Jonathan and His Pathway of Hope to Heaven High-reaching sculpture by Ogunquit artist Borofsky featured at NYC landmark

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Each year, the Public Art Fund of New York City displays a large work in the open-air pavilion of Rockefeller Center in the heart of midtown Manhattan. Jeff Koons’ puppy topiary, Louise Bourgeois’ bronze spiders and Takashi Murakami’s balloons were seen in past years by hundreds of thousands of people passing through the plaza each day. This year, Jonathan Borofsky, an artist who lives in Ogunquit, was asked to erect his 100-foot sculpture “Walking to the Sky” in Rockefeller Plaza. It depicts seven life-size human figures walking along the stainless steel pole, as three other figures watch from below. The work, which will be in New York City through Oct. 18, has won tremendous popular praise for its ambition, hopefulness and accessible messages of hope and aspiration.

For Borofsky, the work is an interpretation of stories his father used to tell him about a friendly giant who lived in the sky. Surely, Borofsky, who is from Brookline, Mass., heard some of those stories during summers spent in Maine, where Borofsky’s parents – his father was a musician and his mother was an architect and painter – lived for many years. In 1990, he settled in Ogunquit with his wife Frances Bisson, a former dancer who teaches French at Wells High School.

Borofsky’s career has been long and prestigious. He graduated from Carnegie-Mellon and Yale universities before firmly establishing himself in the international art scene. His work is featured in permanent indoor collections and outdoor arenas throughout the world, sometimes inciting controversy but always addressing some aspect of the human condition. Borofsky designs his large sculptures in a studio in Wells and then has them built in a factory in Los Angeles. Whether in airports, banks, college campuses or open-air museums, the works often reflect interpretations of Borofsky’s dreams or philosophical inquiries.

When I spoke to the artist in mid-September, he had been interviewed by “The Today Show,” People magazine and The New York Times. Years ago, he told me, he wouldn’t have been interested in talking to the press so widely, but he was enjoying his piece’s popularity, and he was happy that its message was reaching a large audience. Borofsky and I spoke three times. He was always pleasant, personable and generous with his time and thoughts. When one interview ran over the allotted time, he asked me to call him again that evening. He is a man driven by curiosity -about his own time and meaning on this earth and about the connectedness of all living things. Below are excerpts from our conversations.

Alicia Anstead: You have installations all over the world. What does having “Walking to the Sky” in New York City mean to you?

Jonathan Borofsky: After college, I went straight to New York City as a place a young artist should go to take on the art world and see what it’s about. I stayed there for 11 years before moving to Los Angeles. So it’s like a return to New York. Also as a child I did a little skating on that Rockefeller skating rink with my parents on one or two visits.

Anstead: You go back to a New York City that is in some profound way damaged, and your work, as I perceive it, is a very hopeful symbol. I know you’ve said it’s not particularly about the tragic events of Sept. 11, but you must feel good about bringing something so straightforwardly beautiful and hopeful to a city that doesn’t always have those associations these days.

Borofsky: This piece has been developed as an idea from my childhood, and I made two versions of it in the early ’90s in Europe. But at the same time I can’t divide the piece from where New York is at the moment, you’re correct. I think about my work as I get older, and it’s always been about humanity and the human condition and how the human mind works. I haven’t been very focused on work that just displays or symbolizes the negativity of our culture.

Anstead: Even for all its largeness and, if you’ll pardon the phrase, “coldness” of the material, your work seems very passionate and sensual.

Borofsky: It’s really pretty much a symbol. But the materials are what they are: fiberglass and steel, as opposed to natural material of stone and wood, which are more traditional. It’s hard to get a 100-foot piece with a strong idea made in six months and moved from California and into New York and then out of New York a month and a half later. This is really contemporary material for contemporary times.

Anstead: Each of the two original “Walking” sculptures feature a single walker. Why did you decide to add more people?

Borofsky: The original idea was a man walking to the sky [in Kassel, Germany]. That was my first visualization and realization of the idea from childhood, of humanity rising up. I carved it in clay, and we cast it in fiberglass. It was really me as everybody, as humanity in a single figure. [For the second sculpture, in Strasbourg, France,] I suggested doing a woman walking to the sky. I always had it in my mind that someday I would like to do an actual symbolic reference to everybody. I just wondered if it would be as strong as a single figure, which had that archetypal humanity about it. The piece was always in my mind to do and suddenly it became the right moment to do it. That’s the way all my public work goes.

Anstead: How did this one come about?

Borofsky: Tom Eccles, the head of the Public Art Fund, and I started focusing in on this idea a couple of years ago. That Rockefeller center is in incredibly unique place. It’s almost a square open space surrounded by extremely tall buildings with a sky hole sort of in the center. It’s a wonderful spot to begin thinking about a piece that reaches up right in to the middle of that square opening to the sky.

Anstead: I’m not sure you can any longer put something that goes 100 feet into the sky in New York City without it having some echo of the World Trade Center towers.

Borofsky: I try to make work that deals in the broadest sense with humanity and its hopes and its goals and struggles. I tend to pull back if my piece gets narrowed down to any particular struggle of a unique group of people. I just want to clarify that the piece as an idea of humanity rising up into the future with balance with hope – that’s the bigger idea – but it is also very applicable to New York as a city right now. So yes, I can’t deny the connection but the fact is that this piece could stand in Iran, or in Africa or in Hawaii, and mean something about all of us, not just New Yorkers, not just Americans, but all of us.

Anstead: Tell me about your childhood visits to Maine.

Borofsky: I came every summer to Maine since I was a year old, and that was 60 years ago. This was the place my parents found by accident, and we started coming back. By the time I was 8, I actually had my first oil painting lesson in Ogunquit. I had a studio here for the whole summer when I was 19. The people who rented us our house gave me a barn up in the woods, and I did a lot of welding there. I came back every summer for a few weeks to visit my folks. Around 1990, I moved back here.

Anstead: Why Maine?

Borofsky: My wife at the time was from Sweden and she was missing some of the cold weather. I was missing the temperature change and the changing seasons. My parents were around 80 when I moved back here. I’m an only child, and I had this feeling that it was important that I take them through the last years.

Anstead: How has your life in Maine influenced your artwork, if at all?

Borofsky: When you choose a place to live, it has to do with the time of your life that you are in. I spent 11 years in New York City and another 13 in Los Angeles. It was time at around age 49 or 50 to move here. The best influences are nature and living in a wide, opened quiet peaceful space. But I also needed to get away from any semblance of the art world I was involved with, which was the big art world of the United States, Europe and Asia. It’s very competitive. There are a lot of people vying for space and time, and I just needed to get to a place away where I could regenerate what I thought would be new ideas because I thought I had pretty much run my course in the ’70s and ’80s. I had gallery shows and large museum shows, but it came to a point where I felt I had run a cycle. I could start that cycle up again and run another round, but at the same time I was getting very enthusiastic about offers to do public sculptures. It sounds like retirement but it wasn’t so much retirement as it was needing a much more isolated and peaceful place to germinate new ideas.

Anstead: Speaking of peaceful, taking in “Walking to the Sky” as a viewer feels like a silent experience. I have not seen it in person, but certainly, the photographs struck me in a very quiet way.

Borofsky: If the image is strong enough, it stops you dead in your thought processes for a moment. You go: ‘What the heck it that?’ Those are the words but you’re not saying them. Some of my pieces have that; some of them don’t. You could shock anybody into saying that by doing something really weird. But that doesn’t make it good. Hopefully ‘What the heck is that?’ is coupled with feelings that come into the person. The silent part? That’s reflecting the search.

Anstead: I think people get confused by art that is created in the mind of one person and then built by another person. Can you explain that process?

Borofsky: It’s my ideas, my vision, my feelings, my poetry, and it is fabricated by somebody else once it gets into a scale beyond a one-person endeavor. Once you start building a 50-foot tall steel structure, you don’t do that alone. When I am doing big, public, outdoor sculptures, the factory become my fabricator … I work very much like an architect when I do the big sculptures because architects have the same creative process. They have these visions for large objects, but they don’t build them.

Anstead: It’s challenging to think outside of tradition: an artist away from the easel.

Borofsky: Yeah, van Gogh is still standing there painting his paintings.

Anstead: But it brings up an interesting question about the moment art is created.

Borofsky: It certainly does. It goes right into the heart of the creator. Feelings come out of my heart. Then those feelings start to get translated into a few words, if I am lucky. They also get translated into a pictorial form because that’s the kind of form I work in.

Anstead: People in the street see your work as they go to work or have lunch. When you have outdoor art, everybody’s a critic. How do you feel about that? I’m thinking in particular of Baltimore where your ‘Male/Female’ piece was hotly debated by the public and critics.

Borofsky: Everybody would love to be loved by everybody. Down deep we like to feel we are appreciated. So it’s a bit challenging when certain people say: ‘I hate this.’ And they don’t just say: ‘I hate this.’ They say: ‘I hate this sh -. It’s crap. Who gave you the right to make this?’ They are so angry. ‘Male/Female’ is a tough piece because it deals with philosophical ideas that maybe half the people there aren’t ready to think about or discuss or don’t care to discuss, which is how to find a balance in humanity with both male and female, and I don’t just mean women’s rights. I mean two parts coming together in life to form a greater energy. It is a challenging piece. This piece in New York is probably more people friendly.

Anstead: Do you have any sculptures in Maine?

Borofsky: No, I’ve been approached once or twice, but unfortunately my pieces are rather expensive to make. The piece in Baltimore just to fabricate costs – I forget now, but something like $400,000. It’s not something a state like Maine would be ready to deal with. My commissions come from large companies, billion dollar companies, and for them $500,000 is a drop in the bucket.

Anstead: You’ve spoken about wanting to make life better for yourself and others through your art. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that art and beauty, our most powerful symbols of connection are often the first things to be questioned or cut in hard times? Can you say how art makes our lives better when the world sometimes feels as if it has been turned on its head?

Borofsky: It’s a tough question. I wonder myself.

Anstead: When times get hard, does art count?

Borofsky: The most important thing is you feed you family, pay your medical bills and pay for the roof over your head. That’s what drives people. Then, if there’s extra time and money, you can begin to appreciate the finer things that life could and can offer you. That’s where artistic thought and philosophical thought become a potential experience for you, but you have to be taught to appreciate this experience from a young age, and you have to have the free time and the free thought to approach it. Art tries to answer with symbols the deepest feelings that are going on inside a person, and no other field does that.

Anstead: You seem to have a tremendous capacity for compassion. Where does that comes from?

Borofsky: I carry around with me a feeling of connection, that we are all connected, everything is connected. Not just human beings. All life. Teeming on this earth. The feeling I have is a good feeling. It’s just wondrous. But that feeling gets attacked every day by [the news of] X number of people killed here, two planes fly into a building and kill 3,000 people, somebody down the street shoots somebody else. My purity of how wondrous this planet is gets attacked every day with things I don’t want to hear. I do have to find a way to accept it all as part of this process. But where I got it from, I can’t say.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.