Introducing... Jon Vogler

Si: Hi Jon, welcome to the Stations exhibition blog!

The story of how you found your way into Art is a fascinating one - not least because you started out in engineering...

Jon: It actually started some sixty years ago.  One of my aunts was a painter who took up sculpture.  I asked her what art was about and she showed me a picture of Van Gogh's "Chair" and said "That is the essence of a chair".    When I was at university I discovered that the girl I was in love with was not very interested in wind tunnels and supersonic aerodynamics but was very willing to go and look at art with me.

We went to a talk about Picasso's Guernica in Bristol Art Gallery.  This evidently worked, because she became my wife and we have been visiting art galleries together ever since.  However I was certain I had no ability as an artist myself. 

Si: 'Guernica' certainly is an amazing painting and a very stark exploration of the horrors of war. Great choice for a first date, Jon - heh heh!

Meanwhile, I'm interested that you say that you felt that you had no artistic ability at the time. 

Because I would have thought that your engineering work would have required you to be quite creative, and that many of the skills that you used in that line of work are actually quite relevant to the making of art...

Jon: Engineering is wonderfully creative - I was site engineer on the main turbines for the Niger Dam.  To stop the River Niger in its tracks, and walk on the river bed where nobody had ever walked before, was an extraordinary experience.   But it is different from art in that all your choices are rational; either you calculate or else you draw on your past experience.  When I started art classes they had me drawing on a big sheet of paper on the floor with a long withy stick.  I complained "I am not in control" and all the girls in the class laughed and said "That's right!  This is art not engineering!"

Si: And now you're studying for an MA in sculpture... can you tell us a bit about that?

Jon: As an engineer I wanted to know how things worked and how a good machine differed from a bad one.  During fifty years of looking at art I have wanted to know what made one picture, or one sculpture, better than another.   And, of course, how to make my own sculptures "good".   So the MA course is called "Contemporary art practice" - we continue with our own practice and consider it critically as we go along, with input from our tutors, from fellow students and, from time to time, from the public when we exhibit.   It is not always a comfortable process and that is why it is so valuable; all your cherished beliefs and preferences get challenged.

Si: I wanted to ask you about your garden – it’s a lovely space. In an earlier post I was talking with Phill Hopkins about his studio/shed, and the importance of that place to him and his work. 

I wonder if your garden has a similar significance for you and your creative practice?

Jon: Not really.  The current fashion for a man to have his shed to me speaks of a retreat, a corner from which the hostile world is excluded.  Our garden - Jill my wife is the green-fingered one, who produces all the lushness and colour - is an open place that invites the world to come in.  In my MA dissertation, on the subject of sculpture in private gardens, I recalled three Pakistani men who came to assist a courier collect some heavy objects.  They asked me about two stone texts near the front gate - one from Blake's Songs of Innocence and one from Paradise Lost.  I rejoiced afterwards that these simple pieces of art had prompted three Muslims to enquire and learn a little from two of the greatest Christian poets of all time. Yet those men had probably never been into a formal art gallery.

Si: That idea of  Art being there for everyone, and of open spaces being available and accessible brings me neatly round to one final thing that I wanted to ask you about - your work with the Friends of Roundhay Park, for which you were recently awarded the British Empire Medal..

Jon:  There is a great similarity between making a sculpture and organising a working party and, indeed, with installing a turbine in a dam.   First you have to visualise; then you plan - tools, materials, work areas, special skill requirements and, always, co-ordination with others who are involved.   Then comes the execution; the part I most enjoy, when you are in contact with the material, whether it is wax for a casting or tree poles to be cut into sections to surface a muddy path or huge cyclindrical steel parts to be welded together.  Each material has its own special feel, its own resistance to cutting or bending, its own surface texture that needs smoothing or grinding or just leaving as nature created it.   Finally, as you get older (and I am 76) there is the challenge to overcome the body's progressive dilapidation; to use the experience gained over a lifetime as a substitute for strength and stamina and acuteness of eyesight.  

I hate it when art galleries prohibit people from touching sculpture.   In my garden I want everyone to touch everything; to run their hands over the curves and their fingers across the texture. I have a granite elephant in the garden, the work of a giant Scotsman  called Ronnie Rae, and my most acute pleasure is to see small children climb up it and jump off over the head.   Even better, my grandchildren got in the habit of washing it, four of them, after pinching all the brushes from the broom cupboard.   Ronnie says the granite is three million years old and it is certainly so hard they can do it no damage.   So my hope is that their intimate encounter with a piece of sculpture, the feel of it under their hands and bodies, will remain with them and enrich them all their lives.

You can see more of Jon's work and explore his garden during the Roundhay Open Studios event on April 26th.