 2-4pm at Islip Art Museum, Brookwood Hall, 50 Irish Lane, East Islip. 

                                                                                                           David Slater

David Slater's narrative painting style has morphed in and out of wavy dreamscapes, political fury and the kind of cultural warfare that came to define a generation. Eccentric and uncompromising, spend any amount of time with David and you'll agree: inside this artist beats the heart of a revolutionary.

Over nearly half a century, Slater has developed an image bank of picture stories derived from dreams and memories, notes from the underground and tales that range from his insurgent participation at Wounded Knee to cross-country train hopping to epithets from the Kabballah and the literary arts. He transcribes these stories into the visual diaries he's maintained for decades, and it is from these works on paper, now numbering in the tens of thousands, that he creates his paintings. Slater somehow manages to merge the secular and the spiritual, the rational and the hallucinatory, the blasphemous and the righteous with a kaleidoscope of skulls, schooners, sunrises and scorpions. If Max Beckmann, Diego Rivera and R. Crumb procreated, David Slater would undoubtedly be their love child.

Peace Gala, 2003-06, oil and collage on canvas

                                                              His bookshelves and closets are lined with the spiral notebooks that house decades of crafted images. In contrast to the formal architecture of his canvas paintings, his handling of water media allows for a     shoot-from-the-hip imagery that slurps across the page like melted ice cream. Slater's loose brushwork bounces between the masterful and a raw primitivism that exudes frankness. 

It turns out his story-telling abilities are not limited to painting -- he tells a good story in person, too. In fact, in January, NPR's John Biewen from Duke University, will feature Slater in conversation about John Steinbeck on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Travels with Charley. The choice of David Slater, who lives within walking distance of Steinbeck's Sag Harbor home, was inspired. 

Here's an excerpt from our interview last week:

Janet Goleas: When did you feel you first hit your stride as an artist?

David Slater: I was in my late 20s – a graduate student at RISD. Right around this time I started winning awards, selling my work. Things were really happening. I became affiliated with a gallery. Things were really moving along. One weekend I went to the gallery owner's home outside of Boston. It was a mini-Monticello, filled with Persian rugs. She started to say to me, "Well, if you would work more in this (or that) direction…"

I took my lit cigarette and ground it out on her rug -- I was a drinker then -- and I said, "I don’t compromise." And I walked out. Well...that ended my affiliation with her.

Slater's radical thinking also hit its stride around this time:

DS: I was assistant teaching at RISD while I was getting my masters, and they liked the way I taught so they hired me. At that time, I thought to myself, 'I’m going to teach so flat-out radically, that they’ll have to fire me.' And I did that. I’d be trashing the war effort, and here’s the son of the Dupont family in my class. I just kept pushing things as far as I could go. Finally I did get fired.

JG: Did you inspire your students or did you just vent?

DS: Well, some of them I inspired. Mary Boone was my student – and I’ve seen her a few times since then and she’ll run up to me and say, “Oh, this is my teacher!” You know, to Ross Blechner or something. Many of my students say I inspired them. I thought I was a good teacher.

JG: Did you feel you squandered a burgeoning career?

DS: Well, I still feel glad I did it. I don't regret any of these decisions. I was in this very safe situation at RISD. It was a good place to be in some ways -- I'd just gotten my masters -- but I just felt like I didn’t know enough. Also, I was in the whole hippie axiom thing of “tune in, turn on and drop out” – that’s what I was doing. I didn’t give up art – I just felt like all the people who were buying my art were a part of the society that was enmeshed in making money from the war. I didn’t like it.

JG: Back then, it seemed if you had any backbone at all you would reject the status quo.

DS: I felt that by leaving this very protective environment in favor of having experiences – hitchhiking, traveling, different adventures – all somewhat fueled by psychedelics, I have to admit – that I was increasing my knowledge. There was a lot of drinking going on among faculty there, and it seemed like everyone would eventually die of cirrhosis of the liver….I gained so much more knowledge by living my life.

JG: Instead of being the lonely painter drinking himself into a coma.

DS: (He nods) ...And leaving academia was important to me. It didn’t seem entirely honest – there was absolutely no acknowledgment of what you would do after you graduated. No concept of how you would make a living. No one would tell you anything. They'd just tell you to keep on painting.

JG: My education was like that, too. We all thought we’d get teaching jobs or work in restaurants for the rest of our lives – that all that mattered was making art.

DS: I don’t regret any of those experiences. I've left the past behind, but people think because I have long hair that I'm some sort of hippie. Actually it relates more to an Indian concept of the world than a hippie concept  – Indians don’t cut their hair because they feel they were born this way. That’s partly why I do it – I haven’t had a haircut since 1969.

JG: You really haven’t?

DS: No. I got a trim once. It tangles and breaks off here and there. Yesterday I was in the bookstore (where he works) and I was reading a book about the Jewish Brigade, which was an aspect of the British army – not too many people know about it—they actually had a brigade of 5,000 men who fought the Nazis – you know – they were very motivated. So, I’m reading this book and – it’s very poignant – and I have tears in my eyes and all of a sudden Isaac Mizrahi and a whole film crew come in the store and they’re taking down books and filming and running around. So they’re talking about my hair and I say I haven’t cut my hair since 1969 – and they go What!! They really liked that. 

David Slater is represented by the Gerald Peters Gallery.

More to come...                                                                                                                                   JMG

Everything Slater touches somehow mutates into an objet d'art

Hiroyuki Hamada at Art Sites in Riverhead

 

Hiroyuki Hamada's show at Art Sites closes October 10 -- last 2 days to see this body of work! See my profile from the East Hampton Star below:

Buddhist Pillow? Bayer Aspirin?

By Janet Goleas   (01/20/2009)    “I always enjoyed making things,” said

Carissa Katz Hiroyuki Hamada in his East Hampton studio

Hiroyuki Hamada, who grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo and today has a studio in East Hampton. “But everything changed when I realized I was an artist.”

    Mr. Hamada’s most recent exhibit, at Swarthmore College’s List Gallery in Pennsylvania, closed just weeks ago.

    “Hiroyuki’s art is definitely a journey toward a universal language,” said Andrea Packard, the List Gallery’s director. The show, a selection of wall pieces, freestanding sculptures, and works on artist-made pedestals, was enthusiastically received not only by the college but by the broader community as well.

    “I think that he’s very good at creating works that speak differently to different people,” Ms. Packard continued. “One person might see the work in terms of formalist or minimalist idioms, another would see elements of Japanese culture, Buddhism, or the language of technology. One of the most powerful things about his work is that it is multivalent in its associations.”

From top, Mr. Hamada’s  “#61,”  “#54,” and “#64,” sculptures made by rubbing a variety of materials into layers of smoothed plaster

    “I’m sort of working behind my brain to get wherever I’m headed,” the artist said. In fact, the black ovoid clinging to his studio wall (“#66”) looks conspicuously like a human head. Then it looks like a giant moon rock polished to a soft shine as if handled for decades.

    Mr. Hamada’s art is filled with things that look like other things. Then you blink, and suddenly they look just like themselves.

    Contemplative, illusory, and mutable, his imagery as well as his approach is plastic in nature. Beehives, throat lozenges, Life Savers, and torpedo silhouettes fill the studio, their surfaces variously pocked and dimpled, honed to a glossy sheen, or stacked into subcontinents that cleave to shared edges.

    Rubbing resins, wax, and pigment into smoothed and sanded layers of plaster, Mr. Hamada transforms basic construction materials into something swelling with spirit and consciousness. It feels as though a pulse might lurk beneath the finished surface of each object, instead of the structural foam, burlap, and plaster the artist claims are there.

    In spite of such contradictions, Mr. Hamada’s work achieves a synthesis throughout that is resonant, even tribal, in its homogeneity.

     “I was a rebellious kid,” he mused. “I guess I was mad about life’s imperfections. I was angry.”

    Mr. Hamada moved to the United States fresh out of high school. He didn’t much care for the Japanese suburbs but, at odds with his parents, he was reluctant to move abroad when his father, who worked in the steel industry, relocated the family to West Virginia.

   “I was just hanging around, so my father said, ‘Come with us.’ I didn’t really have anything else going on, so I did.”

    The young rebel didn’t speak English, so he enrolled in the local community college. Learning a new language was a revelation. “If everyone on earth had to learn one another’s language, all our problems would be solved,” he said.

    Mr. Hamada went through a conversion, a propitious one, you might say, during this period. “I had a teacher who was a painter,” he said. “Before that, I never knew you could be an artist. The idea that you could put things together on paper and make something significant — something that it could move you — that changed everything for me. At a certain point, it just became so obvious that I was a visual artist.”

    Three years later, when his family returned to Japan, he decided to stay Stateside. “It seemed like a good idea to live here,” he said, then paused. “But . . . maybe they abandoned me.”

    The young artist soldiered on. He went to graduate school and then embarked on a series of residencies at venerated artists’ colonies such as Skowhegan, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. He met his wife, Evan Harris, a writer, at MacDowell.

    “I commuted between New Jersey and East Hampton until she finally asked me to move in,” Mr. Hamada said. The couple now share the joys as well as the exhaustion of two young children.

    Back in his studio, concoctions of Damar varnish, turpentine, roofing tar, and melted wax lined worktables. Curls of painter’s tape cascaded over the sides like bright waterfalls. Other than blue tape and a single bucket filled with plastic Easter eggs, however, the studio was nearly devoid of color.

    “Kids,” he said, looking down at a mound of broken eggshells while walking through racks of electric drills, sanders, slabs of foam, and power cords.

    A work in progress, “#56,” hung on the far wall of the studio. Incised lines filled with oily pigment define the frontal plane as Herringbone patterns weave across its surface. One of his signature marks, concentric circles gently drilled into plaster, dot the surface like tiny crop circles.

    In other works, pencil-thin lines glide like birds in formation, swaying in mathematical warps as if guided by a giant elliptical compass. The preciseness is uncanny, and it lends a machine-age quality to the work, as if parts were discovered in an abandoned airplane hangar and buffed to a shine after years of neglect.

    
     Another work, “#61,” is a meditation on linearity interrupted by a chocolate-brown horizon. Shaped into an eggy cranium, the upper half is covered with larvae-like buds that proliferate like cocoa beans run amok.Its bottom half, a testament to self-discipline, is segmented into geometric ribs that straddle a central spine. They flay outward like inverted frets, each segment incised into plaster and then saturated with resin. Sinking into the surface, Mr. Hamada’s lines mark their surface much the way a tattoo impregnates human skin. They exude a sense of permanence and immutability.

    And there lies the proverbial rub. The humanness of this work is undeniable, not only because of certain anthropomorphic qualities but also because they exude a fragmented yet genuine pathos. They exist outside realism or abstraction — separate from divinity but at the same time contemplative, even devotional.

    “I’m not nationalistic at all,” Mr. Hamada said.”I have no strong allegiance to any country.” Yet his works exude Zen-ness as if just rolled in a dust bath of pure Buddha-nature.

    Like all interesting artists, Mr. Hamada is one in a long chain of antecedents. Chief among his is Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian artist who shook things up early in the last century with his “Endless Columns” and pedestal constructions. Mr. Hamada’s roots are situated not only alongside the elder artist, but astride a long legacy that ranges from Cycladic idols to African sculpture, from Hindu architecture to Inuit homes.

    Distinctly minimalist, his works roll over and over, switching from the ritualistic to the urbane. What resembles a Buddhist pillow transforms into a Bayer aspirin. A facial facade mutates into a beetle, a seedpod, or a chrome dome. A prayer tablet shape-shifts into a bathtub. And so on. In their own way, Mr. Hamada’s works, sotto voce as they are, are exquisitely playful, bubbling with life and animation.

    Working with an austere palette — one that is hard-wrought as opposed to selected — Mr. Hamada derives his pigmentation from nature: ivory, white, asphaltum black, earthy brown. Striking a balance between what is seen and what is remembered, the artist follows a path that marks its transitions in subtle turns, as if following in the path of an ever-widening spiral.

    “Some people do things because they like it,” he said, “some because they’re good at it. I’m lucky because maybe I have a little bit of both.”

Janet Culbertson, Future Tense

From the Collection Insights series, Islip Art Museum

Sunburst, 2010

September 15-November 14  opening reception: Sunday, September 26, 2:00-4:00pm

Janet Culbertson has been addressing issues of our diminishing planet since the 1970s. This exhibit, a selection of works from her "Industrial Park" series, examines the artist's response to global ecology, pollution, over-crowding and the obliteration of the landscape at the hands of our own species.

Throughout a career that spans over four decades, Culbertson has been focused on the landscape and here she employs a keen painter’s eye to convey the peril, the poison and sense of urgency now confronting planet earth. Her use of collage techniques in combination with dramatic perspectival views of the landscape provide her works with a depth of field that is theatrical and foreboding, seductive and mesmerizing. 

Carpool, 2002

Culbertson’s use of iridescent pigment is effective in communicating the toxicity of mankind’s greed and reckless contamination of the landscape. 

Art critic Rose Slivka said of the artist’s work, “A combination of the gorgeous and the gross, her mixture of methods and materials includes collage, pastel, metallic powders, silver and oil paint, glitter, sparkles, glass chips on paper, canvas or wood panels. The metallics suggest the phony, the precious, the attractive, the suspect.”

Marc Newsom at Gagosian

Marc Newsom, Nickle Surfboard, 2006

A grand gallery gesture even for Fashion Week: now on view at Gagosian Chelsea, Australian designer Marc Newsom is exhibiting works focused on human and mechanical locomotion in the exhibit, Transport, now through October 16th.
 
These sleek, ultra-cool works mix power and pleasure with extreme-design, making the proverbial line between art and design as skinny as a Guy Laroche model. Newsom, who lives in London, has mined this field for over 20 years, producing some of the design world's most ambitious and forward thinking works among them EADS Astrium Space-Jet (2007) designed for commercial space tourism; Kelvin40 (2003), a concept jet named after Tarkovsky's protagonist in Solaris; and maybe the coolest sneakers ever, Zvezdochaka, the Nike trainer (2004), designed for Russian cosmonauts in the International Space Station.

Add this to your roster of Fall must-sees in Manhattan.                                                JMG

Judith Page at Lesley Heller Workspace

June 26 (Boom box and Beaver), Tar Gel, mixed media,
13 x 24 x 11 in., 2010

 

Judith Page will be exhibiting new works in her show titled, Night Walk, opening this Wednesday (September 15) at Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard Street, NYC. 

Installation, Holes of Truth, Massry Center for the Arts, The College of Saint Rose, Albany, 2008-09

Judith, a frequent presence here on Long Island, was the subject of a show I did at Islip Art Museum some years back (2002-03). The show, titled Judith Page, Memoirs of a Beast was a site-specific installation of manipulated pages from a childhood diary. Here's the essay:

You'll want to check out this show and Lesley's new space -- on view thru Oct 24  JMG

Dennis Oppenheim in Denver

Blinnk Radar Tracking Device just picked up this hot news item:

Following three years of planning the final installation of Dennis Oppenheim's commission for the Denver Justice Center is underway by La Paloma Fine Arts, Inc., under the supervision of the artist.  Dates for the formal dedication will be announced by the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs next week. 

The sculpture, a commission for the Denver Justice Center, is one of five public art commissions at the Denver Justice Center Campus. Installation at the southwest intersection of Colfax and Elati, near the State Capital Building and the Denver Art Museum, has been ongoing since the week of August 16th.

The title "Light Chamber," comes from two sources: the judge's chambers, and light which is a metaphor for enlightenment. Oppenheim was inspired by the people who work in the courts and his concept was to create a sculpture to serve as a chamber or sanctuary for individual reflection on the plaza. Transparent floral petal forms on an architectural scale will create an enclosure that fits the grand vision of a Justice Center while also evoking humanistic qualities. It will be a like a "quiet room" to be entered and experienced and to provoke contemplation and inspiration.

Aurel Schmidt at the Fireplace Project

Aurel Schmidt, Ecstasy Butterfly, 2010 

Seductive and sly, Aurel Schmidt's drawings are on view at the Fireplace Project through the weekend. For more fantastic images of Schmidt's pyrotechnics, fanaticism and grotesque whimsy, check out Tim Barber's tinyvices.com. If she's not already on your radar, she will be when you realize the depth of commitment in this body of work.

Spider Eyes, 2006

Four Seasons in One Head, Archimboldo  

Garbage Man, 2006

You can also read some very worthwhile material on Schmidt at the excellent site on her monograph, Maneater, published by Deitch Projects, available at Amazon.com. 

Vomit Comet, 2008

And...see my review of the show in today's East Hampton Star.                           JMG