☰ Jonathan Thomson Art

THE FIRM SAU WA FONG PUBLIC ART

My larger than life-size “Mother and Child” has been installed at the entrance to The Firm Hair and Beauty Boutique in the iconic pedestrian-only district of Sau Wa Fong in Wanchai. Sau Wa Fong is a very cool low-rise enclave with a very traditional “old Hong Kong” residential character.

The mother and child is one of the great themes in art. It touches on sex, fertility and maternity; childhood, innocence, care, protection and growth; intimacy, warmth, tenderness and love; and on all of the concerns that a parent has for the life of a child. In this work the figures are walking hand in hand, the woman stooped slightly to better assist the child to make her own way in the world, supported and protected but independent and self-assured. It is a work which speaks to the caring community character of the Sau Wa Fong neighbourhood.

Hong Kong University Public Art Placement

My larger than life-size sculpture "Lost in a Good Book" has been installed at the main entrance of the Hong Kong University Library as an inspiration to students and staff and a celebration of the joys of reading.

This sculpture is part of a series of recent works that employ simplified forms abstracted from the human body to convey a languorous sensuality, harmony and grace. They draw inspiration from classical traditions but smooth out all extraneous detail in order to make the figure a universal everyman or woman. Their clean elegant styling expresses the sensuality, vitality and spirituality of the human form.

They eschew political readings and aim to convey a calm, poised, balanced rationality and speak to the seriousness of truth to nature and truth to art.

These sculptures start as a 1/6 life-size figurine moulded in clay around a wire armature. They are then scanned in 3D and can be enlarged to any size before being cast in aluminium. The soft sheen of the brushed aluminium surface is at once both warm and cool. Its silvery gleam melds light and shadow, lightens the apparent mass and solidity of the figure and unites the mounds and hollows of form and void.

These works have been influenced by the Classicism of Canova, the Realism of Rodin, the Measure of Maillol, the Monumentality of Moore, the Abstraction of Arp, the Wonder of Whiteley and the Passion of Picasso.