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..
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.
