The Pissarro Museum, St. Thomas, USVI.

Copyright, Jim Lane

My sister and I were left standing out on the sidewalk.
The museum shares its location with a hair salon and
an accounting service (which were also closed).

When my sister talked us into accompanying her and her husband on a Christmas cruise to the Eastern Caribbean this year (it was a very brief conversation), one of the stops was St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI). There I had hoped to visit the birthplace and childhood home of the French impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro (now turned into a museum). Yesterday (in the item just below) I told of our encounter with the ghost of Blackbeard, the pirate, and the bronze pirate sculptures of Richard Hallier. Today, let me continue with the rest of the story. Just down over a steep hill from the Hallier gallery is Pissarro's namesake museum. It's located on a thoroughfare they call "Main" Street (it's actually not the main street of the town). The town is called Charlotte Amalie, which is the main city on the main island of St. Thomas (people sometimes confuse the two).

 

The Pissarro Museum. It's not hard to find, merely
hard to get into.

The weather was warm and sunny. It was the day after Christmas. We weren't uncomfortable, but I would have hated to visit the place in mid-summer. After making a few local inquiries, we were directed to 14 Main Street (top) where the Pissarro family dry-goods store had been located in the mid 1800s. I was a little dismayed to find that, after our search, it was somewhat less than I'd expected. Moreover, I was really disappointed to find the place was closed. Their website notes that they're open seven days a week. Perhaps they were closed it being the day after Christmas. The photos which follow were "borrowed" from a visitor somewhat luckier than we. Perhaps we didn't miss much. The photos and the video (bottom) would suggest that the establishment is something of a souvenir shop with a museum attached.



The second floor location of the museum, where the
Pissarro family once literally lived "over the store."

Camille Pissarro, was born on the island of St. Thomas in 1830. At the time the islands were ruled by Denmark (don't ask, why Denmark? It's a long story). The building at 14 Main Street, once housed the family's dry-goods business. They lived in the flat upstairs. Several of Pissarro's Caribbean inspired works are on display at the gallery (no originals, however), along with works from about two dozen other (local) artists including Jenine Wesselman, Sylvia Kahn, Lee Coplea, and Jan Dunn. These contemporary works in oil, watercolor, gauche, rock, sculpture, and print, are available for sale (which says a great deal about the nature of the "museum." Pissarro lived in St. Thomas until age 12, when he went to a boarding school in Paris.

 

What we didn't see when we visited the Pissarro Museum.

Camille Pissarro, self-portrait,
1852, about as he appeared
when he depart for Paris.

Pissarro returned to St. Thomas around 1850. He joined the family business and painted in his free time. Pissarro was attracted to political anarchy, a trait which may have originated during his years on St. Thomas. In 1852, he traveled to Venezuela with the Danish artist, Fritz Melbye. Upon returning in 1855, Pissarro decided to forsake the dry-goods business in favor of be-coming an artist. Most of his St. Thomas paintings (below) are dated 1856. That was also the year he hop-ped a ship off the island and headed back to Paris. There he studied at various academic institutions including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Suisse under a succession of masters. These included such nota-bles as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Charles-Fran-cois Daubigny. Corot is considered Pis-sarro's most important influence.

All works are by Pissarro and date from 1856, the year
he left St. Thomas to study art in Paris. (He never returned.)

Mountain Landscape at Saint Thomas, Antilles
(unfinished), 1856, Camille Pissarro, his final
St. Thomas painting.

--------------------------



Richard Hallier

Blackbeard the Pirate by the North Carolina sculptor, Richard
Hallier, cast in bronze, reportedly about life-size (questionable).
His "castle" can be seen in the background.

On our recent cruise to the Eastern Caribbean, my wife and brother-in-law decided not to get off the ship at St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. So, my sister and I, both of us history buffs, decided to imbibe a little local folklore by pursuing the legend of a pirate named Edward Teach, better known as the infamous "Blackbeard." The operative word in this tale is "legend." It's not as if Edward Teach was not a real, historic figure and notorious pirate. He was indeed, and quite legendary as well. The problem is, he seems never to have never once set foot on the island of St. Thomas; meaning by implication, of course, that he never once spent a single night in their famous "Blackbeard's Castle." In fact, his so-called castle was built by the Danes (who ruled the island at the time) in 1679 as a mere stone watchtower overlooking the sea-level Fort Christian, which guarded the Charlotte Amalie harbor. Moreover, the cylindrical stone tower was erected a full year before Blackbeard was even born. Thus we fell into a tourist trap having as its only redeeming trait the dramatic performance of a delightful Blackbeard impersonator with a (more or less) historic tale to tell, embellished by highly amusing anecdotes. It turns out, Blackbeard had far more to do with Virginia and North Carolina than St. Thomas.

Copyright, Jim Lane

And out in back of the castle, a swimming pool, where
Blackbeard presumably passed the time when not
playing "Pirates of the Caribbean."

The bronze statue of Blackbeard (top) was created several hundred years after Blackbeard terrorized the English colonists of the American east coast by a sculptor (also from North Carolina) named Richard Hallier. I didn't measure it, but the dramatic bronze personage appeared to be around ten to twelve feet tall, though the human version of Blackbeard suggested it was life-sized. If so, he was woefully inadequate for his dramatic role. History suggests that Blackbeard was, indeed of exceptional stature; but though he may have been BIG, he wasn't that big. I didn't look inside Blackbeard's so-called "castle." Danish watchtowers have never been very high on my "must-see" list.

Copyright, Jim Lane

Three Queens, Richard Hallier, commemorating three powerful
women who led an 1878 slave revolt against the Danes.

Had this little sojourn ended there, I would have been somewhat incensed at the locals for perpetrating such a hoax and at myself for having fallen for it. However, just a few dozen stone steps down over the hill from this fake pirate abode was yet another such pirate abiding place, this one much more interesting, free of charge, and more in keeping with my art interest. There, in an airy, modest-size museum, was a collection of a dozen or so bronze pirate images by the earlier Blackbeard's sculptural creator, Richard Hallier (below). These were, indeed, life-size, dramatically posed, some made even more lifelike through the use of chemical patinas designed to add a touch of color to their otherwise polished bronze tones. Just about every pirate of the Caribbean short of Jack Sparrow and Peter Pan's Captain Hook was portrayed in action, doing what they did best, fighting, drinking, carousing, or...well, pirating.

The real "pirates of the Caribbean" safely cast
in bronze by North Carolina sculptor, Richard Hallier.

In retrospect, I feel somewhat remiss in not recognizing immediately the name, Richard Hallier, in that the scope and quality of this internationally known sculptor ranges far beyond giant pirates and life-size attempts to bring such colorful characters to life. Although painters have long been known to try capturing frozen action poses in their works, few sculptors have tried to do the same. Hallier not only tried but succeeded as his athletic figures seen below attest. Like his pirates, they seem to have a life of their own only barely contained by the bronze metal in which they are cast.

Volley Ball Dig, Richard Hallier

Born in 1944, and from Kansas City, Kansas, originally, Hallier began his art career as a U.S. Marine Corps Illustrator during the Vietnam War. After the war, he attended Kansas City, Junior College and the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida. During the 1970s, Hallier founded his own business, the Carolina Sign Company with showrooms on Hilton Head Island, at Shipyard Plantation, Palmetto Dunes Resort, and Sea Pines, South Carolina. From 1984 through 1988 Hallier began sculpting. He produced his first life-size figurative bronze. In addition, he also fabricated hundreds of contemporary abstract stone sculptures and bronze abstract figurative pieces in limited editions. He exhibited regionally and nationally, his work included in many corporate collections and museums such as NCNB corporate collections, Wachovia Bank, R.J. Reynolds, Northern Telecom, the Hickory North Carolina Museum of Art, and many others.

Olympic Headquarters, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Richard Hallier

Richard Wayne Hallier, 2006

During the 1990s, Hallier Produced over 70 life-size fig-urative bronzes. He was one of the top three artists at New York Art Expo, as well as con-tributing to the North Carolina Arts Journal cover feature on Martin Luther King, Jr. Memor-ial Commission. He also pro-duced the World's largest figurative silver casting. Dur-ing the years 2000-2006 Hallier worked on commis-sions for private investors and monuments including the pir-ate figures my sister and I encountered on St. Thomas. Richard Wayne Hallier spent the last three years of his life sailing the Caribbean with his wife. He died from pulmonary fibrosis on April 17th, 2010, in Punta Gorda, Florida, at the age of 65.

Girl with Shell, Richard Hallier

Joaquín Clausell

Ixtacalco, Joaquin Clausell

Americans have long had a national, no-nonsense, love affair with Realism or what most art people would call naturalism. It's a mile wide and dozens of feet deep dating back at least a couple hundred years. It has become so much a part of "who we are" as an art-appreciating nation we take it for granted, seldom giving it a second though. However, as I mentioned yesterday (the item below) we have also fallen in love with Impressionism, though our attachment for this French delicacy is neither as deep nor wide in our national psyche as Realism. Impressionism is, after all, something of a "foreign influence" which we have a natural tendency to approach cautiously. Like French fries or French pastries, we've given Impressionism our own cultural twist in a sort of Franco-American manner the French would find either mildly amusing or not-so-mildly derogatory.

 

Laguna Azteca, Joaquin Clausell

We Americans also tend to think that we were the sole beneficiary of this painting gift in much the same manner as the French bestowed upon us Bartholdi's Liberty Enlightening the World (the Statue of Liberty). As tempting as this analogy might seem at first glance, it's not valid. French Impression didn't simply sail across the Atlantic and take up residence, immigrating to the United States alone. Instead, it radiated from its birthplace into virtually every dark, geographic corner of 19th-century art, (if we must use the earlier analogy), "enlightening the world" with its stunning brilliance and beauty. As Paris-trained painters returned to their homelands during the final decades of the 19th-century, they took with them the Impressionist tonal pallete, if not always the more complex technical attributes of the style. However, in the case of Mexico, a young, largely self-taught, painter named Joaquin Clausell did both. He was the conduit through which his country first discovered and came to love Impressionism.

 

Had Clausell chosen the life of a painter over one predominantly involved in political activism, he might well be considered Mexico's greatest artist. In his own time however, he was little known for his art, but quite well-known by Mexican governmental authorities as a major "pain in the ass."

Today, Joaquin Clausell is best known for his painting, although he was also an orator, journalist, politician, and lawyer. I referred to him earlier as also a "conduit." In this case, that term is very much an apt analogy. Even though he spent some time in Paris where he was influenced by the impressionists, particularly Camille Pissarro, there's no indication at all of his having studied art there, painting there, or even having actually met his painting idol. In large part he escaped to Paris in order to remain a free man, having been jailed in his homeland on numerous occasions for his radical, anti-government views and activities. It was only in returning to Mexico around 1899 at the age of thirty-five, that Clausell first picked up a brush and began to paint. In the years that followed, the man had two painting careers, the first from around 1903 to about 1910, the second, a decade later, from around 1920 until his death in 1935. Between those two periods, the Mexican Revolution intervened.

 

Landscape with Hut, Joaquin Clausell

Despite Clausell's impact upon Mexican art in the form of his impressionist works, his surviving paintings themselves, some four-hundred of them, appear surprisingly unexceptional, even given the fact that around a hundred are quite large in size. Clausell painted mostly on canvas but when circumstances prevented him from doing so, he was not above rendering works on wood and even cardboard. With few exceptions he painted landscapes, and seascapes. Almost never were there human figures or even much indication of any human presences. Landscape with Hut (above) is a modest exception. The style and palette are impressionist. The content is purely Mexican.

 

Clausell Study, Pino Suarez, Mexico 

The single exception to his penchant for remote coastal landscapes can be found in what some have called his "Sistine Chapel" of Impressionism--the barren walls of his rooftop studio in Pino Suarez, Mexico (above), which exhibit more experimentation and a wider variety of themes. These images depict members of his family, other artists, religious icons, nudes, and animals. There are elements related to Symbolism, showing the influence of artists from Paul Gauguin to Paul Sérusier. Female figures were sometimes portrayed in a negative light. These works have received less attention from both the public and critics, mostly because of their relative inaccessibility and (until recently) their poor condition. Clausell did not sign his paintings and rarely dated them, making cataloging and a chronology very difficult. Moreover, he did not consider himself a professional painter and was something of a recluse, not selling or promoting his work. In fact, he was often known to give away his paintings.

 

Self-portrait (the painter), 1910, Joaquin Clausell

With few exceptions, Clausell did not associate with contemporary Mexican artists. Instead he served as an art teacher at the “escuelas de aire libre” (free and open art classes given in parks and other public spaces) though he became a director of the art school in Iztacalco in 1930. It has only been in recent years that Clausell has been recognized as Mexico's most prominent Impressionist. Even though he existed on the fringes of the Mexican art scene during his lifetime, his work was noticed and praised by a number of well-known contemporaries. In an exhibition in 1921, his paintings caught the attention of the Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, who had just returned from Europe. Rivera later visited Clausell in his studio and proclaimed him to be the best of Mexico’s landscape artists as well as a “painter-poet” who expressed the natural beauty of the country. Clausell died in 1935 while on an outing with friends at the Lagos de Zempoala area south of Mexico City. He was walking on a hill near the lake when the ground gave way under his feet causing him to fall down an embankment. The resulting landslide covered and suffocated him.



































































 

Alson Clark

San Juan Capistrano, Mission cloisters, 1921, Alson Clark.

Today we tend to think in terms of an International Art World in which a few, longstanding, urban centers are dominated by a few longstanding art presences. New York City, Paris, London, Venice, and, arbitrarily, two or three more, tend to rule. They set trends, generate controversy, make headlines, foster careers, spark outrage, attract creative genius, and eye-popping lines of credit at a Sotheby's and Christie's. There's really not all that much new in all of this, only a shifting in focus. Before the 20th-century the so-called "international art world," being smaller, was much more sharply focused, primarily on Paris, London, and Amsterdam. Simply put, that's where the money was, and artists tend to congregate anywhere there's a vibrant art market. Of course, after WW II, all three of these urban centers (not to mention much of the rest of Europe) were in shambles. That left only New York City and later (to a lesser degree), Los Angeles.

Mission San Gabriel, Alson Clark, one of his favorite subjects.

In effect, the war turned the international art market upside-down. Whereas, around the turn of the century, the U.S. had long been seen by Europeans as something of a "stick-in-the-mud," backwater, art market; from the 1930s on, a flood of European artists and creative energy hit New York like a tsunami. Art that had been seen as an all-but-obscene outrage at New York's 1913 Armory Show, a generation later was suddenly winning cutting edge acceptance in chic SoHo galleries. There was no better example of this early 20th-century American reluctance to embrace Modern Art than in the case of French Impressionism. What Claude Monet and others painted in the 1860s took some thirty or forty years to gain wide economic acceptance in the U.S. where wealthy collectors were still enamored with Renaissance and Baroque art.

The Artist's Cottage, Alson Clark



Then Americans fell in love with Impressionism around 1900; about the time it was falling out of fashion in Paris. By that time, Monet was seen by American painters summering at Giverny as something of a demigod. Impressionism hit New York and the wealthy Northeast first, as seen in the work of Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, Edmund Charles Tarbell and Frank Weston Benson. However, New York is a notoriously fickle art world constantly yearning for the "next big thing." Impressionism moved westward, under the guise of William Wendt, Granville Redmond, Arthur Cane, Joseph Kleitsch, Armin Hansen, Jean Mannheim, John Marshall Gamble, Franz Bischoff, William Ritschel, Hanson Puthuff, Marion Wachtel, Jack Wilkinson Smith, and Guy Rose (to name way too many). However, one might argue that the most outstanding of them all, was an artist friend of Guy Rose named Alson Clark.
 

Notice the strange vehicle (upper-right) turned into an easel.

Alson Skinner Clark was born in Chicago; his father a prosperous commodities trader who provided his family an affluent lifestyle. Young Alson displayed art talent at an early age. He started taking evening classes at the Art Institute of Chicago at the age of eleven. The Clark family went on a world-wide tour lasting two full years, which also exposed the boy to European art and paintings. Clark moved on to the Art Students League of New York, the Académie Julian in Paris and the atelier of William Merritt Chase. He spent much of his early career working in Paris, France. During WW I Clark served in the U.S. Army as an aerial photographer. In 1920 Clark and his wife relocated to Pasadena, California. There he taught fine art at Occidental College.

Canal construction--a nearly unprecedented close
look at the mightiest engineering feat of the 20th-century. 

In the spring of 1913 the building of the Panama Canal inspired the Clarks to go to the Canal Zone. There, construction was nearing completion. Alson Clark had "connections" and he knew how to use them. As a result, he gained near total access to the construction site, labor trains, and workers. He was able to create numerous paintings in the brutal heat as he tried to capture on canvas the final construction phase of the canal and its railroad (above). By June of that year he had many paintings completed. Clark contacted John Trask, who was the Director of the Fine Arts section of the forthcoming Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. The director was so impressed he provided Clark room for a solo exhibition of eighteen paintings. This put Clark in the ranks of only a very few other American artists: Frank Duveneck, James McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and John Singer Sargent.

Rooftops, Paris, Alson Clark, painted during one of the
artist's many trips to the continent.

In addition to landscape paintings, Alson Clark painted murals for the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles, and the fire curtain of the Pasadena Playhouse, depicting a Spanish galleon in full sail. A group of murals completed in 1929 can still be seen at the former 1st Trust & Savings Bank in Pasadena. The murals consist of four panels standing approximately ten feet in height, each depicting a major southern California industry: oil drilling, citrus farming, the movies, and shipping. Unfortunately, try as I did, I could not locate images for these or any of Clark's mural works, all of which have long since been moved or destroyed.

Medora with Mirror, Alson Clark

 

Marie Bukowski

Iris-11, 2016, Marie Bukowski

One of the great delights in spending my retirement in cruising to various places around the world is not so much the ports themselves, but in getting there, and in particular, the wonderful people I meet along the way. A couple days ago we returned home from a seven-day cruise aboard Princess Cruise Line's Caribbean Princess. Except for a minor mishap or two (one of which I mentioned yesterday) it was an great Christmas leading to a Happy New Year (so far at least). Along the way, we twice had as a dinner companion Ms. Marie Bukowski, a fellow artist, who happens to hold the exalted position of Director of the Southern Illinois University School of Art and Design (Carbondale, IL). She was, in every way, a bubbly, friendly delight to talk with, even though my wife kept elbowing me reminding me that she likely didn't come on the cruise to "talk shop." Perhaps, but if that was the case, she hid it well. Personally, I find myself starved for the opportunity to do so with anyone so inclined, in that it so rarely happens. I love it when I encounter someone who knows more about art than I do.

 

With a smile like hers, she might have a second career
selling toothpaste.

This is where I usually delve into the intimate details of an artist youth. But in Marie's case I didn't really get the chance to ask, though I'm guessing, given her Pennsylvanian academic roots at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pennsylvania she was born somewhere within the confines of the Keystone state. As for when she was born, she hides that well, both figuratively and literally. I could find nothing definitive though it would seem to have been during the early 1970s. I noted she once entered a student art exhibit at my old alma mater, Ohio University, as early as 1992. Given the spelling of her name, Marie's parents seem to have been of Polish descent. She also speaks that language fluently along with a working familiarity with several other European tongues. She's represented by the Stowarzyszenie Miedzynarodowe Triennale Grafiki in Krakow, Poland, an important, tongue-twisting clue as to her heritage.

Iris-02, 2016, Marie Bukowski

Although Marie has majored in painting and drawing at various times, her real strength and chosen medium is printmaking. In general, I like her work, especially her recent Iris series (top and above). But I must also confess that most of it is somewhat "over my head" as to theme and conception. As the graph-like visual texture of her prints would suggest, Marie is something of a "rare bird" insofar as artist are concerned, exhibiting a hemispheric brain dominance far to the left of most such creative individuals. She actually employs (gasp) mathematics in creating her images! She notes that: "Printmaking is a process of testing differences. In the process of questioning distinctions, the mind, eye, and hand sometimes shift in and out of synchronization. Speculation, or the suspension of decision, leads below the surface of order into the ambiguity of conflicting perceptions. Printmaking, therefore, becomes a meditation on the meaning of certainty." I'll make no comment in that I'm tempted to say something "smart" which would likely be stupid, and just as likely to say something stupid in trying to sound smart.

Interstices-7, 2011, Marie Bukowski



Cortex-26, 2012-13, Marie Bukowski



Paracosm-10, 2014-16, Marie Bukowski,
another favorite of mine.

 

Pieter Claesz

Still-Life, Skull, and Writing Quill, 1628, Pieter Claesz

Every artist, writer, perhaps all of us, as we grow older, begin to contemplate the brevity of life. We use such phrases as "My, how times flies," or "I ain't as young as I used to be," or my personal favorite, "I'm older than I look," to hide our feelings, but still they linger, bubbling to the surface whenever we encounter a close brush with death. Over the years I've had two or three such incidents, one quite recently when, while vacationing in the Dominican Republic at a remote beach, resort. I almost drowned. I overestimated my lung power and underestimated the power of the surf. I ended up suffering the embarrassment of being taken back to our cruise ship in an ambulance. I don't know if I came closer to drowning or having a fatal heart attack, but for sure, it served as a wake-up call to the fact I'm no longer "the man I used to be." Claesz's 1628 Still-life, skull, and Writing Quill (above) strikes me as appropriate in my case.



Vanitas Still Life, 1625, Pieter Claesz.
How many symbols of death can you spot?

Though I've never delved into the subject before to any great length, at various times, I have dealt with a number of painters, usually Dutch, and usually from that country's 17th-century "Golden Age," who could be best categorized as "vanitas" painters. These have included artists from this era such as Maria Oosterwijck, David Bailly, the Spaniard, Juan de Valdes Leal, and a few others. They all vary to some degree in their approach, but all have in common a fascination with highly detailed still-lifes bearing highly detailed symbols of death. In some case, this fascination would go so far as to be deemed a preoccupation, perhaps even an obsession with the subject. One such painter was Pieter Claesz. I doubt that any other painter in the history of art has ever painted so many skulls.


Breakfast Still Life with Roemer, Meat Pie, Lemon, and Bread,
1640, Pieter Claesz

Pieter Claesz was born in Berchem, Belgium, near Antwerp around 1597. He joined the Guild of St. Luke in 1620, also the year he moved to Haarlem where his son, the landscape painter, Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem, was born. Claesz and Willem Claeszoon Heda, who also worked in Haarlem, were the most important exponents of the "ontbijt" or dinner piece (not to be confused with the somewhat more well-known Dutch breakfast pieces, above). They painted with subdued, fairly monochromatic palettes, employing a subtle handling of light and texture as their prime means of expression. Claesz generally chose more homely objects than did Heda, although his later work became more colorful and decorative. Claesz's still-lifes often suggest allegorical purposes, with skulls, short candles, spilled ink, etc. serving as reminders of human mortality. Between them, the two men founded a distinguished tradition of still life painting in Haarlem. By the way, it's awfully easy to confuse the work of these two artists, not just because of their similarities in color and style, but taking into account their names as well. I just made a correction to an earlier posting where I had them confused.

There's no indication as to whether either of these
images are self-portraits, but, in a manner of speaking,
the reflection in glass ball still-life (below) certainly is.

According to the records of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, Pieter Claesz tried to teach, his fourteen-year-old son, Nicolaes Berchem, to follow in his footsteps. But young Nicolaes appears to have preferred landscapes to rigors of still-life painting. Or perhaps, he simply disliked skulls. In any case, later, after a trip abroad, the boy turned his talent to music. However, Claesz had, in addition to his son, the pupils Evert van Aelst, Floris van Dyck, Christian Berentz, Floris van Schooten, and Jan Jansz Treck. Pieter Claesz came face to face with the brevity of life when he died in 1660 at the age of sixty-three.

Self-portrait from Vanitas Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball,
Pieter Claesz, 1628,

Still Life with Musical Instruments, 1623, Pieter Claesz

Copyright, Jim Lane

It's About Time, 1986, Jim Lane, the closest I've
ever come to a vanitas still-life.



Jason deCaires Taylor

Molinere Bay Coral Garden, Grenada, Vicissitudes (detail),
Jason deCaires Taylor

One of the brightest spots in the world of art today rests not on painting, or video, or computer generated images (CGI), but with the work of sculptors. There was a time about a hundred years ago that all sculptors came with mallet and chisels with which they attacked a block of stone or wood, or perhaps took on a mound of clay with their bare hands in fashioning a plaster mold for casting bronze. That all changed with Picasso and his assemblage sculptures. For the next several generations, sculpture largely departed from carving (the subtractive method) to slapping together unrelated objects and shapes in an additive method. As exciting as this era and the works that accompanied it may have been, sculpture went into a steep decline as other art media took the spotlight and the non-art world stamped it as "child's play." However, with the revival of figurative art in the 1970s, sculpture, in dozens of media, took on a new relevance. Jason deCaires Taylor was born about this time, in 1974. Today, still only a few years past forty, he is one of the better-known and more audacious sculptors in the world today.
 

Vicissitudes, Grenada (West Ind, Jason deCaires Taylor

Jason deCaires Taylor works under the sea to create long-lasting sculptural works to help marine life breathe. His Vicissitudes (above) located in the Molinere Bat Coral Garden, is one of his best and best-known works. In seeing the colorful detail (top) from the circular grouping of figures one might think Taylor merely suggests a shape cast in concrete, then allows the underwater sea-life to complete the work, adding color and texture was well as a greater depth of meaning from an environmental perspective. Moreover, for divers, they're also a startling revelation as to what can happen when man and the sea work together rather than at odds one with the other.

 

Taylor works with live models, plaster, and cast concrete. Heavy-duty "haulers" who help him move and place his works underwater.

Jason deCaires Taylor was born in Dover, Kent county, United Kingdom. Born and raised near the sea, one of the more "arty" areas of England, it seems only natural that Taylor should somehow manage to meld the two together. He studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts Institute of London. He graduated in 1998 with a degree in Sculpture and Ceramics. However, as often happens with young artists fresh out of the classroom, he ended up working outside his field of study, in Taylor's case, as a scuba diving instructor. While spending time teaching in the ocean's waters, Taylor also studied marine ecology. He had always envisioned his work in an outdoor space, so it was natural for Taylor to consider creating art in the ocean.

 

The process, from live model to cast concrete to heavily encrusted coral.

Taylor's sculptures are clean and smooth on the surface when first installed. From that point on, they act as a base for growing magnificent coral reefs. According to Taylor, reefs will develop quickly in tropical cities with warm water. some juvenile corals appear after six months. As time goes on, Taylor's pieces develop biological growths which redefine the underwater landscape. The sculptor uses pH neutral, high-density cement when creating his sculptures. This material is said to last hundreds of years, designed to sustain a reef. After installations, Taylor returns to his projects, to keep an eye on how well the sculptures are developing into reefs.
 

With each piece weighing several tons, moving and precisely arranging each piece is a delicate, major undertaking.

Above we see the delivery and setup of Taylor's Anthropocene (below).For those not familiar with the term, its the name a proposed era The Anthropocene is a proposed epoch that begins when human activities started to have a significant global impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems. Neither the International Commission on Stratigraphy nor the International Union of Geological Sciences has yet officially approved the term as a recognized subdivision of geological time. Without a doubt, Taylor's  Anthropocene is his most famous sculptuis one he titles Anthropocene (above) depicting what appears to be a female drowning victim desperately seeking to live by clawing her way inside and some illogical means of survival.

The Gardener of Hope, Jason deCaires Taylor, as it has evolved.

Taylor integrates his skills as a conservationist, underwater photographer, and scuba diver to produce unique installations that encourage the growth of corals and marine life. His early work includes Vicissitudes, Grace Reef, The Lost Correspondent and The Unstill Life. All are located in the world´s first public underwater sculpture park in Molinere Bay, Grenada, West Indies, commissioned in 2006. More recently his most ambitious project to date is the creation of the world's largest underwater sculpture museum, MUSA, situated off the coast of Cancun and the western coast of Isla Mujeres. Works in the museum include Hombre en llamas (Man on Fire), La Jardinera de la Esperanza (The Gardener of Hope, above), El Colecionista de los Sueños (The Dream Collector, below) and La Evolución Silenciosa (The Silent Evolution.)

 

The Dream Collector, Jason deCaires Taylor

Set in shallow water, it is easy to snorkel and free-dive to swim among the concrete multitude, which seem to be frozen in a slice of life. The higher purpose of Taylor's sculptural works is to create an artificial reef. The process is well underway, with corals and sponges already beginning to thrive, and  schools of reef fish swirling among the statues, where they can escape larger predators.

Man on Fire, Jason deCaires Taylor

Man on Fire (above), was cast from a local fisherman. It stands facing the current with fragments of implanted fire coral in his head and torso. Although it doesn't look like much now, in a few years, as the colorful fire coral "ignites" it will begin to resemble it's title.

Inertia, Jason deCaires Taylor

So far, the artist has created over 900 sculptures, each one telling a different story and highlighting different issues. Whether it is a colony of people standing still, such as Silent Evolution (below), or a man sitting on a couch eating a hamburger while watching television--Inertia (above), Taylor has integrated characteristics of our current society underwater—including actual people. Real people come to his studio and we take a mold to them.



Silent Evolution, Jason deCaires Taylor

The Silent Evolution (above) is Taylor's largest underwater collection of art (perhaps the largest in the world). It was installed in Cancun, Mexico's  Museo Subacuático de Arte in November  of 2010 and consists of 450 life-size cement people standing side by side on a barren patch of sand. The sculptures evoke both contemporary and historical narratives, forming building blocks which develop into a complex artificial reef for aquatic life to inhabit While the appearance of the collection underwater is of a crowd of people, from a distance it take the shape of an eye. The collection occupies over 420 square metres of ocean floor. Its location was chosen to redirect visitors away from nearby natural reefs, allowing them a chance to opportunity to regenerate.

Taylor's updating of Gericault's tragic masterpiece.

One of  Taylor's most striking pieces involves his rendition of Theodore Gericault's 1818 masterpiece, Raft of the Medusa (above). Taylor's figures reflect Gericault's poses and composition peopled with refugees in an inflatable boat (above). The relationship between the two works is as uncanny as it is haunting. The fact that it rests on the bottom of the ocean adds yet another element of if irony and mystery to the work.

The Un-Still-Life, Jason deCaires Taylor. The produce, and the process

Taylor’s art is unlike any other. For lack of a better phrase, one might term it a paradox of creation, constructed to be assimilated by the ocean and transformed from inert objects into living, breathing, coral reefs, portraying human intervention as both positive and life-encouraging. Numerous publications and documentaries have featured his extraordinary work, including the BBC, CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, Vogue, New Scientist and the Discovery Channel, yet nothing can quite do justice to the ephemeral nature of Taylor's art. Each visit to one of his sites is both unique and subject to the dynamic, fluctuating environment of the ocean. Taylor is currently based in Lanzarote part of the Canary Islands working on a major new underwater museum for the Atlantic Ocean.

Unfortunately, photographing Taylor's work
is not this simple.