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06/17/2015 08:30 AMHelene Johnson has done commissioned sculptures before. She has even done commissioned animal sculptures before. But she had never done anything like Morgana, the statue of Ina Bomze’s beloved poodle that is the focus of the just-dedicated vest pocket park in Essex. Morgana died of a fast-growing, cancerous tumor last year.
Bomze contacted Helene last spring about doing a statue of Morgana to stand on the property across from her own home that she had purchased and has since donated to the Essex Land Trust as a vest pocket park. “Helene was recommended by people I trust,” Bomze explained.
Helene, also an Essex resident, had often seen Bomze and Morgana on their daily walks around town. Still, she needed a more accurate image of the poodle from which to work. Bomze provided her with pictures of Morgana and Helene did her own research on poodle anatomy so she would know how to sculpt the dog.
According to Helene, an understanding of bone structure is vital to any figurative sculpture, human or animal.
“Anyone doing sculpture spends their life studying anatomy,” she says.
Illustrating the point, there are two life-size models of human skeletons in her studio.
“Sculpture is about anatomy,” she says. “ “You can do the texture and things that look like a poodle, but if you have a bone in the wrong place, it will never look like a poodle.”
As Helene worked in clay on the sculpture, Morgana’s groomer, Karen Germini, came to the studio several times at Bomze’s behest to share fine points of Morgana’s appearance as she worked. The sculptor wanted to get the correct appearance of Morgana’s head, with its topknot of hair, which was a bit more pronounced than usual.
“If you don’t understand the shape of the head underneath, you will just get a big mass of nothing,” she says.
Helene begins her work by creating a wire armature of the figure she is making, and then applies clay to the skeleton. Clay without a supporting structure, she explains, will just collapse. When she has finished sculpting, the completed figure goes to a foundry, in Morgana’s case a facility in Long Island City, where in a series of intricate steps, the figure is cast in bronze.
Morgana is not the first dog Helene has sculpted. She also did a sculpture from life of her own dog, a Samoyed named Brie, before the pet died. According to Helene, getting Brie to sit still was a problem solved by a constant stream of dog biscuits. Helene has also done small renditions of friends’ animals—“Often on their downward cycle, sometimes on their deathbeds,” she says.
Helene, a Colorado native, didn’t start out as a sculptor, but as a two-dimensional artist. She describes her early work as humorous paintings she calls sunny surrealism.
“Pillows, paper bags, inanimate objects made animated,” she says.
She took her first sculpture classes after she had both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fine arts and was working as a station manager for a small airline at Denver’s Stapleton Airport.
“Once I started doing sculpture, I was consumed by it,” she said.
She applied to enter one of her early sculptures in a prestigious exhibition in Golden, Colorado, but was turned down. Rejection notwithstanding, it was a formative moment in her career as a sculptor. At the exhibition, she took a workshop with noted sculptor Stanley Bleifeld and was immediately drawn to his relief sculptures. She asked if he took apprentices. Bleifeld told Johnson he took students at his Connecticut workshop. By coincidence, Johnson and her husband Ned were already planning to move to the state. She subsequently studied with Bleifeld, as well as with Laszlo “Laci” de Gerenday at the Lyme Academy. She has also taken a series of marble carving classes in Italy.
Helene, whose studio in Chester has a full selection of her work, has won numerous awards both regionally and nationally from associations for sculpture and for women artists. Her work has appeared in exhibits throughout the United States. Locally, she has done a sculpture for Mercy High School in Middletown of two young people with Mother Catherine McAuley, who founded the order of the Sisters of Mercy in the l9th century. The Griswold Inn once commissioned her to do a relief sculpture of the taproom, which used to be exhibited at the inn but is now in the living room of the former owners.
“One of their sons told me he had grown up with it and he loved it. That made me feel really good,” Helene says.
Still, doing the sculpture of Morgana remains a special experience for Helene.
“I am so thankful to do something for Essex, my hometown,” she says. “It is wonderful to be a part of something that everyone can enjoy, something that will be here for people to see for many, many years.”