 |
| "Structure": drawing, photo, collage, digital. |
Want music?
Click: Jada Monroe, Habit.
2GN2S
Less than half an hour drive from my home is the beautiful California Scenario garden in Costa Mesa, CA. I discovered this treasure over ten years ago and visited with a friend. The art is by Isamu Noguchi, a California native whom many critics consider to be America's leading sculptor. I was so surprised to see it tucked in between skyscrapers and commercial garages. Few Orange County residents know it exists.
His creation is a relatively small 1.6 acre collection of sculpture and plantings called California Scenario, an abstract, condensed vision of the Golden State. A legacy from Isamu Noguchi to his birthplace, made possible by Henry Segerstrom, then owner of Mount Coast Plaza and much of the surrounding land.
As you walk through this urban space, which is open and free to the public from 8 am to midnight, you might notice six distinct aspects of California. The names are Noguchi's words, but titles don't appear on the images. Water Source is a stark 30-foot triangular form of sandstone, suggestion the mountainous water fountain that nourishes life in the state. This sandstone sculpture includes its own miniature cascading waterfalls, providing sound, movement and life-giving potential. The water leaves the mountains and weaves through the landscape before disappearing into the mitered triangular form of white granite, called Water Use.
As you walk along the stream, a symmetrical, circular mound, The Desert Land, suggests the stark beauty of California's deserts. The plants here are native, beaver tail and barrel cactus, ocotillo and agave. Balancing the desert area is a meadow of wildflowers and grasses, bordered by towering redwood trees that rise from a mound of earth with a Sierra granite pathway and park bench .This area is called The Forest Walk. The harnessing of natural forces is suggested in the area, Land Use, where an eight foot knoll with a white Sierra granite form, surrounded by honeysuckle. A stainless steel cone on a base of broken-face Rockville granite, termed The Energy Fountain, for California's dynamic productivity.
One of my favorites, "The Spirit of the Lima Bean", a sculpture containing fifteen, rounded, bronze-colored granite rocks, cut by Noguchi and fitted precisely together. They salute the half century of agricultural use, farmed on this very land.
From CA Interstate 405 (San Diego Freeway) to Costa Mesa, and exit east at Bristol Street, then turn right on Anton, and right again on Park Center Drive, which borders the sculpture garden. For further information on the sculpture garden, contact South Coast Plaza Town Center, (714) 435-2000
Isamu Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi was born in 1904 in Los Angeles to an American mother and a Japanese poet father who abandoned the family before he was born. As a child, he moved to Japan, but never truly felt accepted there either.
At 13, his mother sent him alone to America for school. He later called it his first experience of exile.
He first studied medicine, but left it for sculpture. Even his mentor, Gutzon Borglum, told him he would never succeed. Still, Noguchi kept going. In Paris, he worked under Constantin Brâncuși and began searching for pure form in sculpture.
During Attack on Pearl Harbor, he voluntarily entered an internment camp in Arizona to support imprisoned Japanese Americans, only to find himself trapped there too.
After the war, he devoted himself to stone sculpture, creating gardens, fountains, and public works across the world. Near the end of his life, a child invited him to climb inside one of his sculptures. When he came out, he was crying.
He died in 1988, after spending decades turning stone into something deeply human. "If you spend your whole life searching for where you belong… what if the search itself becomes your home?"
Just because ...
 |
| Blue Waxbills |
Wednesday's Smiles ...
Hoping you see all the good things in your day.
