Brad Stone has pushed the limits before. Hes carved down steep
terrain and clutched brakes so tight, the veins in his wrists have cried
mercy.He has too many scars. There have been injuries to his thumb and
shoulder. And he even dislocated a knee, to the point where he rarely
races anymore.For an extreme athlete like Stone, who competed at the
highest level in mountain biking, these are all things he actually
enjoyed.
But the sport is different now, and its never quite
brought him as much joy as it does here in this moment. The owner of
Greenville-based 402 Trails travels across the country building premier
mountain bike trail systems, from single and slopestyle tracks, to trail
armors and pumptrack designs. Its an interesting story altogether. The
37-year-old Wilson Memorial High School graduate sort of stumbled into
the business in 2002 when Wintergreen Resort management approached him
with an idea. With untapped infrastructure at the ski slope, Stone said,
there was an opportunity for expansion in the way of trail systems on
the mountain.
Back then, the only place you could ride your bike
on a site like that is if you went to a race, said Stone, who
apprenticed for three years at Gravity Logic, a British Columbia-based
world leader in mountain bike trail design, before he was given the
opportunity. That was the only time resorts were running the chairlifts.
People needed a place to ride their bikes. I got involved with
Wintergreen and built some trails.
With three years of
experience working with an industry leader, Stone determined there was a
segment of the market he could capture for himself. He formed 402
Trails soon after his work with Wintergreen, tagging the companys name
after the month and year it began April 2002.
But the
collaboration with Gravity Logic didnt end. Stone says GL works with 402
Trails in a variety of projects, focusing on the design aspects of each
system. Stones company largely constructs the trails, utilizing
tractors, bulldozers and cranes. Its a system that has given 402 Trails
cache.
Earlier this summer, I met Teresa Carbone, the curator of
American art at the Brooklyn Museum, for a tour of John Singer Sargent
Watercolors. It was a Monday and the museum was closed to the
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magnet. The galleries, with their high ceilings and ochre walls, were
empty and dim. Sargent is famous for his portraits, but his watercolors
are almost all outdoor scenes: Venetian canals, Alpine mountains, trees
and buildings in sunlight. Carbone, an elegant, fiftysomething woman
with dark hair and a striped scarf, took me from painting to painting,
stopping to point out aspects of Sargents virtuosity.
We paused
in front of Villa di Marlia, Lucca: A Fountain, a painting of a Tuscan
garden that Sargent made in 1910. In the picture, a sunlit path leads
away into a background of shadowy trees, which are brown and blue with
darkness. Alongside it, two statues perch on a balustrade. The whole
scene is cast in bright sunlight from the right. Carbone pointed to the
statues muscular arms.This is a universal black magic Cell phone anti-slip mat.
On the left, where they are in shadow, theyre purple, green, and gold,
reflecting the trees and path around them.Full service promotional
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The way in which he could just summarize optical effects is what
boggles the mind, Carbone said. With the eraser end of a pencil, she
pointed to the back of one of the statues.Top quality Soft PVC Mugs manufacturers.
Its shadowed curve is the color of dark wood in water, while behind it a
sunlit plant is an explosion of yellow-green, the color of a
light-skinned lime. This kind of thing, she said, its crazy!
Sargents
watercolors, Carbone explained, were painted in a spectacular
shorthand: He was a master of corrective techniquehe could make
alterations where an amateur couldnt. We stopped in front of A Tramp,
which Sargent made sometime around 1906. A bearded man, his skin tan and
weathered, seems to emerge from a forested background. His face, and
especially his eyes, are clearly defined, but below his elbows the
painting becomes vague and abstract, as if in a fog. Carbone pointed to
the lower-left corner, a blur of green and gray. This area was a puddled
area of wash that he just wiped off, she said. You can even see the
stroke marks. The blurred area seemed a little punk-rock. In a sense,
Sargent had defaced his own art, but the hint of casualness only makes
the painting seem more accomplished.
Next to The Tramp are a
group of Sargents Bedouin paintings, which he made in 1905 and 1906
during a five-month visit to Jerusalem, Beirut, and Syria. The scenes
are windswept, and the harsh desert sunlight gives them a feeling of
extreme dramatic intensity. (When they were first exhibited, one critic
described the paintings as spoil from the sun-flooded East; another
wrote that they expressed the larger facts of existence.) In Bedouins,
two figures gaze at you from beneath blue keffiyeh; where the sun
strikes them, the headscarves are so brightly lit as to be
indistinguishable from the sky. Sargent used wax resist around the edges
of the fabric, bringing out the texture of the paper and giving the
figures outlines a shimmering quality. In Arab Gypsies in a Tent, shards
of sunlight push through the tents black fabric, illuminating an old
mans robeSargent has left an area of uncolored paper, which is bright
whiteand a woman reaching out with what Carbone called a pair of typical
amazing Sargent hands. As they would in one of Sargents commissioned
portraits, the tent-dwellers pulse with physicality and intelligence,
but compared with the glamorous women of London and New York they are
more self-contained and less eager to please. You see the portraiture
re?merging, Carbone said, but not in a way thats about the dictates of
his commissioned work. Theres bravado in the execution, even if the
sitter is impassive.
Sargent didnt conceive of himself as a
member of the avant-garde; writing about an exhibition of paintings by
Czanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse, he declared that his sympathies
were in the exactly opposite direction. But he did break with the
relatively staid world of nineteenth-century watercolor. There were two
camps of watercolorists, and apparently still are, Carbone said. Some
watercolorists, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, still
did traditional British watercolor, which was purely transparent.
Sargent, meanwhile, had no qualms about using opaque watercolors. Thats
one aspect where hes really drawing on his work with oil: the buildup of
dense, opaque colors. There was no one doing watercolor in quite this
way at the time. There were people who were doing things that were more
advanced in a modernist sensebut in terms of pushing the medium of
watercolor? It really impressed people. In 1904, Sargent showed five
paintings at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. One critic,
quoting Corialanus, compared him to an eagle in a dove-cote. The effect
of the paintings was to reduce their immediate neighbours on the wall
to paper. Sargent had found a new calling: watercolors that seemed
casual, tossed-off, and touristic, but that were, in fact, technically
adventurous, and that would glow with an intense light not usually
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