Busy Spring, Part 1

OK, yes it's been a long time since my last post. A little over six months, actually... which is a long time for this blog. I have done SO much in these last six months (most of it with Christina and/or Kodiak) that I have made the unusual decision to split this post into two parts. At this very moment, you are beginning to read Part 1. In a few days I will post Part 2. You can blame this on me... for having paused so very long between posts. I'll do my best to keep abreast of things better in the future! Let's begin...

As of my last post, I had just returned from Rome and we had just begun working on renovating our workshop. Knowing that we would need tools when our shop was completed, I drove down to Berlin in December to take advantage of a good deal on a nice TIG welder being sold by a friend, and I had the pleasure of staying with my old friend Guy and his family. Guy's help in building With Open Arms in Berlin in 2018 was invaluable, and it was lovely to see him again.

Not long after that we escaped the dreary Swedish winter by spending the New Year in Athens with my brother Cles and my mother. 

In Athens with Cles

Cles and his wife Kelly had just welcomed a pair of baby girls, Kyveli and Elektra, into the world! It was so fun to see them! We then in turn escaped Athens for a few days on the Greek island of Hydra. I've written about Hydra before... about how ridiculously charming it is, how unspoiled it is by the modern world. It's really an amazing place. No cars, no roads, just donkeys and cats. So many cats! 

The feeling I had this time was really one of being transported back to a simpler time. There is something that I find so seductive about the idea of living a pared-down, simpler life that I even started fantasizing about trying to buy a house on Hydra one day. Oh well, one can dream!

The simple life

While on Hydra it become so obvious to me (in case I'd forgotten) how much I love cats. In fact we all fell so much in love with one particular cat (which Kodiak named Calypso) that I even started researching how to take her home with us. 

Calypso

In the end, that wasn't such a good idea... but we returned to Sweden with the clear goal of finding a cat for our new farmhouse. My only criteria was that I wanted a black (or dark-colored) cat. After quite a bit of searching, we found a mother and daughter duo who we named Stella and Luna. They are not black... but they're tough little farm-cats and they're a perfect fit for our family.

Stella and Luna

In February Kodiak and I again escaped the Swedish gloom by spending a few days in Oslo, the capital of Norway. OK, maybe we weren't actually escaping any gloom, but Oslo was really fun... full of good museums (really good museums, including a military museum that Kodiak Loved, and a museum of polar exploration where you can wander around on board the actual ships which they took to the north pole a hundred years ago!), good food, beautiful views, and lots of sculpture. In fact Oslo is home to the world's largest sculpture park featuring the work of only one artist, and it was precisely that park which drew me there. Gustav Vigeland is Norway's most famous sculptor, and with good reason. He was fantastically prolific during his long life, and the park which (informally) bears his name and the accompanying museum are full of literally hundreds of monumental sculptures executed by him or by his assistants. Actually the fact that he had an army of assistants tasked with carrying out his designs brings us to an interesting handful of points to make about him. 1) Because he was so well-loved in his native Norway, and because he was working in the years before and after the turn of the twentieth century, an era which was characterized by industrialization, optimism, and cultural investment in Europe, he received a tremendous amount of support and assistance from the Norwegian state. This support took the form of financial assistance which certainly helped retain all those assistants, but also resulted in a unique deal in which the city of Oslo not only gave Vigeland an amazing city park to fill with his work, but also gave him a spectacular and huge building in a great part of the city to serve as his home and studio, in exchange for that very same building eventually reverting back to the city upon his death and subsequently serving as a museum of his sculpture. What a deal! I don't think that sort of state sponsorship really happens anymore... 2) The second point to make about the assistants is that, although on first glance it might seem like an antiquated arrangement, especially insofar as the Norwegian state might have helped him retain those assistants, a working arrangement like that is not so different from what we see with today's billionaire art stars. People like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst need only sketch something on a napkin... and then their minions do the hard work of realizing the idea as an actual object. During the construction of Vigeland Park, Vigeland was working in much the same way; he would make a small clay 'sketch' of a sculpture (these clay sketches are all in the museum), and his assistants would execute it in full-scale from granite. A lot of people like to shit-talk artists who work in this mode (and I'm sure there are major disadvantages to being 'distanced' from the actual production work), but it doesn't sound that bad to me!

A few of my favorites from the Vigeland Park and Museum.

The centerpiece of the park... Vigeland's monolith. Look closely to see what the tower is 'made of.' Remember that you can open any of these photos in FULL SIZE by right-clicking (or Command-Click on a Mac) and opening in a new tab. (Not my photo)

2 more sculptures from the streets of Oslo. A diver near the harbor (cast stainless, nice!) and a monument to those affected by breast cancer. The sculpture is modeled from a real person and her story, as detailed on a nearby plaque, was intense.

On the topic of Damien Hirst, on our last day in Oslo I discovered another, more contemporary sculpture park which featured one of my favorite sculptures by Hirst, Anatomy of an Angel. 

The piece presents a medical-style cutaway of an archetypal angel from the Christian faith. By drawing attention to the fact that angels share most of their exterior anatomy with mortal women, and presumably therefor their interior anatomy as well, I think the piece attempts to question the idea that they could somehow be immortal. Or at least that's what I take from it!

While in Oslo we also discovered a really super unusual store which calls itself an 'army-surplus store', but was really so much more. You could buy everything from knives and uniforms to dried insects to animal skulls in there. My kind of place. Kodiak went nuts in there!  

At some point not too long after our return from Oslo I attempted to purchase a genuine Jassans sculpture at an online auction... 

....but the bidding quickly eclipsed my purchasing power... and I failed. Despite all my fascination with Hirst and Vigeland and all the other amazing sculptors of the world, Jassans is my favorite. It's been a few years since I wrote about him, the great Catalan sculptor who I discovered while living in Barcelona, but my love for him hasn't diminished. In the 8 years that I've been a fan, that was the first time I saw one of his pieces come up for sale, and I was heartbroken for days after losing that auction. I've got to figure out how to make some money so I'm ready if another one ever shows up! (Ironically there's a strong argument to be made that one of my best shots at making enough money to buy sculptures like this is just to start making sculptures like this...)

I'll finish up Part 1 with a little update on my own art production. To be honest it's been a busy few months - a fact which will become even more clear in Part 2 - so I haven't exactly been cranking out the work. But back in February I did start a figure drawing group, and that has kept the nerve fibers between my eyes and hands in good shape. You might remember that back in Taos I was enthusiastically involved in such a group, and I figured that it would be easy to find a local one here in Sweden to join. But after a few months of searching, I came up empty... so I started a group. We meet on Monday evenings in Malmö, and I've gradually started to produce some decent drawings. I have lately begun experimenting with drawing directly in pen, which is so much more of a commitment... but also signals, I think, a bit more confidence. Here are a few drawings...

I have more of my own art to share, of a different and slightly wider variety, in the next post.

OK, stay tuned for Part 2 in a few days, in which I discuss our awesome new workshop and all the fun adventures we've had with all the fun people who have visited! It's already written, so I promise it will really happen! 

I'll end with this great picture taken by Cles, in Athens' First Cemetery...

C