More Toronto Sculpture

 Recent posts have told you about my looking for doors and street art during my walks around Toronto, and the other thing I am constantly on the lookout for are sculptures. A couple of months after we “moved” here I posted about a Toronto Sculpture walk, and did the same in China, and in Florida. There are lots of statues and sculptures all over Toronto and I find something new on most walks. Here are a few of the most recent ones I have found.

This one is in what is called a "Sculpture Garden", and the art featured changes regularly. This one looks like the Loch Ness Monster, but is in fact the wave lengths of various local sounds, a Streetcar, a church bell, etc. Very interesting. 

This sculpture shows how everyone is equal before the law - thus the lion on one end and the small cat on the other, but the scale is level. 

This is three cube shapes balanced together in a little park but I have no idea what it represented.

A fireman rescuing a child from a fire is at Queen's Park and honours Toronto's fire service.

This one is a mystery. It is a huge metal stop watch but has no hands on the face. It is fastened to a large rock and is facing away from the street, so you can only see it when walking between two large office building. And behind the watch is a little sculpture of a sleeping cat. 

This is one of my favourite statues. It is huge and extends up and becomes part of the building behind it. It looks like an animal with four legs, but also like a tree with branches, but what looks like leaves from a distance are actually hundreds of metal birds. I could find no plaque explaining what it was, but it is an amazing piece of art.

Sculpture

Sharing the bench with a statue

When I spent a couple of months in China just after I retired, I had time to explore the city of Suzhou where I was living and I discovered interesting sculptures all over the city. I was intrigued because most of them had no explanation of what they were all about or why they were installed. Since then I have begun noticing city sculptures wherever I am.  I wrote another post featuring sculptures in Florida as well, but I have collected photos of city sculptures from all over the world. 

The Queen is under there

Here in Toronto I have collected quite a few interesting sculpture photos during my wanderings around the city. Here, most of the statues and art installations do have some descriptions of what they are about and the artist is usually given credit for their work. Some of the sculptures are to honour some respected historical figure but many are simply decorations for buildings here in the city. Yesterday during a walk around Queen’s Square in Downtown, we came across an unveiling of a new sculpture in front of the provincial legislature. The statue itself was covered in an elegant cloth waiting for the reveal, but I later heard that it was a new statue honouring Queen Elizabeth. 

Here are a few of the sculptures I have found so far during my time here.   

These last sculptures decorates our condo complex. They were being installed a few years ago when Ryan & Ben bought the condo. They are stainless steel pieces and are installed outside and inside the two buildings in the RadioCity complex. I recently discovered that they were designed to represent segments of the original CBC broadcast tower which once stood on the site; thus the name "RadioCity". 

Street Sculpture

We left Nova Scotia for the warmth and sunshine of Florida for the month of April, renting a house in Lakeland, a community about 45 minutes inland from Tampa Bay. We “got out of Dodge” just in time, sandwiched between a snowstorm the day before our exit and another a few days after we left. Now settled in Lakeland we have pretty consistent hot, sunny weather, and I must admit, I am enjoying the heat.

After a week of driving south and visiting friends and relatives along the way, I am trying to get back into my daily walks. Today I looked at Google Maps and decided I could walk from the house to downtown Lakeland. It was a pleasant walk with convenient sidewalks and lovely lakeside walks – obviously where the name “Lakeland” comes from.

I have been to Lakeland previously, actually visiting with the good friends who we are renting the house from, and on the last visit, I was taken downtown to see the Lemon Street Sculpture garden. On this trip I wanted to go back and see it once more, and managed to find my way back easily. The Sculpture Garden is a three-block long street side display of sculpture installed on concrete pads under trees. I enjoyed wandering among the interesting sculptures in such a pleasant setting last time and was pleased to note that all the sculptures had been changed and were all new. The natives of Lakeland obviously just take this interesting exhibition for granted as I was alone in wandering among the  artworks, and people seemed to find it odd that I was so interested in them and taking photos. The one street person sleeping on a bench in the area actually got up and left as my interest in the sculpture was disturbing his resting place.

I have attached a few photos of the sculptures. 

 

Saturday In Suzhou

I was perhaps a bit hasty in my assessment of the people of Suzhou and their appreciation of the sculpture that surrounds them as they go about their business in Suzhou Industrial Park. I discovered that perhaps they just do not have time through the week to enjoy the art work provided for them to enjoy.

Saturday in Suzhou dawned cloudy, misty, foggy and/or raining depending on when you looked ou the window. By lunchtime, it did not look like any real improvement was eminent, so not wanting to completely waste a free day, I unfolded the umbrella, and ventured out. On the previous days adventure I noticed that the other side of the lake running perpendicular to my walk also seemed to have some interesting parks, and a map of the area showed extensive parkland there as well. Today, ignoring the dampness I explored this area.

First thing I noticed was more statues and sculpture. As you walked through the pathways, you would come across interesting sculptures, again, with little or no explanation. On this walk I found a huge crocodile who I believe was being zapped by a spell from a witch. I saw a very hip fellow roller-blading with his dog on a skateboard. Yes I'm still on the sculpture thing, both he and the dog were in bronze. There was an entire brass bank made of red metal on a big white quarter moon, and there was the usual assortment of interesting abstract items.

The difference today was that the Chinese were enjoying their parks and their statues, I gave up waiting for the statues to be clear of people, and started trying to include the people having their picture taken beside the sculpture. One family was very interested in the roller blader and his dog. I watched them trying to convince the little boy to sit on the dog to get his picture taken. He seemed reluctant, but I couldn't tell what his objection was. Finally his mother produced a Kleenex, and he carefully wiped the moisture from the dog and happily sat down for the “photo-opp”.

It was a day for photography, and I came across two sets of newly weds having their wedding photos done. I felt sorry for them trying to look happy and festive as someone held an umbrella over them and someone else tried to keep the rain off the photographer. I can just imagine them years from now sitting together looking through their wedding album and remembering that day trying to stay dry while posing for the pictures.

Again, I was amazed at the expanse of perfectly maintained parkland. Everywhere I went there were beautiful broad walkways, made not out of ordinary concrete, but paving stone or even artistically arranged polished stone. There would often be large areas of polished marble like surface (Very slippery in the rain). There were always neat rows of trees, perfect hedges without any gaps, flower beds with perfectly evenly spaced plants all with perfect blooms. You might see the occasional spot where a path had been worn in a lawn, but other than that even the grass was consistently perfect green. Of course everywhere there is greenery or flowers are the ever present maintenance people; sweeping the sidewalks and bike paths, picking up litter, weeding the lawns, and picking dead flowers out of the gardens. They are there rain or shine, seven days a week, keeping everything perfect.

Actually, as I walked back from this damp adventure, I suddenly realized as I passed a forest of trees all planted in dead straight even rows, that I had actually never seen anything that wasn't completely created by man. None of the parks were preserved natural land, they were created from scratch. I do not recall seeing one area in this part of Suzhou that was not designed and built. I do not know what was here before someone decided to build this Industrial Park, but I don't think there is much left of the original land. This is not really a criticism, because I do not know what was here before – it could have been a waste dump, or a gravel pit, and now it certainly is a lovely place for the people to live and work, and I am enjoying exploring it bit by bit during my time in China.

Suzhou Sculpture

After working for week, I had four days off, so I decided to finally go explore Suzhou and see some of the this beautiful city. One of the schools I work in, requires a fairly long bus ride, and I noticed on the ride a lot of interesting buildings and sculptures along the route, so although the day was overcast I decided to go have a closer look at these interesting pieces of public art. I rode a borrowed bike, and followed the walkways through the parkland beside Jin Ji lake, towards one interesting building modelled after the Olympic Birds-nest stadium in Beijing. This building is the Suzhou Arts & Culture Centre, and is definitely a work of art itself. It is shaped like a huge symmetrical “U” around another glass building called the “Pearl”. The building is surrounded by bronze sculptures of musicians and dancers and other performers. Even some of the seats looking out onto the lake were pieces of sculptures, shaped like the Blue Men Troupe. Not especially comfortable seating however – the nose tend to dig into the back. It is amazing how little this beautiful facility was used; I was practically alone exploring both the grounds outside and the building itself.

From here I continued along the lakeside park, until I was halted by one of the many construction sites – it seems that everywhere something bigger and more impressive is being built. I then rode through an amusement park under construction, and again, the building were going to be as much of an attraction as the rides and pavilions. Like elsewhere in Suzhou, everything is surrounded by beautiful well maintained parks. Even though this attraction has not opened yet, I observed a little old woman sitting and carefully maintaining the extensive gardens.

I was aiming for a series of brightly coloured geometrical sculptures, as a turning point to head back through the pathways and parks on the other side of the roadway. There were four different sculptures in red, blue, green and yellow, blended into little buildings. I could see no indication of what the buildings were for, and they appeared to by unfinished inside. The coloured sculptures certainly called attention to them however.

On the ride back I found tall blue fish, ponds made of man-made coral, beautiful sculptures of women reading, lovely abstract wood and metal rectangles, and cute golden pigs. None of these had any signage, or indication what they were for or about, they appear to be simply there for the population to enjoy. As is often the case, the locals seem to completely ignore them, and I got very odd looks when I was observed photographing them. But then, that is one thing I have noticed here in China – tall obviously foreign men with beards are enough of an oddity that I get stared at wherever I go.

It is amazing how beautiful this bike ride was. I was able to ride through parkland along a lake most of the way down, and once the construction is finished the parkland will extend the whole way, and there was beautiful parks, pathways, and gardens the entire way back on the other side of the road. Remember this is “Suzhou Industrial Park”; it was built to house industry and businesses. We could learn a thing or two from the Chinese about how to design a city.