Art of the Earth

Skip Schuckmann looks like he just tunneled up out of the earth. His fingernails are black with mud, his hands are filthy, and his book of poetry spills dirt when he opens it.

“I live my art,” said Schuckmann, perched high on a rock inside his cave-like home in an overgrown Ojai ravine. “I call it my hovel. This is where I come to sit, work and think. This is where I do my research and development.”

Schuckmann, 57, is a nationally known environmental artist and self-described radical who has done exhibits at Bard College in New York and will teach his art next year at Oberlin College in Ohio.

He sculpts homes and living spaces from the earth and creates ceremonial stone amphitheaters, called kivas, throughout the country.

And though he preaches peace and harmony, certain things rile him--like square houses.

“Corners in a house are killers, man. They kill the spirit, they stop you dead in your tracks,” he said, his wild hair waving in the air. “Those places are the real caves; they don’t let light in, they’re dead, they’re mausoleums, they’re throwbacks to some Roman architecture or some Egyptian tomb builder. That’s what makes people go psychotic. Modern architecture kills the earth, it kills the flow of the air, it kills the people inside.”

There are no corners in Schuckmann’s place. He’s carved a huge semicircle into a hillside, leaving part of his home under the earth, the other under a roof.

His walls and floors are beaten mud. He has a small pool of water, heated by a copper coil in the fireplace, to bathe in. A solar panel provides power for his lights. The roof is part tarp, part swimming pool cover, and a huge boulder sits in the center of the home.

“I excavated all of this,” he said of the yearlong project. “This is steel-reinforced mud, stabilized with acrylics. I can extend hospitality to six of my brothers and sisters in here.”

Small rocks are his chairs, long flat ones are beds, and tree branches serve as supports. A large, colorful portrait of Schuckmann stares down from the ceiling.

“Skip is a force of nature, he’s an iconoclast,” said Marlow Hotchkiss, co-director of the Ojai Foundation, a spiritual retreat center on 40 acres of mountains and valleys. “He has become a master of creating sacred space from the earth itself. His structures seem to rise up out of earth.”

Raymond “Skip” Schuckmann Jr. was born in Arvada, Colo. He received a bachelor of science degree in forestry and wildlife management in 1967 from Colorado State University and a master’s in teaching from the University of Massachusetts in 1971.

After teaching for a while, he became an artist. He left Deerfield, Mass., on a snowy day with $50 in his pocket and plans to hitchhike across the country in search of his destiny.

Schuckmann was in Calgary, Canada, visiting some draft-dodging buddies when he discovered an aptitude for beadwork.

“Threading beads through the eye of a needle is totally magical, man,” he said, rolling a clove cigarette.

He built a small cabin in the Colorado Rockies where he did beadwork and wrote books about beads for nine years. But he wanted a place where he could work 365 days a year and moved to Ojai in 1980.

“I had become familiar with this thing called environmental art. I said this is about something nurturing the life force,” he said. “It’s all about the definition of environment. It’s the ‘I’ plus what you are looking at. At some point the ‘I’ stops and the environment begins.”

In 1980, he was hired by the Ojai Foundation, where he began sculpting deep amphitheaters from limestone with spiraling roofs and fire pits. He helped build a huge kiva at nearby Full Circle Farm that can seat up to 500 people.

Schuckmann also co-directs the BAU Art Gallery in Ojai with Gerhard Steinliger.

“For me, he is the greatest artist I can imagine. He knows all the aspects of living together with nature,” Steinliger said. “It is not talk, talk, talk with him, it’s real. It’s living art in the deepest sense. It’s basic survival, but in such a playful and beautiful way.”

Moving Rocks With Iron Bars

Tall and lean, Schuckmann uses iron bars to move 1,000-pound boulders. He splits rocks with fire, then starts digging and chiseling by hand.

“A severity of intent cuts through everything,” he said.

Schuckmann loves sharp words as much as sharp tools. His speech is a frenetic jumble of metaphysics, hard science and hippie radicalism. He calls himself a “biocomputer” and a “cosmological geometrist.” He theatrically recites his poetry, then briefly disappears in a cloud of clove cigarette smoke to let it sink in.

“Mine is an image not beholden to any other,” said Schuckmann, who has been married and divorced six times, but has no children. “My body is my house. My clothes are another part of my house. Modern architecture is about killing things. It’s about pruning and cutting. I like life.”

As he strolls the rolling Ojai countryside carrying a black bag with bells on, Schuckmann delights in making unprintable comparisons between the topography and human anatomy.

Home for him is a verb, not a noun. He doesn’t live somewhere, he “homes” there.

Many of his former “homing” experiences over the years have been shut down by county officials because they violated building codes. Schuckmann now “homes” on land owned by someone who is sympathetic to his art but wants to remain anonymous. Ojai building inspector Brian Meadows said unless he gets a complaint he isn’t going looking for the artist.

Schuckmann frequently attracts attention. In 1987, Linda Weintraub, then a museum director at Bard College, heard tales of an “apocryphal figure” living in California with no phone, mailbox or address. She tracked him down to a makeshift home over a creek near Ojai.

“When I came to his place he had lit 100 candles. There was a goldfish bowl chandelier hanging from the roof,” said Weintraub, now an art professor at Oberlin College, where Schuckmann will teach this spring. “An opening in the ceiling allowed the rain to enter his domicile. You could sit inside and the rain would come down in spirals without getting you wet. How could you not be impressed by that?”

She got Schuckmann some clean clothes and a haircut and took him to Bard, where he did museum exhibits that were enormously popular. She hopes students in her emerging arts course at Oberlin will also appreciate his unique talents.

Artist as Consultant

“My job is to bring in completely unconventional artists, and he is the complete package,” she said. “There is no hypocrisy there. He is completely unscripted by social norms.”

Schuckmann is also a consultant for those wishing to live closer to nature. He’ll come to a home and rearrange plants and trees, divert the flow of streams, reposition stones and build living structures more attuned to nature.

“People have a piece of land, they have creeks and snakes,” he said. “They have dreams in the night and they think of their grandma’s house, and they might want something else. Our homes are our life-support systems.”