Life During Wartime

The Bill and Basil Memorial Sculpture

 
William M. Brincka and C. Basil Cross purchased a 25 acre property near Chesterton Indiana in the mid 60’s, and creating one of the most widely acclaimed private gardens in the midwest. Towards the end of that decade they also built a Japanese Arts and Crafts styled home, whose main purpose was to bring the garden into the home and to showcase their vast collection of artifacts from travels all over the world. Basil was the European antiquities expert at Marshall Fields for 35 years. Bill’s profession was an artist and for 30 years, art instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago. After Bill started the garden, that became his only art form, and it was truly designed with an artist’s eye. Plants were placed so when they bloomed or changed color, they carried the eye where Bill wanted you to look. They lived the concept of ”house and garden” as one continuous space. One of Bill’s biggest disappointments was that in order to qualify for a full professorship at the School of the Art Institute, you had to be a working, showing artist. But in the schools shortsightedness, they decided that this garden did not qualify as a work of art, even though the chairman of the sculpture department at that time, deemed it so in a book he published. Bill died in 2001, Basil in 2006. Originally this sculpture was to be erected in their hosta garden, where a similar hand carved granite Japanese pagoda once resided. After funding was cut by the park district, the current owner, a new location was found in Valparaiso, on a property where Bill’s hybridizing experiments are being carried on by a dear friend and former student. ABOUT THE SCULPTURE The bare metal is Cor-Ten steel that is made to rust and seal itself. The colored pieces are powdercoated. There is also some stainless and mild steel used. The sculpture was started in 2007 and finished in 2010, with 5 months of actual labor. It is designed with a center column that supports all the stacked pieces. I wanted to show the grounded aspect of a garden; the education aspect of working with plants; the spiritual aspect that comes from knowledge; and the transference of this to us, the next generation. And I want it to be a garden where it’s always summer, sunny and in full bloom.
 
 
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