From time to time I like to revisit the work of one of my favourite artists, and now thanks to Market Square thousands of people will be able to do that daily. Phil Savage, a sculptor from Kingston, New Brunswick is having a multi-piece work permanently installed in Saint John’s Market Square Atrium today in celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday. Continue reading Market Square Celebrates Canada 150 With A New Sculpture From Phil Savage
Category Archives: Sculpture
The Saint John Stone Sculpture Symposium
The Saint John Stone Sculpting Symposium began with fire and brimstone, and massive flows of lava moving across great scathes of our fair province. Fortunately for everyone involved the last 390 million years has given things plenty of time to cool down; bystanders and artists alike have little more to be concerned about than the lingering clouds of Devonian by-product that have come to replace the usual harbour-front fog each morning. It was on the far side of one of these that I found Alison Gayton, a returning intern, finishing her lunch inside of the site’s many small tents. She offered me a cherry tomato, but the twenty seconds it had taken me to cross the lot had already filled my mouth my with a fine dust. Continue reading The Saint John Stone Sculpture Symposium
Phil Savage Stands Still Long Enough To Talk
Phil Savage and I are standing in a parking lot on a Tuesday evening. There’s a strong wind blowing, making it hard to hear, but I’m glad that for once this season it’s come without rain. This is the only time all summer that I’ve been able to get Phil to stand still long enough to talk, not that he’s stopped working entirely; his car is loaded down with fresh produce off his farm, and we’re occasionally interrupted by families filing in to collect their weekly veggie packs.
I’ve known Phil for years, he’s been one of my best friends for over a decade; a fact that I sometimes like to drop at parties, because Phil is honestly one of the coolest guys I know, and I like to think it makes me just that much cooler by extension. He’s also one of the hardest working people I know (which has had a negligible effect on my own work ethic, by extension); he is rarely without a healthy patina of soil, and his hands are a dull copper-brown from routinely beating the earth into submission. His days start at dawn, and often stretch on until midnight, and that’s just his summer job. Continue reading Phil Savage Stands Still Long Enough To Talk