Use the comments below and name where this artwork is!

Extra bonus points if you can name the artist – or the model.

Or check back for the answer tomorrow.

Hint – The artist also memorialized Alan Berg! (of course it’s in Portland.)

NOT ANSWERED – Those sturdy Fiskar’s are in the hand of a statue of Carolyn Marks-Bax, a neighbor of Holladay Park, at NE 11th Avenue & Holladay Street, adjacent to Lloyd Center and the MAX line.

Marks-Bax is a former neighborhood organizer, aide to former County Commissioner Sharron Kelley, and organizer of the Sullivan’s Gulch Blackberry Festival – all of which don’t appear to be operative.

The gardener’s hand is attached to a life size bronze statue, A Neighborhood Gardner of Marks-Bax, who I assume defines the prototypical Portland rose trimmer. The statue is one of three, a vase of bronze flowers, Flowers from a Neighborhood Garden, and a geometric structure which contains a batch of domestic elements, a toy house, a bagel, a hand shovel, called Isolated Molecule for a Good Neighborhood.

The artist is Tad Savinar, a fellow with a complicated resume and wide interests + curiosity.

The three parts surround a fountain by Murase Associates which kids love in the summertime. It’s one where water shoots out of the cement at rhythmic or random moments, and with both parking and a fully functioning water pump, it’s much better than the fountain at the Rose Quarter.

The park has been a byway for fifty years, a short distance to cross between here and there. It has enormous beautiful trees, flowering rose bushes, picnic benches, but is surrounded by traffic; humans hurrying.

Savinar’s sculptures are boring, mundane, seemingly domestic and like a lot of his stuff, need a missing explanation. Casting bronze is an expensive proposition, and the message of rendering banal images in an extravagant manner is to cherish the provincial character of Portland’s inner suburbia.

Why love Portland – or even more insular, why cherish this middle class frumpery? 1. Reason – Portland is possibly the safest place in the world, and people come here because nothing of any importance has ever happened here. They like safe. They like boring. They’ll devote their years to pruning and composting and book-reading and raising children who love fountains.

And those who would challenge this paradigm just to make this bumbling burg wake up, young artists, troublemakers, criminals and political intellectuals, ought to do some traveling first, so they can recognize sanctuary and it’s vital importance.