“Two of the artists that influenced me are Alexander Calder and Frank Stella. Calder’s mobiles are like the hanging I-beams with prefab walls and I-beam parts lifted up by cranes to make buildings that were everywhere in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Many of my sculptures have hanging parts. Frank Stella used bent parallel lines in his paintings and sculptures. The wood I-beams are made of strips of wood glued together in parallel lines. Each I-beam has 10 to 12 strips to make it up. “
More about Frank Stella:
In 1959, Frank Stella gained early, immediate recognition with his series of coolly impersonal black striped paintings that turned the gestural brushwork and existential angst of Abstract Expressionism on its head. Focusing on the formal elements of art-making, Stella went on to create increasingly complicated work that seemed to follow a natural progression of dynamism, tactility, and scale: first, by expanding his initial monochrome palette to bright colors, and, later, moving painting into the third dimension through the incorporation of other, non-painterly elements onto the canvas. He ultimately went on to create large-scale freestanding sculptures, architectural structures, and the most complex work ever realized in the medium of printmaking. Stella’s virtually relentless experimentation has made him a key figure in American modernism, helping give rise to such developments as Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.
More about Alexander Calder:
Best known as the inventor of the mobile, Alexander Calder is considered the preeminent American sculptor of the twentieth century. Calder was fascinated by motion, which led him to develop a new art form–movable sculpture. By adding movable parts to his wire and sheet metal constructions, he gave them a life of their own, allowing them to endlessly rearrange themselves in an ever-changing pattern. Later in his career, he also created looming, standing constructions of intersecting planes of steel plate which he called stabiles. In Artists: From Michelangelo to Maya Lin, G. Aimée Ergas quotes a friend and critic of Calder who noted, “Public sculpture was a stuffed shirt’s paradise until [he] came along.” Calder felt the same way, and he once stated that “Above all, I feel art should be happy and not lugubrious.”
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