Among other projects, ceramic artist Katharine Morling creates ceramic sculptures that are strategically painted with black stain to give them the appearance of ink drawings.
[Via The Awesomer by way of Neatorama]
Harikrishnan Panicker and Deepti Nair are an artist couple living and working in Denver, Colorado.
Among their other projects, Hari & Deepti create cut paper shadow boxes, illuminated with battery powered lights. When photographed in darkness, their scenes take on a deep, theatrical feeling.
Like all sculpture and dimensional work, photographs can only give a limited impression of what the work would look like in person.
There is a video on Vimeo of the process by which a large cut paper diorama window display was created (images above, bottom).
You can see a selection of the cut paper shadow boxes on the Black Book Gallery, and more on Harikrishnan Panicker’s portfolio site, Thumb Demon.
[Via Mark Strauss on io9]
I’m usually not one to watch award shows; I would rather (quite literally) watch paint dry. However, in the case of the Academy Awards, I usually will take note the day after of mentions in the category of Best Animated Short Film.
This year’s winner in that category, Mr. Hublot, a CGI animated short directed by Laurent Witz, is delightful and beautifully realized. It is also, at least for the time being, available to be watched in it entirety on YouTube (albeit not at high resolution).
I found it particularly interesting that the main character, and to a large extent, the look of the film in general, is based on sculptures by Stéphane Halleux (above, bottom images), who I profiled back in 2007 here on Lines and Colors.
As far as I know, Halleux was not involved directly in the making of the film, at least I couldn’t find mention of his participation beyond the initial “based on” credit.
[Via io9]
Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that, with a few exceptions, I’m not particularly fond of modernism — especially post-war American modernism.
Sculptor Alexander calder is certainly one of the exceptions. I’ve loved his work since I was introduced to it when I was in high-school, where we were encouraged to make our own “mobiles” in art class. This was reinforced by the fact that Calder and his family of sculptors (father and grandfather) were from here in Philadelphia, and there are examples all around, including the wonderful large mobile called Ghost in the great staircase hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Calder created his sculptures with wire and wonderful flat metal shapes that looked like the inspiration for the best 60’s modern design and the related styles of animation. And Calder’s sculptures are animated! They move, suspended from wires or balanced on pedestals, with an uncanny slow-motion dance of balance and grace, driven by the most subtle disturbances in the air around them.
Most sculptures are about form and space, and how one defines the other (see my post on Bernini). Calder’s sculptures were also about air and time and gravity.
Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic is a show now on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that continues to July 27, 2014.
There is a photo set on Flickr (from which I have excerpted the photos above). Mark Frauenfelder has an article on Boing Boing in which he describes visiting the exhibit and coming home inspired.
For more, including a discussion of why I find Calder so fascinating, see my 2006 article on Alexander Calder.
The Gates of Hell was an ambitious and astonishing work by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin that was never realized in his lifetime.
The sculpture exists in two versions, one of which was cast in bronze posthumously from reconstructed plaster casts. The work stands almost 30 feet (6m) high and 12 feet (4m) wide, with over 180 figures representing themes from Dante Alighieri’s Devine Comedy.
The sculpture contains many figures and sets of figures that were eventually developed into independent works by Rodin, including his famous The Thinker. Rodin worked on the doors off and on for 37 years, never actually finishing the work.
There is a video here that discusses the the work and the two different versions created by Rodin.
There are three original bronze casts, at the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Rodin Museum here in Philadelphia and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.
Three more were subsequently cast by the Musée Rodin, and are in Zurich, Seoul, Korea and Stanford University in California.
Microbiologist and photographer J.W. Kern has taken a rather remarkable high-resolution (112 megapixel) photograph of the Stanford casting and made it available on Flickr (click on “Original” for the high-res version, which is 18mb). Here is Kern’s article about the sculpture and the photo.
[Via MetaFilter]
Shintaro Ohata is an artist from Hiroshima, Japan who is both a painter and a sculptor.
Artists who are both sculptors and painters are not unusual. Ohata, however, frequently combines the two mediums in single works in which a painting and sculpture are displayed together as a mixed two dimensional – three dimensional work.
The sculptures are textured and painted in a way that carries forward the colors and textures of a painting. The painting and sculpture are then arranged and lit in a way that gives them additional visual continuity. These form scenes, in which the painting acts as a backdrop for the sculpture and the sculpture acts as a three dimensional projection of the painting.
As remarkable as the effect is in photographs, I would love to see these in person.
Ohata also paints stand-alone paintings in acrylic, in which the figures in the paintings bear an uncanny resemblance to his sculpted figures (above, bottom).
[Via Gizmodo]
