Heroic Art

          I’m here in the mountains of New Jersey at my daughter’s for a brief visit. Yesterday we descended to Hamilton, not far from Trenton, where My Guy and I met in college, and also not far from Princeton, where I was born. So I suppose my ties to the state are pretty firm at this point.

         

Our goal was Grounds for Sculpture, a place she had often talked about. It’s on the former New Jersey Fairgrounds, not that you’d ever believe that to see it. Even if you had no interest in art, it’s worth the trip to see the plantings – the groves of bamboo, pools of lily pads, and the outdoor ‘rooms’ that house the sculptures.

        

  It’s all due to artist and philanthropist Seward Johnson (of the Johnson & Johnson family) who wanted a place for contemporary sculpture to be sited within a landscape. His own art figures largely (literally) throughout the complex, some life-sized, but most of it on a massive scale along with works by other artists.

          He reinterprets well-known works into life-size figures, which can be disconcerting to the visitor who turns a corner and suddenly feels like a voyeur.

          

This photograph of his rendition of American Gothic, with a sleek bull by another
artist thrown in for good measure,  is deceiving – those figures are easily 15 feet tall.

    

     Other sculptors provide a counterpoint to Johnson’s realism –

          And we’re transported to places only seen in our imagination.   

(Those are actual people in the clutches of the earth-giant. After enough time there, the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred.)