Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Went with GH and SH to Governor's Island yesterday. We walked along the promenade to Picnic Point, where we had lunch at Eva's. Pulled pork sandwich, corn on the cob, blueberry pie, Shiraz, yum. We looked directly into the distant face of the Statue of Liberty, through the legs of Mark di Suvero's giant steel sculptures. The Sculptors Guild was holding an exhibition titled "Process" in one of the old four-storeyed buldings. I liked Elaine Lorenz's organic-looking sculpture of fiberglass and resin. Jeremy Comins's work also caught and held my eyes. The wooden frame hung on the wall reminded me of homely shelf displays and of a box of children's blocks. The single figure sitting and clutching his knees looked quite sad. The work had a strange mixture of domesticity and isolation. We sat down on a lawn, under another di Suvero piece, and chatted and read the papers desultorily. The New York Times told the history of New York City through 50 objects, ...

Last Saturday, VM and JF drove GH and I to Storm King. We first took a long hike on the mountain, and then made our way to the Art Center. The grounds of the sculpture center were beautifully landscaped. The museum building overlooked the meadows to the North-west and the North woods. To the south was the leisurely undulating South Fields where gentle knolls raised monumental works like Mark Di Suvero's Pyramidian (1987/88) against a background of sky, and a mirror-clear serpentine pond provided the perfect playground for Roy Lichtenstein's Mermaid (1994). Yellow-brown grasses that came up to the knee were sculptured for contrast to the green fields. At the very end of the South Fields was the highlight of the walk for me: Maya Lin's Storm King Wavefield (2007-08). The artist who designed the darkly shiny Vietnam War Memorial worked here with mounds of earth. The grassy mounds did not look very special when we walked past them, though they were taller than we were and qui...