Sir Frederick Gibberd was an English architect, landscape designer and town planner. His design for Harlow New Town, generally regarded as the most successful of Britain’s post-WWII developments, is his greatest achievement. His garden is his most personal. Located in Essex on the outskirts of the town he designed, the garden is little known…
Tree Rings, my most recent sculpture, was installed at Glen Villa a few weeks ago. Making this sculpture has been more challenging technically and mentally than I anticipated. Certainly it has taken longer than I thought it would. The project began in September 2014 when the top of an old maple tree blew off during a heavy…
Combining sculpture and a collection of rare palms, the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden offers a quiet retreat from the up-scale social whirl of Palm Beach, Florida. Palm Beach, after all, was (and in some cases still is) home or vacation playground for many of the world’s rich and famous, from the Kennedy and Pulitzer families,…
Travelling is wonderful, but nothing beats being at Glen Villa on a perfect autumn day, when the air is clear, the sky is blue and nothing in particular has to be done. This morning I walked around the garden, my first walk-about in three weeks. A few flowers are still blooming, like the never-say-die sedum…
Jeff Koons is not my favourite artist. In fact, I don’t really like his work. But I do like his Puppy. And I loved the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, inside and out. Koons’ Puppy is suitably festive outside Frank Gehry’s trademark gay curves. In the plaza next to the museum, towering over pedestrians, Koons’ highland terrier is a…
Several weeks ago I started a three-part series about an art installation at Glen Villa called In Transit / en Route. I posted the first two parts and intended to post the third in week three. But California and all I saw there captured my attention and my blogging time. So the third part of In…
The In Transit / En Route trail starts at the edge of a field. with a sign that asks a rather odd question. Where are you? Où êtes-vous? As I wrote in my previous post (In Transit / En Route: the beginning), the words aren’t easy to read. The letters are small and the words run together with…
In my post last week I mentioned In Transit / En Route and showed a photo of a clearing in the woods. Here’s the photo again. In Transit/En Route: the sundial clearing in the woods Do you see the red sign in the clearing? It is part of In Transit, or En Route in French, an installation…
People respond differently to the woods that are a big part of the landscape at Glen Villa It’s hard to miss the difference. Some hike through the forest intent on getting someplace, noticing very little. Others spy things I’ve never seen. The art installations I’m creating throughout the property generate widely different reactions. For some people,…