Meditation Dancer by Jay Lagemann
Jay Lagemann

Jay Lagemann has been making sculpture ever since he started coming to the Vineyard in 1950. The land around his house and studio in Chilmark has developed into the Wild Island Sculpture Garden that is always evolving and changing. While he has a penchant for the outdoors, Jay spends more time indoors when winter comes. Clay becomes the favored medium. Most of his clay pieces are abstractly figural and are made in the warm tones of terra cotta and stoneware. Dr. Lagemann reads widely about outdoor sculpture and likes to visit sculpture gardens, most recently climbing the wall of a private sculpture park in California to be able to see the hidden sculptures. He is interested in how sculpture works in the outdoors and especially in the interaction between the sculpture and its environment over time. Lagemann is recognized for the animated, playful characters he created from metal. He is perhaps best known for the seventeen-foot tall Swordfish Harpooner that stands amidst the dunes in Menemsha commissioned for Chilmark’s tri-centennial in 1994. Responding to requests for a personal sized version of the Swordfish Harpooner, Jay attended a workshop at the Johnson Atelier and Foundry in New Jersey. There he learned how to work in the bronze medium and completed the casting of a prototype that was used to produce the edition of bronze “Harpooner” sculptures. The bronze Swordfish Harpooner measures 19” h x 18” l x 9” w and is mounted on a hand picked beach rock from Chilmark’s South Shore. They are signed and numbered and are suitable for placement inside or outdoors. The original Raising Children/Swinging Jenny is the full sized painted steel sculpture of a man swinging a young girl by her hands. “I saw it as quite a challenge to translate Raising Children/Swinging Jenny (17” h x 21” l x 6” w) from large steel to a small bronze. It is not easy to get a feeling of weightlessness with a medium as solid and heavy as bronze. I ended up making four different models. By working on them from different angles and in different lights I was able to make one that I feel works very well and I am proud to have created.”

I have always liked making things. I fell in love with art when I spent my 18th summer travelling around Europe. At Princeton I took all the art courses available and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in mathematics in 1966. Disillusioned by the Vietnam War, I returned to traveling after getting my Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I sailed across the North and South Atlantic and wrote an unpublished book before working my way on to the special effects crew for the movie JAWS 2. There I learned the skills to make just about anything. That came in handy because one day, sitting in the Sculpture Park at the Hirshorn Museum, I had a vision of creating the Wild Island Sculpture Park on my land in Chilmark. In 1994 I created the monumental sculpture, the Swordfish Harpooner, in Menemsha for the Chilmark Tricentennial. I work with a variety of materials because I view almost everything as sculpture from the placement of driftwood on the beach to the building of my own house and studios. I have a unique way of seeing things and in 1997 I started making my own public access TV show: Jay's View. In 1975 I fell in love with Marianne Neill and her twin daughters Chris and Jenny. Together we created a life and a business, Marianne's Screen Printing, which prints the Black Dog T-shirts. I became a grandfather when Chris had a baby girl and Jenny had a son as well as twin daughters.

Meditation Dancer
Jay Lagemann
Bronze
30" x 18"
2000
$4,200
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