The lawn of the Hampshire County Courthouse belongs to everyone. And so now does the final creation of an artist who for decades chased a dream of capturing the beauty of everyday life and the nobility of ordinary people.
Greg Stone’s 4-foot bronze statue of a girl tending an injured dove will be his enduring message to people in the heart of downtown Northampton.
Hope is the message. It is always needed – and there this gift to the Valley now stands, in the slight frame of this girl and this dove, on the lawn at the corner of Main and King streets, ready to touch anyone who steps up and studies it.
The work, finished shortly before Stone died of colon cancer Sept. 29, invites people to pause in their workaday errands and minister, as this young girl does, to the fragile wonder of life and to appreciate the connection between all beings.
That’s a big message to assign to a few pounds of metal. That Stone could summon profound feelings from a simple gesture speaks volumes of his talent. The new installation sits just a few blocks east of Stone’s owl sculpture, created to honor a legendary Northampton retailer Eva Trager. He believed in wings.
More than 100 people came to see Stone’s final work unveiled. They arrived eager to see what he had created in his final sculptural commission and simply to be together one more time as Stone’s family, friends and admirers. The artist’s older brother, Charles “Rocky” Stone, said it was his brother’s way to make friends with people, too many to count, “from all walks of life.”
Here on the lawn, more than a month after his death at home in Hatfield, was Stone speaking once more through his work. People’s eyes became wet as a cloth covering the sculpture slid away.
While Stone never had children of his own, he celebrated them for their goodness. His commissioned sculpture of Anne Frank, the Dutch girl who died in the Holocaust, sits installed at the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, Idaho.
Like the girl reaching for the injured dove in Northampton, the Frank he depicts is looking for balance. The sculpture shows her tipping forward on a chair to peer through a curtain, as she and her family hid in an attic from the Nazis. The work was paid for by schoolchildren throughout Idaho.
On the courthouse lawn, another girl also reaches out, in hope. “The figure represents all young people in our community whose good work is having an extraordinary impact,” Stone had written of the work. “And the dove represents our compassion and vision of peace for the future.”
Stone wasn’t one to go on at length about his artistic process. Knowing the sculpture would be his last, he may have made an exception.
Mostly, Stone spoke through his work. His talent as a painter, local art experts say, could have made him a wealthy man through private commissions. But Stone preferred to pursue subjects that interested him, not paychecks.
In his final years, he shifted his focus from Northampton, where his street paintings helped defined his early work, to grittier scenes in Holyoke. Gentrification in Northampton had changed the landscape and removed many of the characters that had caught Stone’s eye.
And in his final months, as if seeking to replenish his own soul, Stone had been traveling New England and soaking in its beauty, from river gorges to seascapes, meditating on those places with the painterly tools that had always brought him joy.
Todd Ford, executive director of the Hampshire Council of Governments, told listeners at the unveiling that Stone needed to summon everything he had to complete the commission. “It’s a testament to his strength that he finished it,” Ford said.
“Extraordinary impact,” Stone said of local children. He wouldn’t have wanted people to speak that way of his own work. But in a sculpture like this final one, and in the wide body of work in private and public collections, Stone’s vision endures. The world he captured is a place in which people, rich or poor, seem ready to give. Their mute generosity, and this artist’s own determination to capture it, helps hope take flight.