in Birmingham, England; a twenty-five-year retrospective at Maine Coast Artists in Rockport, Maine; and "Selected Works from the Helen Drutt Collection," at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

A tour of Woell's Deer Isle home provides a mini-retrospective of his art and life. There are paintings and prints from earlier days, and a collection of cartoons he made for the school newspaper at the University of Illinois. Several pieces from a series titled "Back to Square One" hanging in the stairway highlight his geometric abstract sensibility. Bronze heads date from his years at Cranbrook. There are also cast epoxy pieces that grew out of his time with Gallo. Sculptures made of plumbing parts, lamp fixtures and keys underscore his genius with found material. "I've been poking around in a lot of places over the years," he says.

Intermingled with Woell's own work are pieces he has traded for over the years. He brings out a gorgeous salad bowl made by his friend Lyle Laske, with whom he set up a pottery studio on the shore of Lake Michigan back in the 1950s. Those summers so long ago still carry pleasurable memories, as much related to making pots as to cleaning up the shoreline.

Time has begun to weigh on Woell. "At this point in life," he wrote in an article published in Jewelry/Metalwork 1991 Survey, "I've lived more years than I have left to live." Clearly, Woell has a lot to say about the world, and he is being recognized more and more for the wisdom of his thinking and the significant status he holds in the world of American art. Among other honors, the Smithsonian Institute recently requested his letters and arranged to have an extensive interview conducted in conjunction with the acquisition.

Woell sees salvation in the arts. "The arts give people something emotional; if it's their own thing, it allows them to be who they are," he avows. He maintains that there is a risk in supporting the arts. "Art challenges all our resources, mentally and physically," he has written. "It is about taking steps towards places where there may not be any footholds, and falling and failing."

The other theme that fills Woell with passion is preservation of the environment, "setting aside nature so people can get away from this ugliness we have created, shopping malls, one suburb after another." A poem in his collection Edges, published in 1991, pays tribute to the Appalachian Trail, the twelve-hundred-mile footpath that America created "despite our lust for wealth, /need for food, clothing, shelter, sex, /and national defense."

Woell admits that he has never been an artist who has tried to keep up with what is going on in the art world—he is more apt to be reading a hi-fi or photography magazine than any of the art periodicals. When he goes to museums, he does not read labels or remember names. Instead, he absorbs what he sees and sometimes finds inspiration in another's work, be it the use of a material or a particular sensibility. Curious to note that avant-garde composer John Cage is one of the few artists Woell mentions by name. He plays Cage's music when he makes creative decisions and likes to cite his writings, such as the following remarks incorporated into his address at the Maine College of Art commencement: "Consider everything an experiment. Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and there's no fail.. .There's only make."

And Woell is a maker.