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'Asia',frontal view
Published: 2007-04-29 03:17:33 +0000 UTC; Views: 8798; Favourites: 309; Downloads: 109
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Description
This is a portrait of someone I used to love very much,still very much a friend. She was pretty much the first Japanese person I had ever known. Her ancient culture and its orientation towards art and decoration opened my eyes to new realms of expression and artistic freedom.life size-welded steel
This piece is available for purchase.
Please note me for pricing.
Here's short video which helps explain the piece:
[link]
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Comments: 214
Great-great-great what an amazing work!?! compliment
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Thank you Michael.
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You are most welcome
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Thank you Angele...
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You're welcome, Stephen.
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HAVE BEEN FEATURED IN A NEWS ARTICLE:
[link]
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In my opinion you have achieved in this work, what I understand to be the essence of 'Japanese'. A lightness of spirit..countered with beauty and tenacity.
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That one was a labor of love even if a little bittersweet...
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I have noticed that often the best creative work occurs when there is truly something to say and emotions are heightened. This work is such a beautiful example of transferring the energy of a situation and using the learned insight.
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Thank you Julie,
My art is like a type of mental floss for me.If I can externalize a theme, painful or otherwise,it helps me to digest psychic material and leaves me clean and refreshed,able to once again absorb...
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I agree!......what would we do without artist expression! It sounds too bleak to contemplate.
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amazing use of different textures, great expression and just... wow, stunning!
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Thank you so much...
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Strong and peaceful at the same time, this piece has a wonderful sense of stillness.
In contrast to what many have written here, though, I see this piece as a helmet...it simply has the look: mask, protection, facade, projection. I see the peace and the sensuousness of the person in the sculpture but it strikes me differently than it does everyone else: please, forgive my presumptuousness, but I get the impression that you loved the image you had in your mind as to who this woman was and that in the end, she wasn't that person.
I don't mean to imply deception of any kind but more that none of us is really what someone else may see. We are all both more and less than the vision, the idea, another may have of us. In addition, we hold pictures of others inside us, ideas and feelings that may not be true in total. Our disappointment with others often stems from them not living up to our unrealistic expectations of them. Does that make sense?
If I'm waaaay off the mark, just mentally smack me, dismiss me and go on about your day.
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Not way off the mark at all,
We all bring our own personal emotional histories to any consideration of an art piece especially if we resonate in some way with the piece(good or bad).Curiously ,critics often reveal more about their own experience in their published fictional accounts of artists works and motivations than anything directly pertaining to the artist and his specific work. Art often functions as a mirror,it reflects the artists understanding of himself while at the same time revealing reflections in the eyes of viewers.
Here is a quote from some "fiction" I wrote,which is a more prosaic but in a sense more accurate description of some of the broader lessons I learned about love through that relationship,manifested in a symbolic way through the sculpture...
The narrator is a ghost who was separated from his betrothed by death in a tragic accident on the very day of his actual wedding...
Love quote from βDearly Departedβ
There are those who say,β love hurtsβ, and in their defended posture deny emotions they were meant to feel. And there are others who say,β love sets you freeβ, and I have my own sad predicament to contradict this naΓ―ve statement.
But the truth is, love dignifies our existence. It can be the greatest binder, or the most singular solvent in our lives. It can give us focus and clarity, and it can also diffuse many things. But that we must experience this contradiction, is part of the evolution of ourselves. The capacity to love, that is our greatest inheritance.
It so galvanizes our contentious emotions that our soul grows from this depth of feeling. And it gives us a glimpse at the connectedness of all things, a view which, even obscured by joy or pain, remains undeniable. I know now, the meaning of my life was a product of that love. The tender mercies, the union of spirits, the blending, the stirring and the parting again, these events have given my soul a well worn but polished sheen, smooth and streamlined for the voyage through experience and beyond.
And the gentle one Iβve left behind?
She still feels the depth of my love.
And though I am no more, the bond we built is not brokenβ¦
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All emotions can be powerful things but love is the only one I've found that opens us so completely and leaves us so incredibly vulnerable to another.
'We all bring our own personal emotional histories to any consideration of an art piece...'
True. I think that pretty much every single thing we do and think is in some way a culmination of our lives and experiences up to that point.
"We do not see the lens through which we look."
- Ruth Benedict
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"All emotions can be powerful things but love is the only one I've found that opens us so completely and leaves us so incredibly vulnerable to another."
I hate that when that happens...LOL
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Did you form or cast the face portion? This looks amazing
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I fabricated the whole thing on that one,
but I DO utilize body molds as a guide for some figurative pieces.All fabricated.
I have a whole process I've engineered to restructure and reinforce very thin shell molds taken off the live model,so that they can accommodate the heat of welding and the weight of steel (bronze,or stainless steel)punch parts welded into the molds. There is allot more to it than this but that's the basics. And I hope to produce an instructional video on the process at some point...
The piece "Asia" was a portrait in retrospect of a woman I loved (for a time) more than life itself,and so had her visual so locked in memory that I was able to reproduce her visage in steel 10 years later.
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I cant wait to see that video when you get to it
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A pre-requisite for anyone to take advantage of the process is knowledge of MIG welding.
Have you learned to weld ?
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I'm learning next semester and I'm very excited about it.
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The community college here in my town. I'm working on going into a metals major in art at Illinois State. Not far into it yet, but I'm working on it, I want to learn everything!
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That's fantastic Keiko,
If I'm still vertical by the time you master MIG (wirefeed welding),and you want to learn the process of turning a living ,breathing ,human body into a similarly lifelike metal sculpture,then get in touch and I'll teach it to you start to finish,by correspondence. Six years teaching at U.C.Berkeley in my capacity as sculpture technician,and NO ONE was interested. I've been amazed that nobody wants this knowledge, but you know you can lead a horse to water...etc...
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What a wonderful and amazing piece of sculpture! Very inspirational indeed. I like how the spheres are cleverly built up to make the face.
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Thank you Richard,
there's a new interview in the Artisan Crafts Club that outlines my process.
I'll bet someone like you could use the same technique,but maybe not with metal...
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Hmmm.....*brain starts whirring* .....maybe indeed!
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Artisan Crafts Club has just posted my interview,in it there is a brief description of the technique for taking body molds (the first step of this sculptural process). If you actually get into it I'd be happy to give you tips and pointers that can streamline the process...
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Thankyou...I'll see how I go!
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Not that you even need a mold as guide Richard,
But the technique has applications in other areas.
I took molds of a big whale vertebrae and hope to make a metal sculpture of that someday...
So it doesn't have to be just the human figure.
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Excellent! Very interesting....I look forward to seeing that! I read the Artisan Craft article and making moulds of people is a great way of making a template.
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beautifull. perfect.
i like..
(xcuse for my english, i'm french)
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Thank you Eric,
Wow,that's a hell of a profile you have there friend...LOL
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Thank you Richard...
SOOOOOO sick she was...
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I don't know what you had in mind when you created this. Primeval and organic work. Beautiful death mask. I hope I look like that.
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Well,she's not dead quite yet...LOL
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