Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Local sculptor’s work going to Japan

By KAREN P. CHYNOWETH, Recorder Staff

TURNERS FALLS — In the ’80s before moving to Franklin County, sculptor Jack Nelson had a studio in Long Island City, N.Y., about a half-mile down the road from renowned Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi.

“I always admired his work, the simplicity and grandeur of it,” Nelson said.

So, when Nelson was asked to make a sculpture in the modern/Zen style of Noguchi, he jumped at the chance. Nelson was commissioned to make an original marble sculpture to be sent to Japan and put on display in a public room of what he believes to be a corporate building. The commission came through a third-party art dealer, so Nelson isn’t sure exactly where the sculpture is going, but he knows it is in Japan.

What resulted from the commission is a 270-pound, white and gray marble, 36-inch diameter circular sculpture that sits on a steel base.

“It’s very basic and complicated at the same time,” Nelson said.

Nelson got the commission when he happened to run into art dealer Elizabeth Weiner, who has galleries in New York and California, when she was standing in front of his house. It turns out Weiner was visiting local wood-worker Spencer Peterman. She liked Nelson’s work and, he thinks, saw something of Noguchi in his style.

Nelson found the perfect piece of marble in the “bone yards” of a quarry in Vermont. It’s an off-white piece with swirls of gray through it.

“I love the grain, it is very celestial,” Nelson said as he caressed the inner curve of the sculpture.

The stone is smooth and cold, but not the smooth of machine-sculpted marble. Hand chiseling left the sculpture with undulations and curves that can’t be seen, but can be felt.

“Visually, it looks smooth,” Nelson said. “I really think it’s part of the invitation to touch it, to realize there is a very human element to it; you don’t get that with a machine.”

The shape is a simple circle, but there is something almost feminine about it and Nelson said it reminds him of the idea of the birth canal. He gave it the unofficial title of “Tunnel vision or television, which came first?” contrasting what he imagines a baby might see if it could see in the womb to the way people zonk out when they watch television. Nelson said a photographer recently shot the sculpture and he felt as though the man was photographing a nude.

“It’s so biological — the beginning of everything,” Nelson said.

The sculpture took about six weeks to make and is all but done, unless the buyers insist that a high polish be applied. Nelson said he hopes they choose to leave it natural. In a few weeks, the sculpture will be taken to Weiner’s warehouse in New York and will then be shipped to California and ultimately overseas to Japan. Until then, it will stay in Nelson’s studio, Carriage House Designs at 65 Canal St.

Nelson said he will miss the sculpture, but doesn’t regret that he will likely never see it again.

“My involvement with it is totally different when I put my tools down. I consider myself finished and now I’m just a viewer. It’s a totally different skin.”