Sugabus and Me

Carmi over at "Written, Inc."  who host the week long photo challenge "Thematic Photographic" has chosen the color gray for this weeks theme.  I expected this challenge to be a hard one to fill.   I am never on the lookout for gray items like I am for some of the more popular meme colors like red and pink.   I started going through my archives and pulling out the gray photos and was surprised by how many I found that I have never used before.  I choose two to share with you today.    

The following photos were taken last fall when we escourted out of town guest on a tour of the Laumeier Sculpture Park.  

Me sitting on Sugabus

One of my favorite sculptures is this giant piece entitled "Sugabus."  It reminds me of a giant French Poodle crafted out of balloons.  Sugabus was created by Robert Chambers in 2004 out of six tons of bronze.  The following comes from the parks website: 

    

 "The globes represent the interlocking elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen found in sucrose. Chambers’ cuddly title, a mingling of “Sugar” and “Cerberus,” transforms the terror evoked by the mythological three-headed guard dog of Hades into a fluffy domesticated pet. Has Chambers made this scary creature into a loveable puffball through the association with a syrupy rush? The metamorphosis stirs together love for pets, elemental craving for sweets and legend into a whimsical alchemy of sculptural forms."

this photo from the
parks website

The above sculpture is entitled "The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot" created by Robert Lobe in 1995.

Constructed from the trunk and branches of a dead walnut tree encased in annealed hammered aluminum with stainless steel hardware.

The following comes from the parks website:  "Robert Lobe has described his sculptures as involving an interrupted, sacrificed-Nature that is not just borrowed, but violated. His works are created in nature and often reinstalled elsewhere as a sculptural echo of natural form. Inspired by this wildness and disorganized aspect of nature, Lobe’s The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot,  is a battered, aluminum-wrapped walnut trunk that exemplifies his continued interest in the violence of nature and obliterates the formal distinction between nature and technology with a battered layer of armor plate. Yet Lobe also preserves and protects the tree, as if technology is strong enough to reverse the ravages it has visited upon the landscape."

Laumeier Sculpture Park sits on 72 acres bequeathed by Matilda Laumeier to St. Louis County in 1968 in honor of her husband.  The Laumeier family home, a large story-and-a-half house of cut stone, on the property is still in use today.  In 1975, the park was proposed as a possible site for the exhibition of sculpture and the concept of Laumeier Sculpture Park emerged.  Catapulted by a collaborative of citizen leaders in the arts, education and business communities, Laumeier Sculpture Park,  was incorporated in September 1977; over the years it has grown to 105-acres. Laumeier Sculpture Park today has over 300,000 visitors annually.

Linking to Thematic Photographic 

This weeks theme is "Gray"