Today's post sort of connects back to yesterday's (below) about rock art in the American Southwest. Yesterday I opined that we currently treat the making of artworks as some special, noble act of self-expression, rather than as a part of daily human life. Today I found some powerfully simple sculpture:
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| Tube Lamp Study/Yellow sculpture by Ricky Swallow (www.rickyswallow.com) Currently exhibited at LA's Marc Foxx Gallery |
that I think links art back to the daily human world, in a couple of ways.
In this current body of work, sculptor Ricky Swallow chooses subjects that are often daily-use things like chairs, lamps, hats, cups, tires or dead birds (hough these subjects can be personal to the artist - like a french curve, a drawing tool that he might have on a desk). The shape of the "Lamp" piece shown above is simplified almost to an abstract, but it's still kind of recognizable as something you USE in daily life even if you don't realize it's a lamp. The size of the work (this one is 7 1/2" tall) also makes it something to which you can relate; it's about the size of: a desk lamp.
He also links the work to daily life through his process: he makes an initial model of the object using cardboard tubes and tape (you can just see the spiral lines in the photo above), and these features of the model end up in the final artwork - cast in bronze, then colored and finished in an intricate process. Think about that: he chooses to leave evidence of this interim model-building step - and of the daily-use materials he uses in that step -- in the final bronze work.
Why would the artist choose to do these things (apparently) to connect these new objects back to daily life? In his own words, he works with these subjects because there's a "collective ownership and understanding that one brings to such recognizable forms." In my words: we can all recognize his cup as a cup, because we have cups at home. I take this to mean he intends this beautiful work to be something that's close to our daily lives. You can see his work in galleries (it's at the Marc Foxx Gallery in LA thru December 22nd), but you can also feature it as something related to life. I use tape and cardboard tubes - and lamps and cups - so these pieces feels familiar to me. I like that.
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Today's creation is: a flyer I did for a local community Winter Solstice gathering coming up in a couple of weeks:
When I did the flyer, I reformatted and enhanced a NASA image from one of their/our incredible imaging satellites What you may not know is: since the satellite, cameras, launch costs and everything else in our space program is already paid for with our tax dollars, the images are in the public domain - and hence royalty-free for non-commercial uses. They really do have an incredible online library of hi-res images at nasa.gov .To be clear: the flyer is my creation; the image is not. Art? Or not art? You decide.
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In this current body of work, sculptor Ricky Swallow chooses subjects that are often daily-use things like chairs, lamps, hats, cups, tires or dead birds (hough these subjects can be personal to the artist - like a french curve, a drawing tool that he might have on a desk). The shape of the "Lamp" piece shown above is simplified almost to an abstract, but it's still kind of recognizable as something you USE in daily life even if you don't realize it's a lamp. The size of the work (this one is 7 1/2" tall) also makes it something to which you can relate; it's about the size of: a desk lamp.
He also links the work to daily life through his process: he makes an initial model of the object using cardboard tubes and tape (you can just see the spiral lines in the photo above), and these features of the model end up in the final artwork - cast in bronze, then colored and finished in an intricate process. Think about that: he chooses to leave evidence of this interim model-building step - and of the daily-use materials he uses in that step -- in the final bronze work.
Why would the artist choose to do these things (apparently) to connect these new objects back to daily life? In his own words, he works with these subjects because there's a "collective ownership and understanding that one brings to such recognizable forms." In my words: we can all recognize his cup as a cup, because we have cups at home. I take this to mean he intends this beautiful work to be something that's close to our daily lives. You can see his work in galleries (it's at the Marc Foxx Gallery in LA thru December 22nd), but you can also feature it as something related to life. I use tape and cardboard tubes - and lamps and cups - so these pieces feels familiar to me. I like that.
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Today's creation is: a flyer I did for a local community Winter Solstice gathering coming up in a couple of weeks:
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| (adapted from an original image © NASA) |
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| © me; get the full-res flyer HERE |
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