Thoughts & Opinions

Art in Other Places: Cities - Nov/Dec 1999

Details: Created: Monday, 01 November 1999 22:27

I love visiting cities, especially old, vibrant ones with lots of art. On recent trips, I have been surprised and pleased at how many people got in my way at aIt museums. It's not that I'm a crowd lover - it would be great to have whole rooms to myself. And yet it was marvelous to see so many other people choosing to spend their time visiting art. I really enjoy the big museums, packed full of art, usually from other parts of the world. And I particularly like discovering local art where I don't expect it.

New York has the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modem Art, as well as many other museums and galleries. There is much to see in those museums. I saw plenty that drew me in, and had other very worthy experiences as well. A long New York subway ride took me from Greenwich Village to a working class neighborhood in Queens. After a 15-minute walk I entered the cool, calm oasis that is the Noguchi Garden Museum. If you like Noguchi's work, this is the place to go. Multiple spaces, indoors and out, create a lovely and introspective setting for his small and large scale sculptures. Some of the big basalts were just begging me to lean up against them and feel their textures. I wish I could have - their presence felt primally reassuring.

In older cities, it pays to keep your eyes open-you never know what you might notice, especially if you just look up. Many New York buildings housing chain stores at street level have wonderful carvings and architectural features on higher floors. I was delighted by the variety and inventiveness of the upper surfaces, even with their coating of decades of city grime. And if you get up high enough, take a look at the old water towers atop the buildings. Not that they are lovely, nor even art, but it was striking to see these formations covering the city. The Guggenheim Museum is very modern with a spiral layout llild an open central core. As I was taking in a motorcycle collection, I could look from the chrome and metallic machines to a large carved lion-esque gargoyle on a neighboring building visible through the ceiling windows-what a vivid contrast! Speaking of lions-those at the entrance to the New York Public Library in midtown are the most regal, proud stone beasts I've ever seen-plus it's OK to touch their weathered flanks. And I like that.

Southern Europe is home to more religious art than r ever dreamed existed. Not being Christian nor especially interested in religious a1t, I wasn't excited by the prospect of spending my days viewing it. However, it was "art," and local art at that. Since I was there, I chose to be interested in at least some of it. On my way to Barcelona, Spain, I visited the mediumsized town of Girona. By this point in my travels, I'd seen enough crucifixes to last a lifetime, and would have been happy to see no more. Then I was struck dumb by one in the Girona cathedral. In a dark, quiet niche was a very modern work. Positioned horizontally on the floor was a cross with a terribly gaunt, abstracted Jesus. He was utterly alone llild I could feel His suffering. My memory of it still brings tears to my eyes. In the town's contemporary art museum, I noticed an area blocked off from museum visitors. Naturally, I had to take a look. Several rooms were totally filled with hundreds of large crucifixes, lying on the floor on edge, packed in as tightly as possible. It was disturbing to see all these varied works, all these images of a dying Jesus, crammed together like sardines.

Barcelona is a great and lively city and home to the art of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and Antonio Gaudi. Gaudi is the most imaginative architect I've ever experienced. Throughout the city are his finished llild unfinished works - a park, mllily buildings and homes, and the Temple de la Sagrada Familia (The Holy Family Church). Oh my! You have to look hard to see parallel lines anywhere.

The modern gothic buildings are quite literally dripping with fantasy. In Miro's museum, I spent several hours exploring his joyous world of birds and stars and women and strange fantasies. While I wasn't particularly moved by his work, I grew quite fond of it and of him during the process. One sculpture, which was someone else's work, was a fountain that used mercury to trace a complex, curvy path. It was mesmerizing to watch, because mercury, with its higher viscosity, surface tension and density, moves so differently from water. I wanted to plunge my arms right in and feel the pressure of the quicksilver flowing over me. Last, but not least, was the Picasso Museum. My first memory of a great work of art is Picasso's "The Old Guitarist," which I saw as a child at the Art Institute of Chicago. I loved it then and still do. Much of his later work failed to move me, nor did I "get it." The Picasso Museum is laid out chronologically, beginning with his doodles from a very young age. That boy could really draw. Seeing how he progressed, how he explored his craft, what paths he took was so enlightening. It gave me an appreciation for his genius and his creations that I would not have had otherwise.

I must mention Florence, Italy. I fell in love with the city-with its food, its architecture, its energy, and of course, its art. You must go there and experience it all. Florence is where I first really noticed stone sculpture. First were all the giant marble sculptures ringing the central piazza. Then were all the various carvings on every building in sight. Next were the sculptures in the Bargello Museum. But most especially were the unfinished "captives"ofMichelangelo in the Galleria dell' Accademia where David lives. Words aren't sufficient to describe the emotional impact of my seeing David in all his glory. You just have to go see him yourself. And be prepared to be torn between being drawn toward the magnificent David glowing at the end of the hall and staying with all the intensely powerful captives still contained within their marble blocks. That experience made me see stone sculpture with new eyes and whisper to myself, "Oh I wish I could do that." Several years later I started carving - and am still wishing I could do it like that!

Art in Other Places: A Long Series of Connections to a Sculptor I Admire - Sept/Oct 1999

Details: Created: Thursday, 02 September 1999 06:30

One. Before 1 was 10, my family visited the California State Fair. In one pavillion was a small display of sculptures, including a wooden carving of a baby, lying on its back on a bed of gravel and sucking its toes. For months afterward 1 tried to get my toes in my mouth, before acknowledging the unequal growth of body parts that biologists call "allometric growth". For years and decades 1 imagined carving something like that, and in fact 1 still do.

Two. About 25 years later 1 visited the National Museum of Costa Rica in San Jose, where 1 saw a lifesized female torso in a tropical hardwood. As before, 1 was captivated, even stunned, and 1 lingered with the piece for a long time. This time, 1 sketched the sculpture. After returning home to Canada, 1 dreamed of it often, especially to imagine how it would feel to live in a woman's body-to move, to feel my shape from the inside, and to feel everything about my environment including other people. 1 imagined carving it, too, and kicked myself for not recording the artist's name.

Three. After another 15 years, a Costa Rican friend who was preparing to visit home asked if she could bring me anything. 1 said 1 would like a log of cocobolo, thinking it would be a miracle if 1 got it. While in Costa Rica, she arranged to meet Jose Sancho, a sculptor her mother had done some translating for, and he agreed to help. They visited a campesino who had cocobolo on his finca in the mountains, and paid him $100 US for the section of log she brought home to me. (I still have this gorgeous piece of rosewood, which is so dense that it sinks in water. So does the piece of Asian rosewood that 1 brought home from Laos last year.) 1 wrote Sancho a letter of thanks, enclosed my sculpture brochure, and thought that would be the end of it.

Four. After another five years 1 revisited Costa Rica to study hummingbirds in the rainforest. While visiting friends in San Jose 1 met a woman who knew Jose Sancho. She arranged for me to meet him, and took me to his home and studio, both of which are incredibly beautiful (there are no fir, no pine, no spruce in the tropics-only hardwoods of the richest colours you can imagine). Our mutual friend introduced us and left, and we began trying to communicate. Sancho speaks no English and my Spanish is horrible. After a while, he understood that 1 am a Canadian sculptor and scientist who studies hummingbirds, and who knows about his work. All of a sudden his face lighted up with recognition, he said, "Uno momento!" He ran into the house and up the stairs. He returned immediately with the card that I had sent him five years earlier!

Gradually we came to know each other a little, and although I can't be sure of this because of the language problem, I think Sancho told me that he had carved the torso that had stunned me in the National Museum in 1977! When I left I took with me not only an incredible experience of a man, the place where he lives and works, and his work. I also took a whole handful of handsome brochures, in one of which is inscribed in fluid handwfltmg: "Para el amigo, cientifico y escullor, Lee Gass, como recuerdo de Sll amable visita a mi taller. (Signed,) Jose Sancho. Escazu, Costa Rica. Julio de 1993."

Five. Until he quit to sculpt full time, Jose Sancho was a university economist. His first pieces, done while he was still working at the university, were welded and painted constructions of found pieces of metal. They are interesting and well-executed, but his carvings are a horse of a different colour. They are something else again, because nearly all of about 50 of Sancho's wood and stone carvings that I know of really grab me. They grab me on many levels at once, and in many ways, and invite me in. I come willingly into Jose Sancho's sense of form, and into his remarkable ability to subtract exactly the right material from a rock or from a tree to manifest his imagination in the material. What he imagines is a clear window into life, in my opinion, not just as it is in the moment, structurally, but as it is lived in real time, in the forests and fields of Central America. I have seen his work with my eyes. I have touched his pieces, some of them anyway, and when I did I was amazed. Most of his pieces are at the same time abstract in a deeply geometric sense and true to life. They are true to life both as I live it and as I understand it, as a biologist, to be lived. I love his work. It pretty much blows me away. Some of Sancho's pieces make me laugh. For example, the very large white marble piece on his front lawn. At first glance it is just a large, lovely forman abstraction. After a moment, though, it becomes clear that Sancho has carved a lifesized portrait of two polar bears mating!

Because I didn't ask Sancho's permission to share his work with you, I will show you only one sculpture (Figure I on page 8). You are welcome to sit in my living room, eat delicious Ice cream made from the produce of my small city lot, look at the pictures all you want, and even read his book if your Spanish is good enough. Or maybe, if you are good and the cow doesn't kick over the milkbucket, you'll get to see a real Jose Sancho sculpture some time. For now, then, I will leave you with a translation of part of what Sancho wrote in 1983: "My cult is the Universe, my faith is the art that redeems, my devotion is music, my priesthood is sculpture; the workshop is my refuge. These are the reasons for which I create art."