Thoughts & Opinions

A Visit to the Henry Moore Foundation in London - Mar/Apr 2006

Details: Created: Thursday, 02 March 2006 06:00

In July 2005, I went on safari to South Africa. In order to break up the journey, I stopped in London while going to and returning from Johannesburg. The most important part of this London hiatus was an all-day visit to Henry Moore’s studio/foundation, about half way between London and Cambridge.

After determining my travel dates, I contacted the keeper of the grounds and works of art at Perry Green, the property bought and expanded by Moore following World War II. The foundation was gracious in giving me a reservation for the daily public tour of the grounds and in arranging for my viewing of the inner workings of the facility.

The train trip from London’s Liverpool Street Station was a relaxing 40 minutes through green pastures and crop fields separated by hedges and stonewalls, interrupted occasionally by English towns and hamlets. Upon arriving in Bishop’s Stortford, a 10-minute taxi ride deposited me at the front door of the Henry Moore Foundation in Much Haddam, a small rural village. The foundation offices are located next door to the Moore family house.

I was enthusiastically welcomed to a modern one-story stucco and glass building, and invited to morning coffee with the staff of about 10. They continue the Moores’ tradition of breaking at mid-morning for coffee, sweets and socializing. After coffee, my tour of the private collection of maquettes and drawings and a thorough explanation of the Henry Moore Foundation library were conducted by an informative and friendly Michael Phipps. Imagine - an entire room filled with shelves of maquettes and models of sculptures that I’ve seen in person or in books of the artist’s work. And, in addition, original sketches and drawings, some of them sculptural precursors to subsequent sculptures and others of two-dimensional scenes, such as the “tube drawings” from World War II.

The library of the foundation is housed in a separated small building and contains 1) articles and books written about Moore, 2) writings and letters by Moore, 3) videos and tapes about Moore, and 4) most of the books, magazines and newspapers that Moore collected about art. The collection is open to scholars and researchers, and the collection grows as people send pertinent materials to the foundation.

The end of the private tour was the restoration laboratory, where all of Moore’s sculptures are cleaned, repaired and restored by a capable staff of three. The head of this department is an accomplished stone sculptor, who has several of his own pieces scattered around the studio. This team prepares the pieces for all shows internationally, crates and ships them, and then sets up the show. They reverse the process when the show ends. Major repairs are performed on the grounds of the foundation. One monumental fiberglass piece was being repaired extensively during my visit, because it had suffered damage to the fiberglass shell, and the wooden internal bracing had rotted from water exposure.

The lunch hour is adhered to, so I adjourned to Hoops Inn, an ancient village pub across the street from Perry Green for a sandwich and a pint of bitter. Because of the overload of information and visual stimulation, the quiet hour was welcomed.

After lunch, the public tour of the grounds commenced. The group tours are led by volunteer docents well-steeped in the life and works of Moore. The tour costs 7 pounds ($14), and you must have a reservation (easily obtained by email). Due to an agreement between Moore’s daughter and the Henry Moore Foundation, only a limited number of visitors are allowed on the grounds each year, tour sizes and dates are limited. Guests come from all over the world to this small hamlet; the big three are the U.S., Japan and Canada.

Large to monumental bronze sculptures are scattered artfully around the fields and lawns that stretch behind the Moore residence and foundation buildings. Trees and shrubs break up the grounds into small and large spaces, some with mown lawns, some with long grass, and one large pasture. The most striking are two pieces that are situated in a sheep pasture, around which the flock moves.

The maquette studio is maintained just as it was when Moore worked there, and includes not only his carved and molded clay and plaster models, but also the bones, shells and found rocks that he accumulated for inspiration. Of particular significance were the elephant and rhinoceros skulls given to him by Aldus Huxley.

At the time of my visit, the exhibition studio was showing “Moore and Architecture”; how Moore’s sculptures influence the structures into which they were placed, and how architecture influenced his art. The modern, two-story building contained drawings, maquettes, small sculptures and photographs of his work in bronze, stone, and wood.

At the completion of the group tour, I made my way back to the foundation library, where I traded stories with another sculptor and browsed the library holdings, particularly the books that Henry Moore collected himself, until closing at 5:00.

Back in Bishop’s Stortford, a pint of Guinness at an archetypical English pub helped gel my rampant thoughts of the day and record the images in words.

One day in August, a dream was consummated for me - a long-time admirer and student of a great and prolific artist. From humble beginnings, Moore built a lucrative and satisfying career, meanwhile helping to revolutionize three-dimensional shapes, or perhaps put them back where they belong; in ‘primitive’ forms.

The Henry Moore Foundation can be reached at 01279-843333 or www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk or The Henry Moore Foundation, Dane Tree House, Perry Green, Much Haddam, Hertfordshire SG106EE, United Kingdom

Rocks & Stones on the Blue Marble: Part 2 Jan/Feb 2006

Details: Created: Monday, 02 January 2006 05:45

Editor’s note: Part 1 of Lane’s trip appeared in the November/December issue. This is the second and concluding part. Have a safe and happy trip.

Thank God I missed the ferry boat going from Dubrovnik, Croatia to Bari, Italy. I got to stay in that beautiful city for 24 hours instead of 2. On the tour of the old, walled city, Emanuel our local guide, told us about the many bombs that were dropped on the old city during the war 15 years ago. He was quick to point out that contractors had rebuilt the place using travertine and limestone from the city’s original quarries. I loved hearing the pride in his voice as he told us about his home town, Dubrovnik: place of ancient habitation as well as today’s traffic jam of lumbering tourist busses.

Here’s a piece of good news: the Parthenon is being rebuilt as you read this. Long a place of fallen columns, stolen marbles, and ages of neglect; this most carefully and beautifully designed building is now undergoing a monumental reconstruction project by today’s industrious Greeks.

I watched automatic stone carving machines slavishly following a computer’s instructions to make any size and shape of replacement parts for whatever pieces can’t be found. The once again rising columns are a perfectly fitting patchwork of old, tan marble and new, white marble. Quite striking, really. Someday when my ashes are nothing more than scattered trace minerals in the world’s oceans, the new/old Parthenon will again be the crowning glory on the Acropolis’ head, as it once was so many centuries ago.

Speaking of crowns, there’s nothing left but a rocky tiara of Mount Thera. We tourists, today, call it Santorini Island. After a 270 km trip on a ferry boat from Athens, I saw that tiara just as the sun was setting and the lights were coming on high up on the rim of the island. What a sight, truly the jewel of the Aegean.

A major eruption in 1450 BC blew Mt. Thera apart, leaving only the high rim of one edge. That remaining edge, a thousand feet high, is beautiful beyond compare. All the Greek Isle calendars I’ve seen, showing colorful balconies overlooking the sea, are of Santorini. I picked up a handful of small stones from its beaches as mementoes, wrote an alphabetic code on one, and dropped it over the Ferry’s rail as we sailed through the caldera, heading back to Athens. I’m not all together sure why I did it, only that I feel better having done it.

Istanbul is a beautiful city, and I’m not just referring to the beautiful water, the beautiful hills, and the beautiful mosques. I’m so tickled that I, in my own small way, was lucky enough to add a bit to one of the attractions of the place. Okay, okay – I’ll tell you the story.

It all happened on my river boat tour on the Bosporus. It was pretty much routine stuff until we exited the Versailles-like Dolmabahce Palace. When it was completed, in l853, Dolmabahce became the residence of all the remaining Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, when they just walked away from the centuries old (and therefore old fashioned) Topkapi Palace.

On the palace’s marble steps, heading for our bus, we had to step around scaffolding and tents that had been set up for repairing the building’s aging, rococo front. Quickly ducking inside, I began telling the two stone carvers, there, about how I was a stone carver too. They promptly handed me a hammer and a chisel, motioning for me to go right ahead. The piece I worked on was only architectural, but still… I WORKED ON IT. Yes, something I put a chisel to will now be part of the Sultan’s Dolmabahce Palace. Hooray for Turkish serendipity.

Egypt was hot, right up against 100 degrees Fahrenheit hot. What did I think of the pyramids of Giza? They look just like big stacks of giant, stone legos. A questionable use of perfectly good stone if you ask me. It’s a much better show on PBS. Finally giving in and paying my two bucks, I stood in a head dress next to a donkey looking only a little like Lawrence of Arabia; me, not the donkey. Poor little thing; the donkey, not me. I declined to sit on his very low and patient, narrow little back.

Abu Simbel was better. That’s the temple they cut out of the living rock to reassemble it at a 70 meter higher elevation, above the rising waters of Lake Nasser, behind the BIG DAM at Aswan. Abu is stunning, even if you can see every cut they made in the stone. It’s a quarter mile long jigsaw puzzle with pieces 10 feet across.

I also saw the uncompleted obelisk, largest ever not made. It cracked before they could free it from the surrounding granite. I finished up Egypt buying a couple of limestone scarabs and watching two kids hollow out buried-in-the-ground Onyx vases with a clever expanding bit on a flimsy, hand crank thingy. The translucent vase walls were wonderfully thinned, by these teenagers, to an eighth inch thin.

We’re off to Cape Town. After hot Egypt and the even hotter United Arab Emirates with its straight up sun, and blowing sand - winter on the cape was fabulous. The Cape itself is stone to die for. There were miles of dizzyingly sheer cliffs with southern ocean waves bashing against them in post card splendor. And there were protea plants everywhere (that’s right, like in Hawaii). Going along that narrow neck of cliffs, one could almost feel like the mighty, leathered warrior Ranngar riding on the back of a dragon - instead of a freshly showered tourist tooling along in an air conditioned van. They have baboons too. Well, at least they have pictures of baboons. The little buggers themselves were off somewhere else that day, probably doing something altogether baboonish.

We stopped along the way to look at some of the famous stone sculpture from Zimbabwe - at least 3 acres of famous stone sculpture from Zimbabwe. How about hippos trying to make more hippos; convoluted, entangled (I’d swear they were sweating if it weren’t stone), straining human bodies? There were elegant figures 10 feet high and elegant figures 1 inch high, and every size in between. My favorites were the dozens of giraffe carvings. Those giraffes are so sculpturally funny. The best had a quartet of them circling head to neck, 8 feet across.

We’ll leave South Africa from the top of Table Mountain, a really big piece of quartzite visible everywhere from the long and curving city of Cape Town. I watched the sun set from up there, while ravens wheeled overhead like nazguls scouting for hobbits.

A stoner always finds the stone. This was certainly true in Viet Nam, the last country I visited and the last I’ll tell you about, here.

Halong Bay, 90 km west of Hanoi, is full of those lovely to look at islands whose bottoms are often smaller then their tops. We should all be so lucky. These limestone beauties are sprinkled around like fresh cupcakes on a kitchen counter - cupcakes with lots of holes. We went into one of these half hidden holes; hallooing our way through its huge caverns, and being greatly pleased with our western echoes among the far eastern hang downs and stick ups. (With these names, I never have trouble remembering which is which.)

Going in the opposite direction from Hanoi, I took a night train, and then a day bus up to the town of Sa Pa in the Viet Namese highlands. This is Black H’mong country and much cooler then Hanoi. My hotel sat precariously on one edge of a beautiful valley, and Viet Nam’s highest stones made up the dominant far edge.

The mountain called Fan Sai Pan is 3142 meters above the narrow bottoms of those islands in Halong Bay.

Going down into that lush, rice green valley, we tourists saw water buffalo lolling in a river pool with their just visible backs looking pretty much like the granite boulders all around them. Kids jumped gleefully from back to rock, and back again, without any apparent effect on their docile charges. Sitting in the shade for an hour, watching those kids having such fun with their living farm machinery (my own feet in the water), sweetened even more my long established love of stone.

I’ll finish telling you about my world of rocks from Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon is now called).

Near my hotel I found a park many blocks long. Walking through it, I was intrigued by the 30 foot long dragons “carved” out of living hedges. It wasn’t until I looked in the other direction that I realized I was in a sculpture park. Marble, granite, travertine, figurative, traditional, abstract; it was all there. I wandered for some time enjoying the dozens of wonderful sculptures. Many of these pieces could have been carved by any number of folks from NWSSA. I felt accepted and even welcome in this buzz-word city buried so deeply in the American psyche.

I saw no signs of a political or military enemy in Saigon, but here I believe I had found ample evidence of a global humanity. The fact that the physical and soul searching business of shaping stone is found everywhere, illustrates how much we share with people around the world. What I learned in that sculpture park, and other places I passed though, is really quite simple. In the midst of all the diverse agendas clashing so brutally in the world today, it is now more important than ever to seek out and support that multiplicity of deeply human elements we share with all the people on ourbeautiful Blue Marble.

Monarch Sculpture Park - Jan/Feb 2006

Details: Created: Monday, 02 January 2006 05:39

There are not a lot of places in the Olympia, WA area to view stone sculpture, so when I found out about the Monarch Sculpture Park in Tenino (about 10 miles south of Olympia), I had to check it out. I went on a hot day in August a couple of years ago, and had no idea what to expect.

When I got out of the car, I saw a sign saying that it was open from dawn to dusk year round, so I figured I was good to go. There were a number of intriguing-looking buildings, including an A-frame home and what appeared to be studios and various meeting places, but not a soul in sight. A nice old dog came wagging up to me as if to say “I’m it, let’s go!” So I followed him along one of the winding paths down to the main yard, stopping frequently to gaze upon a variety of sculptures done in various media.

The park is huge – 80 acres in all, with the sculptures spread from the buildings at the top of the hill, down windy hillside paths, and into a lush meadow below. A happy little stream runs through the meadow, where large and small sculptures abound. Some of the art is interactive, such as a few bells, and the “sound garden” which has various oversized musical “instruments.” There is also a hedge maze in the shape of a butterfly that covers 2/3 of an acre.

On that first visit, I had mixed feelings, as I felt a bit lonely wandering around alone with only a dog and a couple of scruffy cats with which to discuss my opinions on the sculpture. This is a small price to pay, though, for such a pretty and verdant setting. I left that day determined to find out more about this intriguing place.

Well, it took me a couple of years to get around to it, but I am glad I finally contacted Myrna Orsini, the friendly and accessible Director/Curator. We had a nice chat about the place. Myrna is an accomplished artist, and has several of her own stone sculptures in place at the park.

Myrna and her financial partner started the non-profit Park in 1994, and in 1998 they hosted an International Stone Symposium. Eleven carvers, representing seven countries, participated. Their work became the start of the park’s collection. With their first open house that year, the park was officially opened to the public. The Park hosts guest artist workshops, has art classes and an artist residence program for emerging and established artists.

The works on the ground, unless permanently installed, are for sale.  The park receives a 25% commission on sales from the grounds and from the gallery. Artists place their works on the grounds for a limited period of time.  Some are there only a month, others are there for two years. They have an ongoing call out to artists to apply to exhibit their work. They like to have new works installed by May 15th for inclusion in the site map for the new season.

There is a new gallery with a side serving kitchen, an enclosed outdoor courtyard, a covered breezeway and storage dressing area. Monarch hosts art exhibits during the year and offers the facility and the grounds for weddings, receptions, meeting and parties. Also, the park has a covered outdoor pavilion that is the stage area when they have their annual open house.

On the third Sunday in August there’s an open house called “Art in the Park. The gallery is open and exhibits both painting and sculpture. Over 125 pieces of sculpture are exhibited on the grounds, artists display and sell their works, entertainment is onstage throughout the day, and there are food concessions. This is a family event, and they ask for an entrance fee of $5 as a donation. Other than that, access is free to the public, year round, from dawn to dusk.

The park is always in transition. They are clearing and making Nature Walks and adding new features, such as the Fantasy Garden. The Butterfly Garden and the Japanese Garden are meditative areas for visitors.

In the future, it is envisioned that the center for the arts will include a building hosting the exhibition halls, office, conference rooms, theater, gift shop, cafeteria, and living quarters for visiting artists in residence. There will also be an outdoor amphitheater for summer concerts. To accomplish this, Monarch needs financial backers who support the arts in our community.

In short, this place is bursting with potential for artists to come work, learn, and exhibit. Next time you are in the Olympia vicinity, check out this little jewel of a park.

If you would like more information about Monarch Sculpture Park, contact Myrna Orsini at 360-264-2408 or e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. You can also visit their website at www.monarchsculpturepark.com.