Sunday 15 January 2012

newsfromgloucestershire201201

Lynn Chadwick Sculpture Park is in the grounds of a medieval and Tudor manor house with notable nineteenth-century additions in the parish of Bisley, near Stroud, in Gloucestershire, England. The grounds include a fine group of medieval outbuildings dating from the late-14th century. It was altered in the 16th century, and altered and enlarged in 1809 by Sir Jeffry Wyatville. Further additions were made in 1876 by R H Wyatt.
In 1959, it was purchased by the Modernist British sculptor, Lynn Chadwick (1914–2003), whose expressionistic, figurative works in welded iron and bronze earned him international acclaim. Chadwick restored the house and died there on April 25, 2003, since when his heirs have put forward proposals to open to the public an area of the park in order to create a permanent display for his sculpture collection.

“Although Chadwick had certain reservations about showing sculpture in completely natural surroundings, he had quite early on in his career at Lypiatt Park shown some of his work against the stone walls of his house or in a garden setting. (…) Nevertheless, it still came as a slight surprise when, in early 1988, he acquired a magnificent stretch of wooden hillside and rough pasture, the Toadsmoor Valley, which adjoined Lypiatt. (…) After clearing scrub and cleaning out streams, he began placing sculptures in carefully chosen sites in the valley so as to show off their qualities against, say, the skyline or a sward of grass, where the background would remain relatively unchanging, unlike, for example, a screen of trees which would move in the wind or, in winter, present a busy patter of bare branches. He continue with this work up to the late 1990s and just as the gardens at Lypiatt have matured under his care, so too has the Toadsmoor Valley become alive with his sculptures. (…)
Many years ago, Chadwick broadcast a talk on the BBC Home Service, 'A Sculptor and His Public', in which he expressed his feelings about art, patronage, and art education in our schools. Some of his comments remain valid today, (…)


«To begin with, let me say that a sculptor has no public in the ordinary sense of the word. When I produce something, I hope that someone, some individual will buy it. Public interest or disinterest has no direct impact on me. For the persons who do buy my work are not concerned about how popular it is. Theirs is a personal choice. There are, of course, other people who see my work in public exhibitions, and how form some sort of opinion and can therefore collectively be called a public. But there is no way of gauging their opinion…
It is a great joy to have a visitor who feels for sculpture; who does not fear his own reaction; who knows that appreciation is not in the first place intellectual criticism but enjoyment through the senses; who understand that sculpture, though it may makes its literary allusions, has a separate identity, is an expression in form and mass and is vital by reason of what it is...
It seems to me that art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark, caught by the imagination and translated by the artist's ability and skill into painting, poetry, sometimes music. But whatever the final shape, the force behind it is, as the man said of peace, indivisible. When we philosophise upon this force, we lose sight of it. The intellect alone is still too clumsy to grasp it.»

… a sense of mass, order and design is inherent in architecture and, by extension, in sculpture. These are qualities found in Chadwick's [naturalistic figurative] sculpture. There is movement, too …”

in Lynn Chadwick, by Dennis Farr (2003, Tate Publishing)

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