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A poolside chat with sculptor J. Seward Johnson
And he is a bit of an imp; a man with a keen sense of humor and playfulness that he exhibits through his work, and a man who loves to tell funny stories. Johnson made his first life-size sculpture in 1968 called "Stainless Girl" that is made of steel. "I didn't think I was an artist. I'd been fired from my family's company and I applied to art school and they wouldn't accept me," he began, sitting in the shade of an umbrella beside his Hulbert Avenue pool. "The company casting the first piece asked if they could enter it in a competition, and it won the art prize and the grand prize out of 11,000 other entries from all over the world. It was wild."
"I realized I could cut out Styrofoam and cast it without welding. I left before the class was over. All I needed to know was Styrofoam. It gave me a life where I didn't have a life," he said, adding that he is dyslexic and never graduated from college. Johnson started to create and turn out many pieces, but his father asked him to take over an oceanographic institution in Florida, and Johnson pretty much set aside his art to build that institution into one of the world's three largest. Once it rose to a level that satisfied Johnson, he turned it over to a vice-admiral and in 2004 returned to his sculptures more full time.
His personal favorites are "King Lear," inspired by Lear's and Johnson's father's comparable life plights; "The Nature of Obsession," based on Vermeer's painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Awakening," a symbolic and dramatic creation of his own that depicts a man's head emerging from the ground with one of his arms reaching out and upward. "It's where something ends up that has a real resonance in me, that means the most to me," he said of his favorite pieces. "Sometimes something catches fire in the process that is so meaningful that it's worth it. 'The Awakening' would be 70 feet long if he was all there. It's a metaphor for the awakening of man or a giant who's waking up and he's hungry as hell so you'd better watch out. I got calls from China saying it's in their mythology."
He also crafted a sculpture from the famous photo of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up, only Johnson's latest version will stand 25 feet high. "So you don't have to bend down to look up her skirt," he said with a laugh. He became widely recognized after he sculpted the "Newspaper Reader," which he donated to the town of Princeton, N.J. He said at a point in time his trustees insisted he give money to the Nixon presidential campaign. After the Watergate scandal, Johnson was frustrated with the man and tried in vain to have his funding returned. He had the last word by altering the cast newspaper's headline to read "Nixon resigns" for all to see. Johnson also used to find trays at junk shops and painted the trays with scenes that were meaningful to him, but stopped doing that about a year ago because he is so intent on his sculptures. In 1971, Johnson opened the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey, a technical school of sculpture where he used to have a foundry and which he now uses for his modeling and finish work. He does the metal casting these days in China, Thailand and Poland because it costs less for labor in those countries. The process to complete one of Johnson's large and sometimes mammoth pieces can take a year. He begins with an 18-inch maquette, which in French means doll. Next, he sculpts a life size model in the nude, made of plastiline, then a mold is made of that and a plaster cast is created. Real clothes are fit on the nude cast by a seamstress and a polyester resin is applied to the clothing. Johnson makes a rubber mold of the clothed version and from that he casts a wax form. A ceramic shell mold is poured over the wax after the wax form is cut into pieces. Molten metal is then poured into the ceramic shell mold, and as the wax melts it leaves an empty space the metal fills. Finally, the metal parts are welded together, the weld imperfections are removed and the sculpture is ready to be painted. Johnson said some painting is done by assistants, but he performs all the finishing touches. "I do the fun part," he said. "They paint the dungaree color and then I age the dungarees out. I try to make it as real as how you see somebody." Johnson said he goes as far as to make molds of hands so that actual finger prints appear on the piece. "The only thing I don't mold is the face," he said. "The faces are sculpted." Johnson said he once was a guest on Jay Leno's late night show and Leno tried to get him to talk about how he does his work. In his typical style of humor, Johnson told Leno: "I have a team ready and when I see someone [I want to use] they grab him when he smiles, we pour molten metal down his throat and we've got him. He screams a little bit, but it's over very quickly." His current projects are sculptures called "The Silence," an image of Jesus with his hand over his mouth that was inspired by a Redon painting and "The Scream," based on Munch's famous painting, which is the opposite of silence. They will become a two-part installation at the ends of a building in his park with the center depicting "The Chamber of Internal Dialogue" and containing a psychiatrist's couch. "It's a crazy one," said Johnson. "All of these things are to take you out of yourself," he explained. "All of the park is intuitively driven and theatrically framed. In the future, more and more I think art is going to take the place of religion. I love going into a church and being enveloped in that atmosphere, but I think art can do that too, in different ways." I |
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