|
Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts™ State College, Pennsylvania July 12-15, 2012 ~ Children and Youth Day July 11, 2012 |
|||||||||||
 
|
THE SEWARD JOHNSON SCULPTURE EXHIBITION Sculpture from The Sculpture Foundation The Festival is especially delighted to welcome, for a second time, the loan of sculptures from the Sculpture Foundation of Santa Monica, California. In 2010, the Festival will exhibit one sculpture is the work of Seward Johnson, who is well known for his life sized cast bronze figures of people captured in everyday situations. The second sculpture will be a work by Isaac Witkin, the internationally known abstract sculptor. After an early career as a painter, Seward Johnson turned his talents to the medium of sculpture. Since then, more than 350 of Johnson's life-size cast bronze figures have been featured in private collections and museums in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia, as well as prominent places in the public realm such as New York City’s Rockefeller Center; Hong Kong’s Pacific Place; and Les Halles in Paris. In 2009, the Festival displayed three works by Johnson and they were an enormous hit with the Festival audience. Johannesburg born Isaac Witkin, studied at the St Martin’s School of Art in London, where he became part of a new movement in sculpture known as the New Generation. After an apprenticeship with Henry Moore, Witkin moved to the United States. He taught at Bennington College, the Parsons School of Design, New York, New York, and the Philadelphia College of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Through his work Witkin became an acquaintance of fellow sculptor and patron of the arts J. Seward Johnson, Jr. and was instrumental in persuading Johnson to purchase and transform the abandoned New Jersey Fairgrounds into what became the Grounds for Sculpture Park, a 35-acre outdoor display of sculpture. Several of Witkin’s works are among the Grounds permanent collections. Witkin’s work is also included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, the Centre for Modern Art, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal; Fine Arts Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
THE MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, AT A GLANCE Are there real clothes on the sculptures? No. Surprisingly each sculpture is entirely bronze. The realism of the textures and details is the hallmark of Johnson’s art, and this detailing is achieved with hours and hours of intense labor. Seward Johnson begins each bronze with a l2 inch tall “sketch” in clay, and then enlarges this to life scale in clay. Often delicate textures, such as the skin, can be made more real with fabrics pressed into the clay at this stage. Sometimes articles of clothing are stiffened with a resin and used in the mold process, but there is no clothing on top of, or under the bronze, in the sculpture that you see today. Other times clay clothing is sculpted onto the figure by the artist using fine-edged wooden and metal tools. As the figures are sawed into many parts for the casting process, there are dozens of roughly welded areas when the parts are reassembled in bronze. At this stage, the artist must replace many of the fine textures; a corduroy, a tweed, a cable knit sweater pattern, with an electric tool that is much like a fine dentist’s drill. This is the most time consuming part of creating these bronzes. It takes up to one year to create one sculpture. Who does the artist used as models? When Seward Johnson is ready to enlarge a piece from the small gesture sketch into the life size version, he will seek out just the perfect face and body type for the story of the sculpture. When he was doing a gardener, he went and talked with gardeners and landscape companies. He wanted a weathered face with sun wrinkles, and the working hands of a gardener. He used a real police officer for his work "Time's Up," which depicts an officer writing a ticket. How does he get the unusual colors? Seward Johnson has been developing unique chemistry for the colors of his sculptures for years. In an effort to better fool the eye, and allow the pieces to blend successfully into our colorful world, he began to add colors about ten years ago. The current opaque colors are achieved using the same type of advanced technical pigments that are used on airplanes. They are quite resistant to climate conditions, and each sculpture is also coated with a thin film of incrylac and a final coating of wax for added protection. Haven’t I seen these somewhere before?
If you are a frequent traveler, it is likely that you have seen Johnson’s work in other places. New York City has several very publicly sited works, as does Washington DC, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Osaka, and even Istanbul. Cities will often arrange an exhibition of Johnson’s bronzes to bring levity to a downtown area, and museum’s frequently host exhibits on their grounds and parklands. You may also have seen photos of the sculptures in Architectural Digest, New Yorker Magazine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Life Magazine, and others. Johnson has also appeared on the Tonight Show with several of his pieces, and CNN has also created a couple of interesting stories on the artist. What’s Seward Johnson like? Seward Johnson is 78 this year, and has been married for over 40 years to his wife, a novelist. The Johnson’s have two grown children and live in Princeton, New Jersey and on the island of Nantucket. Seward Johnson had the unusual experience of growing up as the heir to one of America’s largest fortunes as the grandson of the founder of Johnson & Johnson. As someone who could have spent a life of leisure, Johnson is quite actively involved in both his art and an array of other interests. He is the President of a large oceanographic research institution in Florida, the publisher of a science magazine, and the founder of an off-Broadway theater in New York. He is the past President of the International Sculpture Center of Washington, DC, and remains a vital force in encouraging and assisting with young sculptors careers by having created the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture. Personally, Seward Johnson is a charming and philosophical man, with a tendency toward irreverent wit. He loves to anonymously loiter around his public sculptures and make negative remarks to fellow viewers of the art to see what the real response to his work is! He loves to get into the position of having the stranger unwittingly defend the sculpture to this “hostile” art critic. Are these one of a kind, or does the artist make several castings? Seward Johnson will make up to seven castings of a design, and only as ordered. Therefore, although there are now many sold out editions, some works will only be made once. When the full seven are purchased by collectors, the artist invites all seven owners to the foundry to celebrate the ceremonial destruction of the mold.
The Sculpture Foundation
| |||||||||||
|
Contents © Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts | ||||||||||||
