Hogpen Hill #1: sculpture installed August 2006
We completed the installation of Hogpen Hill #1 in August 2006.
The piece is stainless steel, 24 feet high, with a weight of about 4,900 pounds.
It was sketched out and mostly constructed during the spring of 2005, then temporarily installed and studied during the next 10 months, and then positioned in its final location. The final location is called Cove 2, which is surrounded by trees and a stone embankment.
(Millstone 8 was installed in nearby Cove 1.) Cove 2 required several months preparation: cleaning up, regrading, contouring, and planting grass.
The gray and rainy weather provided a good soft light. Photographs with the butter light of sunrise and sunset will provide very different views, since the sculpture borrows light.
A history of constructing the piece is at our thread The Levitating Sculpture (and also sculpture theory and practice).
As usual Zerlina (left) and Anna provide scale information; Hogpen Hill #1 is approximately 9 Golden Retrievers tall.
In this picture with the dogs, a Necker Illusion is generated by reading the center vertical of the piece as either coming forward or receding.
Immediately above, 4 images of Hogpen Hill #1 with scattered clouds and filtered sunlight, photographed today. The last image in the sequence was made with a 300mm lens, a long lens often used in bird photography, in order to blur the trees in the immediate background.
I recall that such blurring, which here looks like dappled light, is called “boca” (sp?), but my search didn’t turn up the definition.
I belive the term is “bokeh”
There’s a good explanation on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh
B O K E H bokeh BOKEH b o k e h
Thank you. There is almost always someone at this board who can answer any question!
I regret my spelling lapse, as complex searches (boca photography macro -“boca -raton”-“boca -grande”) turned up, of course, nothing.
The quality of bokeh varies in the Wikipedia reference pictures. The 105mm Nikon Micro (everyone else says “macro,” as in a large-scale map = big houses) usually produces good bokeh.
Bokeh is not that far in visual effect from our double-action grindings on the stainless steel, where we’re looking for neutral variation that responds gently to the environmental light, as in the second picture from the bottom in the pictures immediately above.
This year at the HOW Design Conference the opening speaker was juggler Michael Moschen; and his work reminded me very much of your sculptures. Go to http://michaelmoschen.com/press.html and you can see some of his videos.
Source: Brian Boucher, “Two Serras for California,” Art in America, 2006, 39.
Photos: Jebb Harris, The Orange County Register
Source: Richard Chang, “Richard Serra: Making an artistic connection,” Orange County Register, April 23, 2006.
Our land is named on maps as “Hogpen Hill,” and since we’re also doing some farming, we call the place “Hogpen Hill Farms.”
I was please to learn that Henry Moore’s 70-acre estate where he lived and worked for 45 years is called “Hoglands,” presumably after its original use.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,2091477,00.html
http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/matrix_engine/content.php?page_id=4416&shop=4363