I came across these photos today from an installation I did a couple of years ago. Minding my own business, working a late night, and all of a sudden I am engulfed by a cloud of purple …it was an early start to Holi, the Festival of Colors. This celebration of the end of Winter/ beginning of Spring, involves throwing dye at each other and I was an obvious target of choice.
I have been fortunate to experience other cultures not from just a bystander point of view, but as an active participant…..traveling to create land art and gardens has been great, but days like these are even better.
Also, if you have not seen the movie Outsourced about an American working in India – highly recommended!!!
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While attending a conference in Dallas, I was able to sneak out for a bit and went to the Nasher Sculpture Center and Museum. What I was most impressed with was the created space and placement of the pieces within the setting. I guess I should have just said I was most impressed with the art, but I have become very accustomed to looking at the details of designed spaces and this execution seemed so natural, and scaled ….oh and the art was great too! The sculptures acted as backdrops to each other without competing for attention, even in such a limited space. The designer of the space was Peter Walker, PWPs Landcape Architects.
“Situated in downtown Dallas at the base of the city’s skyline, the Nasher Sculpture Center represents Raymond D. Nasher’s vision to create an outdoor “roof-less” museum that serves as a peaceful retreat for reflection of art and nature and public home for his collection of 20th-century sculpture” -
Ok, so I am going to share with you what one of my guilty pleasures…Graffiti. Now, I am not talking about “paint vandalism”, but rather truly inspired art that has been appropriately placed and well executed. The following are all images that I took in Sao Paulo – a city which is home to some of the very best graffiti I have seen…..oh, and if someone just happens to know Banksy and would like to make an intro….
(click on the images below to scroll and see the full photo with comments too)
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Having never formally trained in design, I had no idea who Isamu Nogouchi was when I first started creating gardens and working with stone….actually, now that I think of it, I really had no idea of who any designers were! Not until one day when a client asked me if Nogouchi has been an influence was I was first truly exposed to him and his work. Now for me, visiting the Noguchi’s museum located in Queens is like entering a cathedral.
His work spans the use of several mediums from metals, wood, water and earth, but it is not surprising that I am most attracted to his work with stone. Although deliberately worked with by hand, most of his pieces still maintain the true nature and essence of stone. So often, stone is so severely carved and manipulated that the end result could easily be of any material. It loses the integrity of being an object crafted of stone…of being stone itself.
I think my attraction may even border on a sense of kinsmanship (although I am in no way comparing myself to his talent, experience or sense of expression). – he worked on several scales, from small sculptures to large mixed media commissions, from single pieces to quantitative production and has been aptly described as an “internationalist”, having traveled extensively and even maintaining two studios both in the US and one in Japan.
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Sometimes you are fortunate to receive a project and commission that has special meaning. AguaFina was selected to provide various stone sculptures for a children’s park in Lincoln, Nebraska and it doesn’t get much better then that! We have been working with a team of designers for the park helping to implement their ideas and concepts. The gallery below shows the progression of some of the carvings including the initial concept renderings that were presented to us. Once we hammered out some of the final details and engineering concerns, I went to the stone carving studios that I work with to select the actual stone and begin sculpting. I will keep updating this post with images as we complete and finally deliver these pieces.
It seems only appropriate that I officially launch my blog here, on the road from Indonesia. It was while traveling here that a series of events occurred that resulted in a big shift in the direction of my life. I remember getting on that plane from Singapore haeded to Bali for the first time. I really can’t completely explain it, but I knew that if I got on that plane something was going to happen. I haven’t really shared this story with many people, but at the gate in Singapore, I literally got off and on the plane about four or five times until the flight staff finally asked if everything was all right……I am certain that today I would have ended up being interegated by security!
I had already done much traveling and it wasn’t a fear of flying, but I had the sense that getting on that plane was significant….that something was going to happen or change, but I could not sense if that was going to be good or bad, just a feeling of “something”.
Over a dozen years later and frequent return trips in between, I find myself in Java with one of my very closest friends, Kadek, that along with his wife Megan I met on that first trip. We just spent the last couple of days sourcing new stone carvers, both buying some of their sculptures and working on new designs. It is that first trip to Bali that changed my travels from being just a curious bystander, to actively finding sculptural elements, artifacts, stone and other items to incorporate into my gardens. I started that trip exploring the island on a motorbike and later left with two full shipping containers completely packed. This later led to traveling to other countries to find additional items for AguaFina’s projects and clients to give our designs true authenticity. This eventually let to being involved in projects overseas, our own product catalog, a design studio and more.
Below are some photos I wanted to share from this last trip. We actually saw many pieces that looked surprising similar to some of the signature pieces in AguaFina’s catalog that I helped design several years ago……hmmmm. ….unfortunately par for the course at times here. Additionally, if you go to the link of “recent finds”, you will be able to see images of some of the pieces we collected.
