Modern Artist Spotlight – Rob Mulholland

(image via The Daily Mail - resized for display)

Rob Mulholland is a sculptor and installation artist based in the United Kingdom, who does some pretty awesome things with mirrored surfaces. Seriously, this guy’s work Vestige is gut-wrenching thought provoking. To quote the artist:

The six male and female figures represent a vestige, a faint trace of the past people and communities that once occupied and lived in this space. The figures absorb their environment, reflecting in their surface the daily changes of life in the forest. They create a visual notion of non – space. A void as if they are at one moment part of our world and then as they fade into the forest they become an intangible outline.

His most recent work Tide Flow – Time Flow invites us to consider the flow of evolution in a similar fashion. I personally think the use of mirrored surfaces makes the viewer more likely to examine themselves and their own part in the play we call existence.

Of course, Mr. Mulholland has works in other mediums that you would expect from an inventive modern sculptor, including more perishable materials and items from mundane life. You can see the theme of humans relating to their past and their environment through much of his works. But these stainless steel mirrored works are a stroke of pure genius.

Artist’s website - http://www.robmulholland.co.uk/

When do we consider someone an "artist"?

It is said that a writer is someone who writes.

When I consider "spotlighting" a modern artist, I usually select people who are primarily known as fine art artists. This has not been a conscious decision on my part and until today, I really didn't put much thought to the matter. In fact, I don't usually put much thought into it at all. I just come across an artist I find interesting and I post about him/her.

Well, I decided this week that I would do someone who is mostly known as a craftsman and a webcomic artist - "Doc" Nickel, creator of The White Board. By trade, he's an machinist who specializes in paintball guns/markers (otherwise known as an "airsmith"). By academic standards, this might not qualify him as an "artist".

However, let me present the follow piece of sculpture:





Rage by 'Doc' Nickel is a sculpture wrought entirely by hand, each piece of 22 gauge sheet steel was formed using only hammers, wood blocks and small handbuilt anvils. Each of the seventy-nine individual plates are welded to an internal steel frame, all of which is supported by a graceful steel spar over a handmade Red Oak base. - from the website.


Shall we compare it to the cluster qualities of high art?

1) Direct Pleasure - yep.
2) Skill and virtuosity - definitely.
3) Style - check.
4) Novelty and creativity - yes.
5) Critism (or "illicits a positive or negative judgment") - I believe so.
6) Representation - check.
7) Special focus - yes.
8) Expressed individuality - yes.
9) Emotional saturation - most definitely.
10) Intellectual challenge - putting 79 pieces together is definitely an intellectual challenge.
11) Art traditions or institutions - okay, you got me here, but I'm still not sold that this is a valid criterion.
12) Imaginative experience - yep.

Does someone have to make a living at high art to be an artist? No. Poet and painter William Blake made his living as an engraver, printer, and illustrator. Here is my favorite work of Blake's Ancient of Days:



Perhaps Doc will not end up in the art history textbooks, but I believe he is definitely worthy of the title of "modern artist".

Modern Artist Spotlight - Tom Shannon

Tom Shannon's visually perplexing sculptures and installations allude to unseen forces better known to physics -- and to Star Trek fans -- than to conventional art.
- Art in America



I appreciate Tom Shannon's sculptures because they are not only aethetically engaging, pleasing and inspiring, but they are also wonders of science and technology, which engage the analytical as well as the artistic mind. The Artist's Official Website and the following TED.com video give wonderful examples of his works.

Gravity-defying sculpture inspired by the sun, the earth, the moon.



As a student of the mind, I am touched by his paintings on a couple of levels. First, the marriage of order and chaos - of math and art. Second, on the level of a creative and artistic mind being clever and resourceful enough to find a way to create works of interest and beauty, even while suffering from Parkinson's Disease. Lastly, and most importantly, of the human spirit to strive in the face of difficulty.

The painter and the pendulum

Art and public spaces

Olafur Eliasson does a wonderful job of showing how making public spaces an art piece, especially interactive, can help people become more aware of their surroundings and relate to them more. He also explains why this happens with things, such as waterfalls.

Of course, Eliasson uses artistic elements that reflect nature into his public spaces, which makes them more human than many man-made spaces. I believe that this reflection of nature that creates a common ground for all humans, whereas the obviously artificial space limits the way people relate to it.

Teddy Roosevelt saw the same thing in nature's effect on humans when he created the US Natural Parks system. He saw the National Parks where people of all classes could visit and be the same.

So nature reflected in art creates common ground. What does other styles of public architecture do? During the Federalist Period in the United States, elements of Ancient Greek architecture was used to bring a sense of order, beauty and achievement from that ancient democracy to the young country. Romanesque architecture was meant to life the spirit and strengthen faith. Crisp, clean, artificial architecture is meant to drive the imagination into future endeavors.

Likewise, shoddy buildings, and other signs of urban decay, negatively affect the psyches of those who live around it. The only exception to the "building decay=depression" rule I've found is when the decay isn't a crumbling into dust, but a reclaimation into nature. In which case, it often strikes me as nature embracing the structure--a marriage of art and life.

Artist report for my Arts and Human Values Class

Antony Gormley
Arts and Human Values


British artist and sculptor Antony Gormley was born August 30th, 1950, as the youngest of seven children, to prosperous family in Hampstead, England. Gormley studied at Ampleforth College; Trinity College, Cambridge; and various other colleges in London, before completing his education with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Art. In the middle of his artistic education, he spent five years in India and Sri Lanka to study Buddhism. In 1994, Gormley won the Turner Prize with Field for the British Isles. He is currently a trustee of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

Though he has been known to work in several media, (such as terra cotta, wood, and bread and wax) Gormley is mainly known for using metal castings of his own body. According to radio interviews with the BBC, Gormley prefers to actually be a part of his work materials while creating his pieces, to truly feel the experience he is trying to inspire. His casts are done with the help of his wife and a workman. He is first covered in cling wrap (i.e. plastic wrap), which provides a better barrier between him and the plaster than Vaseline does. Then his wife applies the plaster and after it dries, she cuts him out of the mold. Then fibreglass and metal (usually lead) is used to create the figures. Gormley feels the skin-like nature of his sculptures is so important that he will often list "air" as a material used.

Gormley is known for making the setting part of his works. In Total Strangers (1997), his metal figures are placed not only in the museum, but outside as well, with one figure looking at another through a window. In Land, Sea and Air II (1982), he has three figures in various positions on a beach, contemplating the elements. Scuplture for Derry Walls (1987) has three sets of double figures, standing back to back, one always facing towards the Catholic regions of Ireland, while the other faces the Protestant regions. Each figure gives the impression of setting a boundary and blocking the way. A piece I find most intriguing is Learning to Think (1991), which shows five figures hanging from the ceiling as if their heads were above it. Better know works of Gormley include his Field series, Iron: Man (1993), Another Place (1997) and Angel of the North (1998). An apparently lesser known piece is the Oslo Holocaust Memorial (2000), where he forgoes his normal penchant for human forms and has six empty chairs instead.

Antony Gormley firmly believes that art is meant to be a universal experience and not just something for people with disposable income. Art has the potential to connect people to the real world and themselves. The redemptive qualities of art cannot fully be realized in specialized settings such as an art gallery or museum or other refined spaces. Art galleries have an important part in the art world, however they should not be the final goal, but as a means to get art into the real world, where it can work on the souls of everyone.

[side note: you can find the works mentioned if you go to Antony Gormley's main site and click on "walk through".]