Jari Sulkala, Taideympäristö kehitteillä / Art environment under development

this image and the next five by Veli Granö

The city of Espoo is Finland's second largest city after Helsinki. It has about 300,000 inhabitants and is known as a center for high technology. 

Near a house in a rural and wooded area in the north of this city an impressive art environment has developed in the past year. That now already can be reported about this, has to do with the infrastructure around outsider art (ITE-art in Finnish), created in Finland thanks to the efforts of Maaseudun Sivistysliitto (the Rural Cultural Association).

 

Life and works

Jari Sulkala, the creator of this site, was born in the mid 1960s. 

Not much is known about his early years, education or studies, except that he got a job in Espoo as a maintenance technician of technical equipment for several companies in Espoo. It was hard and tiring work, the results of which were generally hidden.

Gradually, Sulkala began to feel uneasy that nothing could be discerned from all those years of toil and he began to long for activities where that could be otherwise. And so it happened that in the spring of 2022, in his mid 50s, he quit his job, to continue his activities as a self-taught artist. 

A career switch that was as surprising as it was radical.

Creating an art environment

With his technical experience and skills, he focused on transforming metal objects into artistic creations. For example, the images above show that under the igloo-like garden dome,which he created in the early months of 2023, there is a pedestal with a sculpture of a bird that is made from the parts of a broken motorcycle.

At the top of the dome there is a set of icicles from which water drips, a reference to the melting North Pole due to climate change. The bottom of the dome became a herb garden.

Before Sulkala created this dome, he already made some smaller creations, such as -in the picture above left- a diver made of metal scraps, which can sing through a sound system hidden in the cloak.

The image at the right above shows a creation depicting a bow and arrow weapon, made of a

part of a mixer as found in paint factories.

The image below depicts the first creation Sulkala made. This creation, more or less a first statement regarding the kind of creations he envisioned, is called Leaping Deer and is made from unaltered parts of a broken motorcycle, arranged and welded together in such a way as to emphasize the dynamics of the jump.

The image below shows a dinosaur skeleton. 

The creation is made from the cast iron interior of an old piano. Cast iron is a difficult material to work with, but Sulkula succeeded in extracting legs, ribs and a gaping mouth from the base material in such a way that the dinosaur takes on a lively shape.

The success of this creative operation says something about Sulkala's skill in transforming an iron frame into a work of art.

If it is correct that Sulkala, who quit his job in the spring of 2022, at that moment started making the creations reviewed above, then he has managed to develop an art environment in about a year with a landmark dome and a number of impressive stand-alone sculptures.

That's a great achievement.

If Sulkala continues in this way for a few more years, something could happen that he is already hinting about, which is that the site in the (near?) future will open to the public. 

Espoo then has an art environment to be proud of.

Documentation

* An article posted on the FB-account of ITE Uusimaa on July 7, 2023, written and provided with photos by Veli Granö, was the first (and until now the only) publication about Jari Sukala's project.

- I like to mention that this publication was used in preparing above post

- And then, as far as could be ascertained, the local Espoo press has not yet covered Sulkala's activities

Jari Sulkala

Art environment under development

Espoo, region Uusimaa, province South Finland, Finland

not (yet) open to the public

Giovanni Righetti, Camera decorata a mosaico / Mosaic decorated room

all photos courtesy of Catharina Pinelli

About 12 km northwest of the city of Verona in the north of Italy  there is the municipality of Negrar di Valpolicella with about 16,000 inhabitants (end 2004). 

In the 1970s the municipality experienced a considerable growth in population, mainly due to influx from outside, such as well-to-do residents from  nearby Verona who found a pleasant living place in Negrar.

From the point of view of art environments, in Negrar di Valpolicella there is a special creation. In a room in the basement of a house the four walls and the floor have been richly decorated with a variety of mosaics.

Life and works

This art environment was created by Giovanni  Righetti, who was born in a simple family in Negrar di Valpolicella on December 12, 1950 . His mother did the housework and his father worked on farms and on road construction in the area. Giovanni was the only son and had three sisters.

As a boy he was already good at drawing and he also ventured into making sculptures, working stones that he found in the area. The local pastor was enthusiastic about Giovanni's artistic aptitude. However, his parents could not afford an education at an art school and, after holding several jobs, Righetti became a mason, a job he would practice for most of his working life.

In his late teens, Giovanni made a trip to Rome, where he viewed mosaics made in Roman times. And around age thirty he made sculptures with an archaeological slant, such as runes, amulets and totems. 

The larger creations were displayed in the garden at his house,in the La Bassa district, a part of the community surrounded by a beautiful, hilly landscape. The smaller creations were placed indoors in a display case.

An extensive creative project

The artistic activities of Giovanni Righetti summarized above form a prelude to the major project he would undertake in the years 2020-2022. He was 70 years old when he started and had been retired for several years. 

The idea was initially to decorate one wall of a room in the basement of his house with mosaic, but gradually all walls and the floor were decorated, a major project during the period of lock-downs due to the COVID pandemic, on which he also worked on Saturdays and Sundays.

The first wall he decorated is depicted in the very first photo. In the center is a geometric mosaic-filled circle, flanked by a colorful star on the left and an alien on the right.

After that first wall, Righetti continued to decorate the other walls and the floor in the room in the basement, creating creations not only from his imagination, but also by drawing inspiration from legends, stories and myths, as well as historical events and famous sculptures. 

There are imaginative scenes with dragons, but also an image of the sculpture of the mermaid in Copenhagen. Noah's ark, the Trojan horse, the pyramids, they are part of the decorations.

Righetti has worked on his decorative project with great diligence and perseverance. Just to collect the pieces of marble that make up the mosaics, he had to search the streets and the dumps of local quarries. The photos in this post also demonstrate Righetti's sensitivity to color and the great degree of precision used to manufacture the tiles that cover the floor.

To what extent this particular art environment can be visited by those interested in this form of art is unclear. Righetti is a modest person and it is not to be expected that he will transform his house into a kind of museum. In addition, he has said that he doesn't see himself as an artist; he considers making mosaics more of a playful activity. 

So it remains to be seen how things will continue in the coming years. Righetti himself said he sometimes wondered how archaeologists in later times would react if they stumbled upon the mosaics during excavations at the site of his house.......

Documentation

* The text in this post is based on an article recently published in the Italian magazine Osservatorio Outsider Art: 

Daniela Rosi, La stanza meravigliosa. Racconto Musivo di Giovanni Righetti (The wonderful room. Mosaic story by Giovanni Righetti), Osservatorio Outsider Art, no. 25, Spring 2023, p 40-53   (photos by Catharina Pinelli)

As far as could be ascertained, no publications have appeared in regional newspapers

Giovanni Righetti

Mosaic decorated room

Address details not available

Negrar di Valpolicella, dept Verona, region Veneto, Italy

Philippe Burnel, Jardin avec sculptures / Sculpture garden

this image and the next eight from Burnel's Facebook account

The image above shows a creation that is part of an art environment that has developed over the past few years. The site is located in the small village of Jouy-en-Argonne with about 50 inhabitants, 13 km west of the town of Verdun in the north-west of France, 

Life and works

This art environment, which currently is still in development, actually was started as a creative project in July 2021 by Philippe Burnel, born in 1966. The photo below shows the very first cement-formed creation added to the site, 

the first sculpture in the garden, July 2021

Burnel, who lives in Verdun, where he has a job in the archives of the post office, was active as a sportsman in his younger years. However, he was increasingly drawn to making works of art. Following this vocation, he started working as a self-taught artist around the year 2000, when he was in his early thirties.

Initially, as an admirer of Salvador Dali, Burnel made surrealist paintings, but after meeting the Verdun painter Serge Pighi (1941-2018), he found his own style, characterized by a lively, colorful palette and a critical, sometimes rather sharp view of what happens in everyday life. 

The persons and other items featured in his work are often depicted in relief, what he achieves by adding paper-mache to the canvas or panel used for the creation and transforming this layer in such a way that the intended image appears and can be painted after the drying of the paper mache.

Numerous works by Burnel can be seen in the videos in the documentation below.

In 2010, Brunel bought an old barn in Jouy-en-Argonne, in which he set up a studio. As shown in the very first image there is a large, elongated piece of hilly grassland behind this barn. 

Apart from some decorated wooden totems, placed by Burnel on this area, it remained untouched for over a decade. However in July 2021 Burnel began developing an art environment on this area by adding a variety of sculptures made from cement.

 

Just as Burnel uses a fixed technique for his paintings to achieve dimensionality, he has a specific method for making these sculptures. An infrastructure of iron mesh, broadly in the shape of the desired image, is covered with cement, after which the resulting structure is transformed into the intended design of the sculpture by means of mortar.

Over the past two years, Burnel has already produced an ensemble of sculptures in a style on parts similar to that of his paintings. This, however, with one major exception: Brunel has chosen not to color the finished creations, but to set them up unprocessed in the gray tint the mortar has. 

This might be significant. 

In Burnel's  paintings the color scheme underlines the character of the person depicted, in the art environment the ubiquitous color gray has a connecting effect. The ensemble as such is paramount and the parts each contribute to the impression that the whole evokes.

The interrelation within the ensemble is expressed in many parts of this art environment, for example characters that are connected to each other by an actual embrace or by a long winding sculpted tube. 

So far the regional press has not given any publicity to Burnel's growing art environment, nor has it been reported in publications in the French field of art environments. Burnel's Facebook page is the only place so far where photos have appeared and (much positive) comments have been made.

One of those comments suggests that Burnel could open the site to visitors once he retires, which Burnel, who is in his late 50s, thought was a nice idea.

However, at the moment there is no visitor regulation yet, so this article does not mention the address of Philippe Burnel's sculpture garden.

New additions 

After this post was published in July 2023, Burnel published photos of new additions to his art environment: 

addition published August 2023


addition published April 2024

Documentation

* Burnell's weblog

* Burnell on Facebook 

* Entries about Burnell's paintings on website Passions-art, with a video and on website Artpulsion

* Article in regional newspaper l'Est Républicain about an exposition (April 2022) of Burnell's paintings, with a short referral to the decorated garden

* Article in the same journal about an exposition in 2016

Videos

*Video (123.47) May 2016, YouTube, with Burnel being interviewed in a radio-show

* Video l'Atelier by Patrice Velut (2021, YouTube, 1.55)

* Another video by Patrice Velut (2021, YouTube, 2.30) with an impression of an exposition of Burnel's artwork in Château de la Chaussée in Saumur 

first published  July 2023, last revised August 2024

Philippe Burnel

Sculpture Garden

Jouy-en-Argonne, dept Meuse, region Grand Est, France

visits only on appointment

Nicola di Cesare, Giardino Roccioso / Rock Garden

images are screenprints from the two videos in the documentation

In 1981 Nicola di Cesare started to create an art environment in the Italian town of Grosio, a municipality with about 4800 inhabitants in the far north of Italy, near it's border with Switzerland.

The creation has risen on a mountainside, located behind di Cesare's house and is generally referred to as Giardino Roccioso (Rock Garden)

view on the Rock Garden from below

Life and works

Nicola di Cesare was born in 1950 in Pizzoferrato, a municipality in central Italy. 

After primary school he had various jobs, including one with a marquise, who had a summer residence in Grosio. Every summer he travelled to that place in the north to do all kinds of chores. He also worked in Switzerland as a cook and a railway worker.

view from the Rock Garden on Grosio

In a shop in Grozio in the 1970s he met Domenica Lucia. They fell in love, married and settled in a house along the northern edge of Grosio near the slope of a mountain in the Rhaetian Alps.

In 1981, behind his house, at the spot where the slope begins, he built a small wall which he decorated with mosaics. This was the  start of a project he is still working on in 2023, when this article is published,.

Because he is a modest man, di Cesare did not give the project a name, he even avoided this. Currently, the name Giardino Roccioso (Rock Garden) is quite commonly used.

In the publicity surrounding this art environment, di Cesare is also referred to as the Gaudi of Grosio, but it may be noted that di Cesare was not familiar with Gaudi's work and -apart from his few jobs in nearby Switzerland- he had never traveled abroad.

Like so many non-professional artists who have created an art environment, Nicola di Cesaree had no prior plan. When the wall with mosaic near his house was ready, as if it were the most natural thing to do, he began to transform the mountainside behind the house with all kinds of creations. 

This included the arrangement of a number of structural provisions, such as stairs that lead upwards and paths to walk past the decorative items.. 

The images above show how beautifully those stairs (with a total of 207 steps) are integrated into the whole of decorations applied to the slope of the mountain.

These paths and stairs lead along another architectural element that characterizes this art environment. Niches have been made in the mountain wall in which decorative elements have been incorporated, mostly pots of considerable size, made by di Cesare himself or found on the site of the municipal waste processing.

As an aside, it may be noted that di Cesare had a good relationship with the local waste management staff. They kept all kinds of items that might come in handy in the art environment and di Cesare was rather happy about that.

The images above give an impression of the fencing along the paths, which often have a creative look and feature arrangements of pots and colorful decorations.

It should be noted that these gates are not in place in all areas and that in comments on tourist websites visitors are advised to hold children's hands during a visit. Municipal authorities have also expressed their concern about the level of protection for visitors. 

A sign at the entrance to the site reminds those visitors of their own responsibility in this regard.

example of a mosaic creation

In addition to decoration with all kinds of items found on the landfill, such as vases, old ceramic plates and mirrors, in particular the multicolored mosaics added by di Cesare on the rock wall emphasize the creative character of this art environment. 

These mosaic creations often consist of small pieces of stone, which are pushed into a layer of cement in the shape of the intended image.

An image of the heart has been applied in many places in the mosaics, perhaps an expression of the feeling that predominates with di Cesare when creating the site. He also does this by applying all kinds of inscriptions that reflect his feelings. as well as by adding various dates that indicate when a certain part of the decorations was ready.

Although the creation of this art environment has been underway since 1981 and a large part had already been realized around the turn of the century, the site did not gain publicity until the early 2020s, particularly after the COVID period. 

In the first months of 2023, numerous messages about the art environment appeared on the internet. Some more substantive articles, published in these months,  have been selected in the documentation below. 

The videos in the documentation also date from the first months of 2023.

Documentation

* Article by Sabino Maria Frassa (September 2022) on website Linkiesta

* Article by Romina Vinci (June 2023) on website Spazio 50

* On Facebook a group about Grosio with on April 21, 2019, a large series of photos by Pim Stefano

* Article by Giada Carraro on het website Bric-a-Brac Italia

Videos

* Video (8'44", YouTube, April 2023) from the series of travelogues by Beatrice and Stefano

* Video (7'29", YouTube, May 2023) by Tele Paolo67 

 

Nicola di Cesare

Giardino Roccioso

via Rovaschiera

Grosio, Lombardia, Italia

visitors welcome

Google Maps with more than 1500 photos

Chris van der Sman, Miniatuur kerken in buitenruimte / Miniature churches in outdoor space

seen from the street via Google Maps 

a view of the outdoor area with miniature churches

The miniature churches in the image above are set up in an outdoor space in Nootdorp in the Netherlands, a village with 19.000 inhabitants (2021), located east of The Hague, the city where the Dutch parliament is located.

Life and works

These life size stone replicas were made by Chris van der Sman, who was born in 1935 as one of a set of twin boys. The twins had an older brother and ten other children would be born after them.

The older brother, called Kees, made a miniature town in his younger years, a creation which has now almost been lost. Chris, who in later years would surpass him in building miniatures, went to work in a painting company after primary school at the age of 14. 

He would continue to do this work until his retirement, the last thirty years working from his own one-man business.

Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), Delft
this image and the next four are screenprints from the
video by Omroep West referred to in the documentation

Chris married on January 24, 1962 and the young couple moved into a house along Sportparkweg (Sportspark road) in Nootdorp, where they still live. They had two daughters.

In the same year 1962, Chris started the creative project, which he would work on with great passion for the rest of his life. His choice to make replicas of churches is related to his great admiration for the work of builders of churches in earlier centuries.

 

It started with the manufacture of a replica of the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in the city of Delft, located near Nootdorp. On July 21, 1962, his wife laid the foundation stone for the structure, which on a scale of 1:20, has a tower with a height of 5.40 meters,

The image above shows in detail the a few centimeters large building blocks used by van der Swan to build the walls. He has developed a method that allows him to manufacture more than 1100 bricks in an hour. 

A project such as that of the Nieuwe Kerk comprises about 100,000 such stones.

In 1987, after 25 years of work, Chris van der Sman's first replica of a church was completed. Striking aspects of this creation are the stained glass windows, the clockwork and the copper bells.

Making replicas of towering structures now had such a place in his life that he immediately started a new project.

Oude Kerk (Old Church), Delft

This new project was again a 1:20 replica of a church located in Delft, this time the Oude Kerk (the Old Church), 

The tower of this church is 10 centimeters out of line, and the same is the case with van der Sman's replica. 

This project took some 20 years. It was finished in 2008. when van der Sman was in his early seventies.

 part of Dom Toren (Dom Tower, (Utrecht)
the upper part had been brought down, probably for
maintenance, as can be seen in the very first image

Van der Sman tirelessly started on the next major project in scale 1:20, the Dom tower in Utrecht, which is the highest in the Netherlands at over 112 metres. His grandchildren laid the foundation stone in 2008 on his birthday, when he became 73.

Van der Sman had thought it would take twelve years to complete the construction, but after ten years the creation was already finished, so at the age of 83 he started a somewhat smaller project that was expected to take two years.

This became a project closer to home, the small Village Church in the Dorpsstraat in Nootdorp. 

It's a church with a long history. Founded as a wooden church somewhere between 1225 and 1250, it became a stone church in 1547, which has experienced many disasters over the centuries. Currently a national monument, it requires the necessary attention in terms of maintenance.

Building and tower are relatively small, so van der Sman made the replica, which only includes the tower, on 1:11 scale, so that it doesn't blend in with the other creations in the ensemble of creations.

Another project ?

When this project was completed, Van der Swan did not immediately start a new project. He filled his time with cycling and walking tours. 

However, when he was interviewed in June 2023 at the age of 88, he said he missed building and that he was already making drawings for a new project: the Bartholomeuskerk along the Veenweg in Nootdorp, not far from his home (image below).

Let's see whether and how this project develops. In the field of art environments, there are more non-professional artists who were still building creations at an advanced age.

this image from Google Streetview

Future of the creations

Chris van der Sman sometimes wonders what will happen to his creations in the future, when he is no longer there. He would be happy if they could be accommodated and maintained elsewhere. 

There is interest from Utrecht in locating the Dom Tower in a beautiful spot in or near the Galgenwaard Stadium. As for the replicas of the Delft churches there are currently no developments.

A popular Dutch theme?

In the Italian internet magazine about outsider art Bric-à-Brac  (2022, nr 5) I published an article entitled Arquitectura Fantástica en Los Países Bajos caracterizada par torres y castillos, discussing the fact that a quarter of the art environments in the Netherlands,documented in this weblog in early 2022, had to do with a skyward-facing structure (tower, church with tower, donjon, etc). 

Now that van der Sman's site is added to this blog, the share of such creations has only increased. This relatively large interest may have to do with an affinity of non-professional Dutch artists for beautiful buildings from former times. 

Documentation

* Article (August 2016) in newspaper Nederlandse Dagblad

* Article (February 2022) in journal Telstar Online, 

* Article (May 2022) in magazine Kerk in den Haag

* Article (June 2023) on the website of Omroep West, with a video (2'51", can't be embedded here)

Video

* Video (2023, YouTube, 1'56") by Hart van Nederland

Chris van der Sman,

Miniature churches in outdoor space

Sportparkweg 4

Nootdorp, Zuid Holland province, Netherlands

can be seen from the road

Google Streetview