Seed - Johnston, Barry Woods

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Résumé :
The Seed journeys into the deepest heart and soul of one artist facing the massive paranoia of injustice, economic free-fall, unimaginable chaos, and unsurvivable global war. New towers of Babel eclipse the culture and spirituality of the everyday everyman into depravity and dysfunction. But like his colossal Shakespearean portraits poised on the precipice of cataclysmic conquest, the towers crumble in Johnston's modest belief that truth and justice will prevail. By giving his subjects the dignity of art, Johnston advocates for the clarity and wonder of hand-tooled sculpture, the timeless industry of a master artist working in his studio by hand, on a human scale. He sows within himself and his spectators a yearning for the universal human value of labor, the work of art, the dignity of labor, and labor as art.

Biographie:
After graduating in architecture from Georgia Institute of Technology, studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and National Academy of Design, and serving in Vietnam in 1968 as a Combat Artist, I pursued European methods of art and architecture, living in Florence, Italy, between 1970 and 1972 and in Pietrasanta, Italy, at the Tommasi Foundry between 1985 to 1988. I established a studio in Washington, D.C. for seventeen years, and finally settled into my present studio in Baltimore, MD. As a practicing sculptor for over fifty years and an architectural designer, my primary focus has been on humanity. My sculptures are light and lively while complimenting their architectural setting. I seek to visualize fundamental emotions in three dimensions and breathe life into them. While adding levity, movement, and humanity, my designs are derived from abstract forms symbolically embodying the overall vision. I break down my sculptural visions into the most fundamental abstract shapes - circles, triangles, and squares, allowing those images to emerge as found in nature. I then integrate that abstraction into a realistic statement, seeking to stir universal feelings in others.