Tony Smith

Hello ladies!  Happy Thursday, as always!  I hope this finds you well!  Miss. Eva, thank you so much for the lovely kitty drawing you mailed to me – I’ve been meaning to take a picture so I could post it here, just haven’t gotten to that yet.  I’ll try over the weekend.  It is lovely and I so appreciate you thinking of me!  J

Did you know that yesterday - October 1 – was the 43rd anniversary of the day in 1971 when Walt Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida?  I hope you’re enjoying living so close to Disney.  The pictures from your trip to Harry Potter World (which I know isn’t Disney, but it’s close) were certainly awesome – I loved the fire breathing dragon the most!!

All is well here in NJ.  I’m hoping Gram-E will come and visit me soon, since this is probably the very best time of year here – it’s not hot, but it’s not cold, and the leaves are turning pretty colors, and there’s so much fun stuff to do in October!  I love hayrides and corn mazes.

Anyway, this weeks’ artist is Tony Smith.  He’s from South Orange, NJ – which isn’t far from where your dad and I were born – and lived from 1912 to 1980. He was a “minimalist sculptor”.  Mostly he made really, really big geometric shapes.  They’re not always pretty, but they almost always look like they’d be really fun to climb on.  I would love to have a yard full of gigantic sculptures that I could climb up on and inside and see the world from lots of different angles and through different shapes.  I really like to climb things.  Sadly, very few places who have pieces of big sculpture will let you climb on them…probably because they’re afraid you’ll fall off, hurt yourself, and sue them.  Which, really, when people do things like that is totally ridiculous (the suing part, not the climbing part), but that’s a whole other issue.

So Tony got tuberculosis (a disease in his lungs, I think – medical stuff is not my forte) when he was a kid and his family made an isolation ward in their backyard while he was getting better…I wonder if he ended up making such great big things as an adult because his world was very small when he was a kid.  But that’s just me wondering, not any real fact there.  What is a fact is that as a young man, Tony worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect I’ll have to tell you about sometime…and that is very cool.

So here are a few of his sculptures.  I especially like the big black M-ish one….there are so many good places to sit and read a book in that one! The yellow one is cool, but you’d have to put handles in it to be able to get to the top, and that would probably mess up the “clean lines” of it. 

In any case, know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

xoxoxoxo