Posts Tagged ‘plastic’

Artist of the moment………….Dewain Valentine

{ March 30, 2015 @ 2:07 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Dewain Valentine is an American artist renown for his minimalist style. Dewain Valentine was born in Fort Collins, Colorado in the year 1936.

The artist was inspired by modern painters including Larry Bell and Ken Price.

Many sculptures are made of fiberglass and/or resin. For subject matter Valentine often refers to skies. Valentine is sometimes associated with the Light and Space movement.

Valentine helped to develop a special resin that for the first time allowed artists to work with sculptures larger than 50 pounds. Valentine also prefers a very smooth finish, to give the appearance of being new and machine built.

Below the surface of Valentine’s work is discussed in further detail with more examples shown:

The artist is based out of Gardena, California.

Valentine is part of the collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,  and the Denver Museum of Art.

The artist is a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Price range information: Large disks by Valentine can reach the $1 million dollar mark. Smaller table top size works range from a few thousand to $35,000.

Valentine gives the viewer a wonderful combination of basic geometric shapes with cutting edge materials that he helped to invent! A wonderful example of modern art.

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Artist of the moment…George Segal….

{ March 2, 2013 @ 1:06 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Lets take a closer look at the great American sculptor George Segal. Segal was born in New York city in the year 1924. Segal is associated with the Pop Art movement.

Segal was married to his wife Helen from 1946 until his death in 2000.

For most of his life Segal lived on as chicken farm. The farm was located in New Jersey.
Segal lived on the farm from the early 1950s until he died in 2000.

The artist was most prolific as a photographer during the later years of his life.
Segal was important to the career of the artist John Cage. Cage was not only a
superb minimalist painter, but also a composer and song writer.

Segal had many art events at his farm, they were known as happenings.

In 1999 Segal was given the National Medal of the Arts.

For his collegiate studies Segal attended many well known art institutions including
Pratt, Cooper Union, New York University, and Rutgers studying art and earning a
teaching degree.

Price range info: Larger works such as Chance Meeting can break the
$600,000 mark. Segal was prolific and many works from small works
in plaster, serigraphs, pastel,and etchings can be found for less than four
thousand dollars.

In this clip we  see a wonderful work about people standing in line waiting for food in the midst of the Great Depression. Though the viewer might think that the people are sad or depressed, like a Kathe Kollwitz etching, the  people seem just to be waiting patiently.

Like the great Andy Warhol Segal enjoyed taking photographs. In this clip we see some of his work with the lens.

I love the way Segal is able to capture the essence of the person, similar to one of my favorite sculptors Duane Hanson. Hanson was able to capture an exact moment in time with people from the 60s and 70s. Awesome likeness with vintage clothing. Here is a great example of Duane Hanson’s style with a self portrait of himself featuring a model. Hanson lived from 1925 until 1996, I have blogged about him before.

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In this clip we visit some more sculptures by George Segal and interpret the moods of the characters. That is what I enjoy most about the artist, you can’t tell the mood of the character from a distance!

Segal was known mainly as casting works with plaster. He also did some great work with cast paper and vacuum formed plastic. Very unique interpretations!

In this clip we visit a sculpture installation on a college campus dealing with circus acrobats by George Segal.