Brilliant blue sculpture by 92-year-old Joseph Ferguson rises in Burlington
Since the installation of “Seraph” last June, visitors to the Burlington Sculpture Park have admired the play of sunlight and shadows emanating from the blue 12-foothigh, aluminum, glass, and acrylic creation.
Joseph Ferguson recently ensured it will be enjoyed for future generations. The Burlington Select Board voted on Dec. 12 to accept the 92-year-old artist’s donation of the piece for permanent display.
“I was quite happy to do it because I want the sculpture to be out where people can see it,” Ferguson said.
Jonathan Sachs, founder of the sculpture park, noted that half of its 10 works are now permanent fixtures at the site located on Center Street between Grandview Farm and the Burlington Police Station.
“[Seraph] is the tallest work and dominates the park in the nicest way. It’s gorgeous and very popular.”
Ferguson said he is pleased that the sculpture has been so well received in Burlington, which follows numerous local installations he’s created. In Weston, where he lives, several stained glass pieces adorn the town library. “Counterpoint,” a welded aluminum sculpture, took up residence on the front lawn of the Weston Art & Innovation Center last May.
The shimmering reflections of “Seven Stars” and “Singularity,” which Ferguson described as a “three-dimensional form with galactic intent,” are perched behind the Newburyport Art Association. Also visible along the Clipper City Rail Trail is “Chroma,” a metal and acrylic sculpture in color media displayed at the Custom House Maritime Museum.
Ferguson’s commissions have included stained glass for churches and private homes, as well as numerous landscape sculptures in glass, copper, brass, and aluminum. Many are detailed in two autobiographies: “The Evolving Image,” published in 2011 by Peter E. Randall, and the newly written “Driven by the Sun: Reflections on Art and Religion” for which Ferguson is seeking a distributor.
Born in 1930, Ferguson grew up in Bergenfield, N.J. before his family moved to a dairy farm in Unadilla, N.Y. As a child, he said he considered drawing to be a “plaything, a toy,” and he especially enjoyed sketching Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Olive
Oyl, and other popular figures from comics and The Saturday Evening Post.
Ferguson considered becoming an engineer, scientist, inventor, or test pilot, but he struggled to achieve the academic requirements.
“Art came to me as the alternative,” he said, “the only thing I felt I was good at.”
Ferguson attended The Cooper Union night school while working as a junior draftsman for the New York Central Railroad. After designing and building airfields in the 417 th Engineer Aviation Brigade for two years during the Korean War, he attended Edinburgh College of Art on the GI
Bill.
While going to college in Scotland, Ferguson met Isabel Gomersall, a history student at the University of Edinburgh. The couple married in 1958 and honeymooned by viewing the art and architecture of cathedrals in England, France, Italy, and Germany.
After settling in Boston, Ferguson was an apprentice artist at J.G.H. Reynolds Stained Glass before striking out on his own. Seeking a larger space than the home they subsequently rented in Wellesley Hills, the Fergusons visited a property on Conant Road in Weston. The yard, which was strewn with litter and overgrown with blackberry bushes, now neatly showcases more than a dozen of Ferguson’s sculptures.
“The minute I saw it, I knew it was perfect — although my wife was a little skeptical,” recalled Ferguson, who was married to Isabel for 52 years until her death in 2010. Alluding to the adjoining barn where he now works and teaches stained glass, he added, “I knew I could improve it, and it has given me a place to work all these years.”
From the beginning, Ferguson said his fascination with form and light has been the basis of “taking stained glass out of architectural and cathedral settings and putting it into the landscape.”
First, he builds a frame, with each piece of stained glass cut to shape and fixed into a supporting structure of brass rod, welded aluminum, steel, or stainless steel. Instead of soldering the pieces together, he separates and superimposes them while inserting a brass rod at varying levels for added strength. Light gleams between the pieces, with thick fractured glass or blown forms added for dimension.
Despite now leaving the heavy lifting of installations to sons Chris, Mark, and Eric, Ferguson has no intention of retiring. He continues to live by a lesson learned from an older engineer at New York Central Railroad who repeatedly and miserably voiced his wish for a lower retirement age.
In what Ferguson called a “singular moment of personal illumination,” he wrote a vow to pursue art on a piece of paper that he carried in his wallet for years.
“I would draw pictures and make things,” he said, “not spend my life waiting for retirement.”