The Wooden Sculpture Garden of Romano Gabriel

The Wooden Sculpture Garden of Romano Gabriel. . Romano Gabriel spent nearly three decades making the hundreds of brilliant objects filling the front yard of his Eureka home. Gabriel fashioned his brightly painted trees and flowers out of vegetable crates, adding droll faces and figures. Some of the figures were commentaries on contemporary people or events, political or religious. Romano Gabriel’s Wooden Garden was a seeming jumble of objects: taller in back, smaller in front, set up in the approximately thirty by sixty foot yard, behind the picket fence, intended to be seen by passersby., The folk art of Romano Gabriel is internationally renown for its originality of ideas, its freedom of fantasy and the nature of Romano Gabriel’s commitment to his art., Romano Gabriel was born in Mura, Italy, in about 1887 and worked with his father as a furniture maker before setting off for America in 1913. Soon after his arrival in the United States, the artist served in World War I, then settled in Eureka where he worked as a carpenter and gardener, and built at least six houses., Many of the original pieces in the Sculpture Garden were cut with a hand saw and additional hand carving. Later the artist used a small electric saw as he worked in the small shed in his yard, peeking out secretly to observe the people who stopped to see his work. Some of the pieces were animated by motors., Romano Gabriel’s models emerged from memories of his travels and his homeland as well as from his favorite magazines. Gabriel was known as an introvert. Many trees in the Garden seem purely decorative, other pieces embody their creator’s attitudes about society and its institutions and his reactions to public events., As the years passed, Gabriel’s garden grew until it almost completely obscured his house, and became a tourist attraction gaining national and international attention. Photographs of the sculptures have been exhibited at Harvard and M.I.T. as well as in the magazines Architecture Plus and Art News among others, and in the book All Their Own., Romano Gabriel died in 1977, ten years after he added the final touches to his wooden works. In the year of his death, notification arrived from the California Arts Council that the Wooden Sculpture Garden had been designated a cultural landmark.