Sculpture and Color

I wanted to have sunflowers blooming for the open studio and garden. 

Luckily all it took was yellow paint and some lumber.

 

I want to see how the Sunflower World design looks with a rusted finish, 

so why not get it OUT  from behind my workbench, OUT of the studio 

and up on a wall to be enjoyed?

 

There's was nothing to look at in this corner of the yard but the very tired wood and mold shed.
Primer and yellow paint and bang suddenly you don't notice the shed at all.

Sculpture and Color

It feels so strange to vandalize your own work.

Painting the faux bronze patina on the Bouquet for the City triptych left me with cans of bright blue spay paint in two different shades, each color begging to be used again.
.................That's when I spotted the Nesting Birds relief sculpture.

Here is the finished carving in AAC.

 I'd tried an unsuccessful acid patina on it. The acid color was too dark and blotchy. I'd tried to bring it back with subtle spray paint in neutral colors. Everything I did made it worse.

 I love this carving, it's a two panel cartoon of love and springtime. But to other people it was monochromatic Blah and Bland. Not good. How do I get people to SEE it?

COLOR to the rescue! 

 It felt weird to blast the relief with bright blue spray paint. (Call it my Banksy phase.) Each color asked for the next color. Green, brown, black, ochre, even gold.
After a lifetime in search of and study of the subtle, I'm learning that subtle in my sculpture can be just too damn quiet for it's own good. Time for a shout or two of color!

The Studio Garden

I wanted to show you the garden to prove it doesn't look like a sculpture graveyard. 
There's many works of art, but they're hidden along the paths to be discovered. 
The game I'm playing is that you should never see more than one sculpture at a time. 
This means placement and screening are very important.

The woodland path to the quiet garden

Solomon's Seal is like a living gothic cathedral.

The quiet garden

The tree peony Boreas, god of the wind, in breeze shattered glory.

Adiantum maiden hair fern, very happy it's new space.

Sculpture and Open Studio Garden

The first Gracewood Studio open garden was a success.
On a perfect sunny day, about 75 people visited the garden. I was still painitng when the first visitors arrived, so they got to see the artist at work. It was good was to stop and enjoy the garden like any visitor. 

 Visitors entered through the little gate, it's a compressed experience walking between the bamboo hedge and the garage. The Buddha with the saw blade halo is the Welcome.

Wood fired ceramic pot by Richard Brandt.

Handicapped and elderly visitors were able to navigate all the paths and found many places to rest. There are six permanent benches and many mobile chairs throughout the garden.

Some of the benches are only 8 feet apart, but are completely different experiences due to the screening of the plantings, the art and the design. This was the first bench in the garden.

When you provide places to pause and rest, people can notice the details, like this lovely volunteer columbine at the base of the bench.

Having made a place to rest, what do you see when you sit down?
I planted Mahonia aquafolium to screen the view and placed this ceramic acanthus fragment low. You don't notice it walking, only when you actually sit down is it visible.

Acanthus terra cotta fragment amid the mahonia and rose Bell Isis.

The south facing wall with grapes and bench. On a sunny day in September,  you can simply reach up to pick the grapes.

Sculpture and Open Studio Garden

photo by Lisa Meddin.

Professional landscape and garden designer, Lisa Meddin, of Harmony Design Northwest, 

visited my garden recently. She interviewed me and wrote about it on her blog, Landscapes Alive.

If I look a bit frazzeled, it's because I was. Getting ready for Saturday's Open Studio and Garden has been a lot work cleaning, siting new work and dealing with spring growth here in Oregon.  

There's so much to be done.  The big lesson is to enjoy each task that I'm doing. There will always be more work.

I'm looking forward to enjoying the garden, the art, and the riot of peonies with garden visitors. If you can't make it, I'll be showing photos of it all next week.

Sculpture and Franken-shrine 2

Context is everything.

In the studio, Franken-shrine was funny, but looked dirty, broken, and a little haunted.
Installed in the garden, across the path from the sculpture of the monk,  Still Thoughts,
the little shrine now has presence and meaning.

Playing with scale is an important aspect to garden design. The shrine looks as if it's set on the top of an enormous cliff, which is really the concrete pedestal. It's smallness evokes a mythic or mental journey to Japan or Tibet.

Originally I'd installed the shrine deeper into another bed. (above)

It looked ok here, but it was important to me to have it close enough to the path so that anyone might ring the bell. The sound is so clear in the garden's quiet, and adds another way for a visitor to participate in what makes a garden special.

Sculpture and Franken-shrine

It was dead and broken. 
But now, it's Alive! It's Alive!
It's FRANKEN-shrine!

Once upon a time, it was a perfect tiny Japanese cedar shrine.
A friend wanted to get rid of it, so it was packed carelessly for a two state road trip, the bag of parts has gone missing, and three dusty years on the to-do shelf left it a shadow of it's former self...

..........which made it easier to just play with it.

I used scrap cedar for the back wall, (Love those knot holes!), maple branches and my pin-nail gun to put it back together. A small Tibetan bell hangs in the center bay.

It will be great in the garden on the path to Still Thoughts,
and ready for Saturday's Open Studio and Garden