A NANCY GRAVES SCULPTURE GROWS AT CROCKER CENTER

Nancy Graves is an elegant-looking artist with a knife in her pocket. She doesn’t use it to stave off muggers near her SoHo studio in New York; she only attacks plants and only for art’s sake. Graves casts them in bronze, assembles the metal parts in gravity-defying thickets and paints them in polyurethane colors bright enough to knock the socks off Mother Nature.

With her face on the February cover of Artnews and a major piece about her in Connoisseur’s February issue, Graves arrived recently in Los Angeles to unveil her largest outdoor sculpture, “Sequi,” a 13-foot-tall, 20-foot-wide painted bronze that looks like a refugee from a botanist’s hallucination. The sculpture, located at Crocker Center and visible from Grand Avenue, was dedicated late Thursday afternoon.

Simultaneously friendly and threatening, “Sequi” (whose name has no significance outside the artist’s accounting system) is both familiar and foreign, natural and expressionistic. Its parts are scaled-up castings from real plants--deerfoot ferns, banana blossoms, halyconia (lobster claws), seed pods and vines--plus an angular component inspired by Chinese scissors.

Loosely painted in broad sections of pigment, with contrasting hues on opposite sides and vibrant details splashed on veins and berries, “Sequi” presents a different color experience from every angle.

The unorthodox sculpture has an air of spontaneity about it, in striking contrast to traditional use of bronze, but Graves describes a two-year process of “very hard work” in her studio and at Tallix Foundry in Peekskill, N.Y. Traveling by train to Tallix several days a week, Graves supervised the massive project, mostly carried out by technicians who also produce sculpture for Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Willem De Kooning and Reuben Nakian.

In an interview at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the tall, slim, 45-year-old strawberry blond with Hepburn-style cheekbones and pompadour recounted the intricacies of enlarging a smaller sculpture, building a stainless-steel armature (for strength and permanence) and modeling clay on it. Rubber-coated plaster waste molds were made of the clay forms, which were then cast in bronze and assembled. Welded joints had to chased. Then the whole piece was sandblasted to remove impurities and etched to make it porous enough to receive paint.

After the piece was repeatedly primed, Graves painted it in two days with the help of three assistants and four paint mixers. “The paint is catalyzing. It’s liquid at first, then increasingly viscous until it is applied as an impasto,” she explains. “The fun of the painting is in seeing how the forms reveal themselves.” Though she plans carefully, “there are surprises in the opticality, the way one color radiates against another.” The process constantly requires aesthetic decisions, such as allowing paint drips “to define gravity” and accentuate the character of the material.

A graduate of Vassar and Yale, and this year’s winner of the Yale Arts Award for Distinguished Artistic Achievement, Graves made her first big mark in the art world in the late ‘60s when she created realistic, life-size camels of synthetic materials. One critic called her “subversive” for daring to bring natural history into a sphere dominated by formalism.

Graves rather likes the label, though she says she wasn’t “imitating taxidermy but emulating it” and that her real subversion is “only an effort to change the way we see.” What interests her now is “testing parameters of building” by creating things that “look as if they shouldn’t work.” She has to accept that only limited masses of bronze can be cast at once, but she has repeatedly tested the foundry’s ability to construct heavy, cantilevered forms that appear weightless.

She has also treated a hallowed material irreverently by painting it with expressionistic fervor. As for her choice of exotic plants, it’s less a matter of wanting “large, lush, organic forms” than of finding those that can be used as “building elements.”

Pleased with her growing representation in Los Angeles, Graves says that her work in the County Museum of Art’s collection is her “first fabricated piece, enlarged from cast bronze,” while “Sequi” is her “most significant outdoor sculpture.”

She considers the Crocker commission “a real plum. It’s one of most prestigious sites in the country and it’s ideal for my piece. When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it.” Though she had to give “Sequi” a fourth “foot” for stability (extending a vine from her original plan) and alter its location slightly to anchor the piece securely, she insists that problems were almost nonexistent.

Full of praise for her sculpture’s new home, she says “the pink granite pavement doesn’t sap color like black would; it allows the color to glow. The plantings are in a scale that doesn’t compete with the piece. The trees won’t grow to 500 feet, and I think the sculpture will be well maintained.” Graves also lauds the sculpture’s visibility and “relationship to the street,” its proximity to the new Museum of Contemporary Art and the Music Center, and its part in the cultural refurbishment of downtown Los Angeles. “It’s the perfect site,” she says.