mcauleyhouseartists: Bringing Alexander Calder to Life

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Bringing Alexander Calder to Life

Debbie Amylon

We had a great class yesterday using the work of Alexander Calder as our inspiration. Debbie Amylon, teacher/artist created her own Calder inspired pieces to get the other artists to see various shapes and lines that flow so effortlessly through Calder's work.

The class was a lot of fun, and I think the group will definitely want to learn more about Calder's work.

Here is quote from Calder which really resonates with his style :

The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them...spheres of different sizes, densities, colours and volumes, floating in space, traversing clouds, sprays of water, currents of air, viscosities and odors of the greatest variety and disparity.
- Alexander Calder

Artists : Rocco, Bob, Maria, and Deb.

What exciting shapes and colors!

To see more of Calder's work:

.http://www.flickr.com/photos/shootonce/sets/72157629484282517/.

OK- one more thing I can't resist sharing...Bob, our wildlife artist, discussed this:

and painted this:

Bob's Ocelot

Alexander Calder, Bob's story about his encounter with an ocelot, a super cute painting of an ocelot-
priceless !

I recently finished reading a new book on John Hoyland, and made a Facebook album of his work. Rocco's work reminds me a lot of Hoyland's cosmic abstract paintings. See what you think :

Flickr show of Hoyland's art: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shootonce/sets/72157629515164531/

About the Art Program

5 Ways to Grow as an Artist

So how would a Cassatt or a Henri or Picasso approach painting differently than we do today? How might this heartfelt fear of others controlling our painting process impact our self-understanding as artists? Here are five possible answers:

1. Making a successful picture is not the goal. Think of periods, such as childhood, when we grew, our self-understanding changed and we became more of who we are. There was an endless stream of events where we expressed ourselves and slowly began to discover the things that pleased us. As with the sense of freedom characterized above, the entire payoff was growth. The events of life when we grow are the things that happen along the way. Making art should be exactly the same. Paintings are just the series of events or steps we take. Let them go. Keep moving. Or as Henri implored, “Keep living.”

2. The painting process is always a beginning. As soon as the freshness evaporates (we are bored or lost or acquire interest in something else), stop. Do not think in terms of finishing. Picasso lectures eloquently on this. Finish is the death of our work because it means we are painting an expectation or “to be like” and that puts the brakes on painting to see and feel more deeply. Every beginning is a new prompt, a new point of departure. Begin everything. Finish nothing.

3. Ignore non-artist authorities. Juries, the grantors, the gallery, the direction from above are just so many fingers in our pie. All external measures are dangerous because they not only push us to performing, as opposed to creating, but their sense of worth takes over our own. This is precisely what Parisian artists fought against.

4. Get into a prolonged creative process. Have dozens of paintings in your studio that have been abandoned for one reason or another, left in various stages, unfinished but always complete as expressions of who you were at that moment. Work on several paintings simultaneously. You are not making shoes.

5. Furnish the world with your beauty, let the world see, touch and feel who you are. Scary I know. It is so much easier to hide within safe fortresses, the sources of praise and dignity that we can count on by pleasing our audience. This is the dreaded condition called style. We cannot be free to be who we are if we are not always risking being who we are in front of others.