(water trickling) (birds chirping) (waves splashing on pebbles) - Memory's like a museum.

It's just like a big old museum of my life.

And some of it in the museum is on the wall, and a lot of it's down in the basement.

And there's some pretty cool stuff down in the basement if you can get that collection, and get rid of the security guards, and just have access, have at it, have at it, and then you can make something.

You wanna make something of it?

I wanna make something of it.

To me, there's this real primal, primary human need to define, refine, express, explain, what is this life stuff all about?

It's pretty amazing.

Pretty awful stuff too sometimes, things happen and make scar tissue on your brain cell.

But it's basically pretty amazing.

And my friend Bob Dylan said, "How happy just to be alive underneath the sky of blue on a new morning, new morning with you."

(upbeat cheerful music) (birds chirping) (upbeat cheerful music continues) Welcome to Hopkins Wharf.

This is great granddaddy's original store building here.

And I grew up in this house right here.

This was my brother David and I, when we were, I was probably 15, he was 13.

We had a gallery here, a little very funky, '60s-type gallery.

And I lived in that building for quite a while.

So this is the place.

When I was a kid, water came right up underneath the buildings here, and we just threw our trash off the deck.

That's what people did.

So this was the meat room, and the produce and storage.

This is the inner city, Main Street.

I pretty much grew up here till fifth grade.

And then my brother drowned off the dock here when I was 10, he was five, and we moved to Rockland.

My father ran a ferry between the two islands.

We had a fish market, marina, gift shop.

Rented the store part-time, a store store.

And then my mother had a gift shop in the back, and then it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

And she was here, I think, 63 years in biz.

Which was a big deal for a woman in the '50s to run a business, you know, not just cook and take care of babies.

(children singing) So this is where we grew up.

(turn signal clicks) (car engine accelerates) Cousins, lot of relatives.

My daughter lives in this house right here.

This is my road, Runway Road.

And this is a little house we built aways back.

And upstairs is a studio.

(water running) Come on, this is the studio.

Relatively recently, last 10 years, I started working the wood more.

I love wood.

So this is a piece for Maine Maritime Academy.

All right.

And it's a full, I call it a double diptych, but I don't know what a full part is called, so I do it.

It's basically this almost surfboard, oval, overweight shape, ellipsoid shape.

And I think of it as a graphic novel starring the sun throughout the course of the day, early morning, four noon.

I'm gonna put this over here.

Afternoon, sunset, late afternoon.

So this is the early morning one.

And if you notice, see the light behind it.

It's painted day glow yellow.

So when this is on the wall, you'll see it be glowing but you won't know why.

I'm a solar powered guy.

J.M.W.

Turner's final words were, "The sun is God."

These I've been working on for 10 years.

Golly.

Yeah, I'm a little OCD, see.

Takes me a while to finish stuff.

And like I said, I'm solar powered, so I wouldn't touch this stuff today.

Color comes from light, and you ain't got the light, you ain't got the color.

So my priority is to get this Maine Maritime done.

That's a big, big, big, big.

Did I say big priority?

Gotta get cranking, though.

I'm not a figurative painter anymore than I'm a plane, air, landscape, representational painter.

I represent, I repackage stuff.

And people are saying, "Oh, wey, wey, wey, how bad everything is these days."

I choose happiness.

I choose the light of light and really good stuff.

(upbeat reggae music) This is a big piece.

Little dusty.

You can see the colors a little better without the dust.

See, I make sawdust, I'm good at making sawdust, a lot of it.

So this is sort of the early morning, four noon, the sun's gotten higher, smaller, tide line has come up.

Tide lines come up further, afternoon the waves build up, the clouds build up.

The sun is higher and smaller.

Horizon line, tide line going down a little bit.

The sun gets bigger, it's all apparent.

(chainsaw roaring) (upbeat reggae music continues) That's when I wanna get the texture, like to feel the wave.

(chainsaw roaring) I like it.

(upbeat reggae music continues) (chainsaw roaring) Hee haa, get that motion.

Get the rhythm, rhythm's going.

Even if it doesn't look like waves, per se, I don't care.

It feels like it, it's gotta feel like it.

And this is too pretty, too smooth and everything.

But this texture here just started to get some of it with the chainsaw.

But now I can see this is gonna be good.

This is gonna make it happen.

But these trees, they just take sun, just add water, a few minerals, grow wood, and it's amazing material, just really amazing.

(trees rustling in the wind) Now see these clouds, this stuff, the clouds, the sun coming through.

You know, a lot of artists are collectors of things.

So I collect clouds.

I realized that's my studio, the sky.

Look at this big, big sky and inspiration, all these ideas, and it's all ideas, but that's not enough.

Just thinking it is not enough.

Well, seeing it is not enough.

I wanna make stuff.

I like to make stuff and I wanna make things happen.

And this is my brain center.

This is where I sleep and write.

This place right here is a lot of the writing and the downloads and a lot of words.

Not only collecting clouds, I collect words, No electricity, it's healthier without electricity.

Better for you.

(soft guitar music) I've been writing, writing forever, it seems like.

It's part of the practice, the art practice.

Having a dialogue mostly with myself.

And then after my son died at 20 years old, drinking and driving and rolling his truck over, I've been getting downloads from him and my other guys in the sky.

I've always been looking for meaning, true meaning, deep meaning to life on this planet, life of nature, elements, people.

Trying to make sense of it all.

I'm responding to light and color and shapes and sounds and smells and all senses above and beyond.

Just getting through the day.

I got a little lost, living life, making art, making babies, trying to make money to pay for it all.

Yet all the while I was living, living life fully, vastly.

(birds screeching) And then these guys, they just change second by second.

So I like to capture that, kind of catch and release the cloud.

(birds screeching) I love it here.

Yeah, feel like I don't have a clue what I'm doing.

I'm torn between wanting to draw, paint, represent what I see, and get to a deeper higher plane of understanding and deeper sense of being here now.

I see so much here, it overwhelms me.

The sky's so big and my hand and paper so small.

(soft guitar music) Nine, 26, 20, 10.

(birds chirping) I've been thinking, thinking, thinking way too much thinking lately, I just wanna be wild again.

Electric screen free.

Feeling the wind, feeling the tide.

Even when it wakes me up with worry that my act is dragging.

And those rocks are getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer, when I'd rather be sleeping and dreaming of being a wild boy barefoot in the mud flats playing with my dog.

I've been civilized, much too civilized for way too long.

And I gotta pay the bills and be present and pleasant to people in the gallery and turn my free paintings into money, into pictures of dead presidents.

Okay, I think ladies and gentlemen that's- So I got music, man.

(soft rock music with guitar) (soft rock music with guitar continues) (group laughing) And then, oh, I think it was late eighties I turned it in.

I had some great mentors.

I was very, very fortunate to grow up here on the main coast, Rockland, North Haven.

There were a lot of artists around which I had real connection with.

But even more important, at 16, I went to Hurricane Island.

I would bound school and I was the youngest one there.

It was the third year they were in existence.

It was kind of weird.

These people go out in boats, they run around the island, jump overboard at five in the morning.

It was like weird.

What do they do that for?

People thought that was weird.

And I thought, man, that's cool.

I like to do that.

I'm an artist, it's what I do.

It's how I work with the world.

It's how I see the world.

It's a tool, it's a vehicle I use.

But if I had a choice today of going to a museum or going to the top of a mountain or a old island, I'd take the island or the mountain any day.

(upbeat reggae music) One piece gives me 20 ideas.

And working in glass and working with jahooli in the early days, it was sort of a series.

You just blow a bubble and then da, da, da, da da, da, one piece leads to another and another and another, same in the painting, a thumbnail sketch or a study or looking at one thing and making it into something else.

Sometimes it's just taken a line blank canvas, make something happen, and then react to the next line and gesture.

And it's alive, it's magic.

I mean, really, I'm a magician in a way.

Artists are being able to make ideas come to life.

That's the discovery, it's exciting.

And it's a conversation with the material, with an idea with yourself, what works with the guys in the sky.

Hey, where do ideas come from?

'Cause that's pretty divine.

I mean, that is pretty serious heaven and earth kind of stuff.

And the art is a souvenir of the thought and the process.

And it just embodies it, it holds it.

It is an object and it's imbued with meaning.

And everything I do or an artist does, it puts that meaning into that object.

I know I'm not gonna be a musician, I'm not gonna be a rock and roll star, but I can make a few scribbles that have some meaning.

I guess I figured that out somewhere along.

(upbeat trumpet music) This is, I call pyrograph fire drawing, where I drew in space with molten glass.

This is a early seventies thinking time, space, motion, space program, Apollo mission, trying to get from this little Cape Canaveral in Florida all the way around earth orbit, moon orbit and land a couple guys walk around.

Pretty heady stuff, pretty good stuff.

So I'm thinking conceptual, I'm thinking space, I'm thinking motion, I'm thinking orbits.

I'm thinking vectors and energy and all that.

I just love it.

It's just this gorgeous burn line and ethereal, atmospheric, very spatial kind of things.

And then I just add color with a paint.

And I titled this, "The Earth is blue" cried Yuri Gagarin in 1962.

So he's the first guy, first human that actually left the planet and looked back and that was a great revelation.

The earth is blue and it's not green and brown and reds and all that stuff.

It's blue and it's the atmosphere that's blue.

We had this thin, delicate, very thin blue line around this rock, this round rock.

(deep inhale) And that's what we're breathing.

It's pretty amazing.

- [Radio controller] Approach NY31 (soft guitar music) - [Eric] I said, if I'm doing moving through space and being all heady and conceptual and all that stuff, I need to move me through space.

So I'll take flying lessons.

I always love flying and being in the sky and looking at the earth.

If I couldn't go to the moon, I could at least go up a thousand feet in the airplane.

(soft guitar music continues) And I always love looking at the ground and seeing all those forms from the sky onto the earth.

And ever since I had my first flight at 10 years old, I was just amazed by the land, the layout, how small everything was, how big everything was.

(airplane engine roaring) When I started taking flying lessons, I, geez, just before I went to sleep, I just see all the images from the across the horizon, looking straight down, looking out at the clouds and all that space.

And then I figured it out.

Well, I'm still figuring it out, we're starting to.

So gotta get back in the sky.

I'm a sky guy, Eric, E-ric, I think my 19th birthday I read a meditation book and it said to just say a word, a mantra or something like your name, something simple like a name.

Just repeat it over and over and over again.

I said, Eric, Eric, headache, addict, addict, Eric, air, addict, addicted to air and space.

And that's how it happened.

Another round of heavy rainfall, possible late Sunday into early Monday.

Okay.

I love seeing these eagles around, it's pretty cool.

I love all this space here, just space, wind.

See, I can almost be an eagle, but not quite.

(soft guitar music) (leaves rustling in the wind) (soft guitar music continues) (woodcutting machine roaring) (woodcutting machine screeching) At first, I was kinda imposing my will on the wood.

Now the wood imposing it's will on me.

That's the way it should be.

May 23rd, 2012, for the past couple years I've been playing around with shallow three-dimensional wood pieces on shaped wooden panels.

The physicality of wood provides me with the opportunities to cut, sand, shape, reshape pieces, and make visual parallels between my images and the forces of nature that shape all things.

In the piece, I keep seeing water currents and cloud patterns mirrored in the PUR or pine panel.

It's more than illusion of space.

(polisher grinding) (soft guitar music) (trees rustling in the wind) (soft guitar music continues) I don't know how many times I've sat here, laid here, looking at the sky, just absorbing it all, taking it all in and getting inspired.

I mean, it's really osmosis.

It's just kind of soaking it up and just, you gotta be here.

(soft guitar music continues) Yes sir.

Yeah, that helps.

That's sort of the pause for the cause.

We just lay back, soak it in a little bit.

I'm a big proponent of taking a chill and kind of reflecting on what you're doing and, oh yeah, okay, that's what I gotta do.

(soft guitar music continues) I wanna make it all make sense.

Not just follow the sun, but follow the flow of man on earth.

Humanize what man does, humanize humanity.

Wanna humanize the sciences, make us connect with what is and thinking of how to make visible our place in space.

(soft guitar music) (woodcutting machine roaring) (polisher buzzing) (polisher buzzing) (sandpaper scratching) (birds screeching) (water trickling) (soft guitar music) I had a great ride this morning from Rockland, Nova, November 4th, warm-ish, cool-ish.

Definitely a different season.

Saw one boat out there and the sky was just amazing.

These layers, this white blue bands, contrails, and the islands were all mirages.

They were stretched out, very elastic, reflective, upside down, right side up, looming up.

Just these amazing organic shapes that just drive me nuts.

I've seen them, watch them for a long time and every time it still moves me.

And I think this sense of being out there in the water, we know there's that horizon line.

We know those islands are glued down to the bottom of the ocean.

Well, part of the bottom of the ocean, but they appear to be rising.

And that's because of the atmosphere.

It's the temperature inversions, it's the physics of bent light.

And it changes drastically.

If I'm drawing that stuff, by the time I start here and go here and look up again, it's changed, it's different.

It's very fluid, very elastic, changing constantly.

And that's what I like.

I like being there, just being in that moment.

This morning I was reminded of my childhood bedroom linoleum floor, which I picked out probably 50 or 60 years ago.

I don't know exactly when, but I was probably eight or nine or 10.

And it's very much like the sky blue with streaks of white.

And I thought it was kind of as water.

I also picked out the wallpaper, which was boats for some reason.

And so I think at an early age, I was looking at my world from really early on and just kind of questioning, wondering, and still am.

I think the room was bigger as I remember.

And I remember this floor.

I really liked the sense of water and sky and we must have had a sample or something to choose from, but I just chose that and I've always liked it.

And I slept here, this was my bed, it was back this way.

And my brother, Steven, had a crib or a small bed over here and he couldn't speak very well.

And I didn't realize this until just a few years ago.

And my mother said that he'd had some brain damage at birth with Rh negative positive and some transfusions.

So he had trouble speaking.

But I know we communicated, we, you know, babbled before going to bed at night, babbled in the morning.

And I had no idea what form of communication it was, but we communicated and it was great.

And then one day he wasn't here.

That was pretty bizarre.

Like, whoa.

We had sailboats, docks, wharf, kind of boaty, boaty nautical theme.

Again, I picked that out.

I guess I was always kind of a boat boy more than the other brothers.

And when I woke up in the morning, I hear this.

(banging on the table) North Haven, North Haven, North Haven.

Open the post office and it's a great place to grow up.

(boat engine revving) I grew up with a big sky, broad horizon, tall trees, big spaces.

And I'm claustrophobic.

I didn't know I was claustrophobic, but I don't like to be contained or trapped in any place.

Stuck.

Not so much afraid of tight spaces but I want just the big spaces out there.

And a sense of freedom.

I grew up with a big sense of freedom.

Being a free range kid like we all were in those days.

I could come and go and on the island you knew if you got lost in the woods or any place, if you went more or less in one direction, you'd come to the water, to the shore.

And if you look this way or that way, you knew if you kept going in one direction, you'd eventually run into something you were familiar with or see something across a cove.

So there's a great security in that.

I moved back to North Haven in '81 thinking I'd be there for six months and hit the road, Jack, again, and just stayed.

(boat engine running) (soft guitar music) I'm boarding.

So welcome to Athena.

Got us some wisdom.

There's a whole bunch of other stuff.

Clouds and looming island mirages So this is something I've been working on for a while.

The shapes of the clouds.

And these are notes, little kind of shorthand, basically.

I can pick up a study or drawing or painting that I haven't touched or looked at for 20 years and pick up right where I left off.

And a lot of the drawings I never look at or don't look at often.

And I read them like a book.

They're lines, I read lines and shapes and colors and textures and energy from the sky or whatever.

And that's a big part of how I do.

I think of it as blueprints.

You know, you got a plan for a house or something, a blueprint.

That's just the plan, that's what the drawings are.

That's what the lists are, like what I'm gonna do, what I'm thinking of.

And I do series of everything.

I don't do one of anything.

I just kind of go to that, next, next, next.

So that keeps it alive.

If you're moving, you're alive.

And I think I realized that when my five-year-old brother drowned and in front of the dock and then my father brought his body up and my brother who I shared the room with, he wasn't moving.

And that being dead meant you're not moving.

And I think somehow I had to keep moving all the time.

If I'm moving, that means I'm alive.

I'm dreaming of a vessel to hold and behold the mysteries of this world, this life, this planet, maybe even beyond into the bigger universe.

The uni-verse, uni equals one, verse equals truth.

The one truth.

The university of mother Earth, the university of mother nature, mother nurture.

Yeah.

(easy mood guitar music) But too much whining, whining, moaning the blues.

And it's gray outside, gray, like the end of September.

Gray.

And the days are getting shorter and the nights are taking longer and it don't matter if they do.

It's all cool 'cause I'm cool.

I'm cool with me just being me here now.

And I'm here, all self-contained like a turtle or a hermit crab in his shell.

And I got my colors spread out.

My drawing books are all signed and dated, after a quick summer where I did the drawings but never even looked at 'em.

I couldn't remember at first where I even did 'em.

Then it all comes back and I can see the pictures in my head.

I mean, just a scribble, a line, a few lines, a place, a road brought back not only colors of blue sky and gray clouds, but the red of a raspberry, the smell of a raspberry, the new cut spruce, just, you know, when you're on a bike, you smell that stuff and you go down a hill and it's cool.

And then you go up the hill and it's hotter and these smells wave through.

I got all that out of a few scribble black lines.

I've always liked Cape Canaveral as a home base, a launching pad where you take off from and come back too.

So North Haven is my Cape Canaveral.

And just because I wanna go someplace doesn't mean I wanna leave where I've been.

I'm a mobile American, that's part of the deal.

And you go and you come back, just like I took a lot of Osprey lessons.

They migrate every April, they come back, leave every September.

And that's nature's way.

They go where the food is or go where the money is.

They go where the art is, whatever.

(easy mood guitar music) Yeah, so I flew out midnight Sunday night, Monday morning from Seattle and I was tired.

I'd been burned out, long busy week.

So I got back here with not much sleep.

And the tides were real low, minus two feet below normal.

So I worked upstairs for a while that Monday.

And then about five, it's dark, started to rain.

Low, low, low tide.

I gotta get my headlamp and my boots.

Go clamming for these big guys.

(easy mood guitar music) (knife scrapping on clam shells) Oh yeah.

(easy mood guitar music continues) So this film could be brought to you by Eric's kitchen.

(onions and garlic sizzling in the pan) (easy mood guitar music continues) I think we're just about there.

(easy mood guitar music continues) Discovery and problem solving, it's a lot about that.

You have an idea but you don't know how to make it happen.

And if you could think the idea and why bother do it, you know, the idea is just the beginning point.

I think for me, when I'm in the moment of making stuff, painting or whatever, I don't think, my thinking brain is gone and I do all I can to get rid of that darn thing and it gets in the way.

But then you come back, sit back, stand back, look at what have you've done and kind of analyze it and then put the thought back into it.

And that editorial process to me is a very big part of the creative process.

You get something down, you jot it down for wherever it comes.

You let it sit around, cook in the back of the stove a little bit, eh, that's not good.

Need a little tweak here, a little tweak there.

And that's the element of time.

The beginning or end result might not have anything to do with what I started with but it was the trigger.

(soft guitar music) Keep the waves moving.

Yeah.

(soft violin music) (soft guitar music) Look at that guy that was so square before, just taking a different shape.

Yep, pretty cool.

It's kind of like there I was on the edge of the world, little microscopic person in a great big universe.

You know, this little planet, this amazing little planet, home, the home island.

And it's pretty amazing.

I was thinking about this, you know, just that thin line, thin atmospheric line.

And they talk a lot about in the spacewalk about just how dark it is out there, how intensely dark.

Yeah, this one amazing.

There's a guy out there, out there, unattached, and there's home and there's that little sliver of atmosphere and then the clouds we've been looking at, and then the water and land.

And that just drives me nuts every time I see it and think about it.

And how do I get to be an astronaut?

I'm not and I never will be an astronaut, but I'm highly influenced by that whole program.

And I call myself an aeronaut, kind of out there and a artonaut or not naut, but just this sense of what we just did this morning, looking at the sky from the earth.

And I can visualize what it's like to be out there looking in.

Charles Duke Jr. said, "It was a texture, I felt I could reach out and touch it.

It was so intense.

The blackness was so intense."

And I feel like that here some days when the sky is just so deep blue and it's intense, almost crystalline, we think of air as nothing, emptiness, right here.

But when I'm out there and I just see it's an ocean of air, this whole atmosphere.

(deep breath in and exhales) In the winter you can watch your breath come and go.

(soft piano music) July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong took a small step for man and that giant leap for mankind.

Somehow that was a defining moment in my life.

I knew that if we could put a man on the moon and safely return him to earth, that I too could do anything I wanted.

For the next four decades I've been exploring visual ideas of my world realities.

Sometimes that means looking through the microscope or telescope or from a boat or a plane.

Sometimes it means looking closely at what's right here in our own backyard.

Like the way cloud look from space, they look different than here on earth.

Just what's old Joni Mitchell say, "Both sides now."

So here we are on this little blue marble, all these millions, billions of people sharing all this DNA and sharing all this space and sharing all these cells.

And then we wanna destroy it all.

I mean, it's crazy.

It's just crazy.

That's the word "insane."

So I get joy out of it.

I just see the other day on Facebook, "Oh, the world's awful."

Yeah, it's terrible man, it's awful.

But you know what?

It's the best one we got and it's the only one that we know of right now.

And if you think it's awful, it's awful.

But I think it's pretty cool.

And you are what you think.

(upbeat soft rock music) (upbeat soft rock music continues)