Category Archives: Sculpting Magic

The wizards who build amazing 3-dimensional forms can be found here

Extreme Knitting- Looped madness

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Loop after loop Agata Oleksiak crochets anything that enters her bubble; even people! Olek was born in Poland and graduated with a degree in Cultural Studies, she moved away from the ” industrial, close-minded Silesia,” a region in Poland, when she rediscovered her crochet abilities while in New York- where she’s been knitting art ever since.

She has stated that she chose to crochet as a means to do two things at once: to watch movies and make some great art. She has been quoted saying, “Life and art are inseparable. The movies I watch while crocheting influence my work, and my work dictates the films I select.” I’d do the same to keep myself interested for the many hours of knitting to be done.

Her artistic goal is to bring renewed color, life and energy with a splash of surprise to a living space- presenting these spaces to the public. Her installations covering some very iconic structures, such as the business district bull.


She often collaborates with neighborhoods to highlight the, “economic and social reality in our community,” and takes advantage of New York’s many diversified areas to do so.

Olek’s work has been presented in galleries from Brooklyn to Harlem; Istanbul to Venice; Poland and Brazil- her work has also been featured in many great magazines and newspapers around the world. If you like what you see go check out her site!

Ray Villafane- The pumpkin king

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This is a bit late but i thought it’d be worth the share for the next Halloween season. I know you artsy bunch are out there, so to inspire you to make something astonishing for the spooky season, here is Ray and is amazing pumpkin sculptures!

He was born in Queens, New York and at a very young age showed a natural flair to the arts; a passion that his mother fostered, motivating him to pursue it as a career. He became a teacher and from 1993 to 2006 Ray taught art to grade K-12 students in Bellaire, Michigan. It was during this time he decided to play around with pumpkin sculpting, initially as a fun project for his students and himself.

His popularity grew with the students’ parents as he started getting requests for custom-carved pumpkins; this made him realize he was on to something and so he started offering them to local hotels and restaurants- it soon became his fall hobby for several years.

His pumpkin sculpting hobbies were brought to an entire new level in 2007 when he was contacted by High Noon Entertainment and asked to participate in the Food Network’s Challenge Show, Outrageous Pumpkins. Ray competed as one of four professional pumpkin sculptors, impressed the judges enough to sweep all three rounds and was awarded the Grand Prize. Outrageous Pumpkins logged the highest ratings of any other Challenge episode, and a second invitation was extended to Ray in 2009. They wanted him to come back and defend his title in their Outrageous Pumpkins Challenge II. Ray defended his 2008 title and took home the 2010 Grand Prize from the Food Network’s Pumpkin Challenge II.

The ensuing exposure of Rays unique talent and creativity ushered in a whole new appreciation for pumpkin “carving”, and his artistic take on the traditional jack-o-lantern has granted him invitations from across the globe for VIP Galleries (Very Impressive Pumpkins). From the President’s Quarters in the White House to Bermuda’s Sousa’s Gardens, Ray’s pumpkins have gathered a cult-like following. He also does some very impressive sand sculptures as well as making some fantastic looking collectables.

If your interested in more of Rays’ magnificent pumpkins, go check out his site!

Ron Mueck- Creating giants

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Hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck is one gifted fellow, who’s currently working in Great Britain. Early on in his career Mueck started making models and worked as a puppeteer for a childrens television show called Shirl’s Neighbourhood and later worked on the film “Labyrinth” for which he played the voice of Ludo.

He went on to establish his own company in London, creating animatronic and ultra realistic props for the advertising industry. To much of Muecks frustration, these realistic props we’re only needed in one angel, so most of the “sculpture” was not completed. He wanted to move on to bigger things, which meant creating photo-realistic sculptures which looked perfect on every angle.

He did just this, reflecting the human form quite flawlessly by detailing the most minute features, even though he played with the scales of the bodies which produced some sensational visual images-as you can see. His first five meter sculpture, Boy (1999) was featured in Millennium Dome and then later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

After awhile, Mueck grew tired of using Latex as his medium of choice so he ventured to find a new type of material and luckily he did when he saw a small archtectural decor hanging on the wall of some nameless boutique. It was fiberglass resin, which has become from that day forth his bronze and marble.

The most ambitious work to date would have to be Muecks Pregnant Woman, a 2.5 meter high sculpture that incarnates the exhausting 9 month process of child birth. Some viewers feel intimidated when first seeing this gigantic model of our own “mothers” but after awhile this “majestic Earth Mother becomes familiar, unthreatening and endearing.” Mueck labored tirelessly for 3 months to complete this work, mimicking a single female model begining when she was six months pregnant. Most of her form was made from his prized fiberglass but the face, however, is made with silicone so that the eyebrows and hair could be punched in with greater ease. Miniscule needles were involved to painstakingly punch in the human hairs in dull repetition.

His many works have been exhibited in major galleries in New York, Germany and not to mention the selection for London’s Millenium Dome which has now moved on to become the subject of a solo exhibition in the cities highest profield contemporary space: The Anthony d’Offay gallery. If you enjoy viewing his amazingly out of scale (oversized or undersized) versions of us, then check out this site for more info!

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Yuki Matsueda- Breaking out of Dimensions

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I found Yuki Matsueda while scouting the internet frontier and just couldn’t get enough of his art! I couldn’t find any information about him so i decided to go ahead and ask him some questions about his life and his eye popping works. Born in Ibaraki, Japan in the 1980s, he grew up in a family that was completely embroiled in the print industry and who wanted him to follow suit by taking over the family business- to which he agreed to do.

However, his imagination rebelled against the idea of creating illustrations & prints on a flat plane, it was too normal; within the box.  So he left for the Tokyo University of the Arts and majored in 3-dimensional design in order to fuse his love for print and to express the world we live realistically,  free of dimensional constraints. This inspired him to create these new forms of unconventional art.

Encompassed in acrylic, the complimentary elements of his work extrude themselves off of the background and free themselves from the bounds of it’s 2-dimensional flat masters. His works are well crafted and very sleek, having humorous undertones which sends out a message which you would normally find from a street art piece. Haha, all Exit signs need to be like this.

His older works were focused on the more destructive side of man, interested in the letting the observer see the tools that hurt the thousands and using it as a message to promote more peaceful ideas. He sternly opposes war and the creations of weapons.

When he’s not birthing new out of this world designs, you can find him going on long runs, hitting the gym or fearlessly climbing cliffs, what a bad ass. He currently lives around Tykyo and is planning on opening exhibitions in Hong Kong sometime in February next year. If you enjoy his works go check out his site over here!

Jen Stark

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My eyes burned with wonder when i gazed at Starks’ bright, multicolored sculptures. To think she builds these things layer by layer, painstakingly by hand- it must be a labor of love.

She is the construction paper and glue model architect of the universe, mimicking the elements of time, nature and the cosmos. She says, “There is so much out there that we don’t know about, and I hope to reveal some sort of magical secret of it in my artwork. I love the mystery of science and the universe. Wormholes, dark holes, infinity! What does it mean?” Her sculptures send the viewer down the rabbit hole, injecting the metaphysical quality of her works into the persons mind.

Who needs illegal mind altering drugs when you have Strak’s layered paper kaleidoscope of geometric-shaped infinities? Her works explode, implode, drip, expand, breath, and drizzle rainbows, it’s an endless procession of beautiful mind games. Conundrums aside, one thing is certain: Jen Strak’s universe is being noticed. She has works featured in Nylon, New American Paintings and The Miami Herald, all the while winning several awards to solidify her rising stardom.

She received her Bachalor of Fine Arts from Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005. She spent her junior (second to last year) studying abroad, over in the south of France. It was this trip and a slightly empty wallet that brought about her bond with paper, “I went over there [Aix en Provence] with a couple of suitcases of clothes, figuring I’d get art supplies when I arrived. The Euro was high and everything was expensive, so I decided to get the cheapest material I could find, but one with potential. It was a stack of construction paper. I went back to my studio to experiment and the sculptures were born.”When her time in France was done, she shipped back home to Miami, where she is currently based.

Stark also likes to draw, and let me say her drawing are a 2D manifestation of her 3D forms. Composed of loops, swirls, tenticals and magic her drawing are a well needed break from the tedium of cutting, pasting and folding. “I tend to make sculptures more than drawings, but not by much more. I like to do them equally, and think of them as a break from the other. The drawings are more spontaneous and allow me to rest my hand a bit. The sculptures are more organized and structured, and I do the same hand movements over and over, so simultaneously being able to work on the drawings gives me freedom and change.” Still her ‘doodles’ are fantastic and deserve as much recognition as her other works. If you like what you see, you can check out more on her online portfolio!

Andy Goldsworthy- ORDERING THE CHAOS OF NATURE

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Watch out, here comes the zen master of environmental art! Andy Goldsworthys’ process & work possess a real deep and sentient understanding on the subtleties of nature- or rather, the nature of Nature. The environment is his medium, which he handles with an intimate, patient, considerate, hands-on approach. His principles of taking ones time, keen observation and listening to natures’ murmurs, all lend his work a unique type of elegance and beauty which, while unnatural, are anything but.

He has been quoted saying, “I think it’s incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.” The tools he uses on his ephemeral works are the ones’ he was born with, or at times objects found on site. He has been noted as being the founder of modern day rock balancing, an immensely difficult art to perform.

Due to his arts ability to fade into time, photography has become an essential role in his work; capturing the stunning nature of his pieces before they fade away. On the roll of photography with in his art, Goldworthy has this to say, “Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit.”

His artistic style roots itself into his childhood; growing up on the Harrogate side of Leeds, in a house edging the green belt, (a ring of protected forest land neighboring urban areas) Andy found himself working on farms and has been said to relate the rhythmic qualities of farm tasks to the routine qualities of making a sculpture, “A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it.” He eventually went to receive his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, Lancashire. If your interested in seeing more, click on the link here!

Antony Gormley

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40 years- that’s how long Gormley has been producing these magnificent sculptures. He specializes in large-scale installations, creating hundreds to thousands of human like figures which he presents in a very odd way; he switches the roles of viewer and the viewed, making you feel as though you were being appreciated as a piece of art yourself. This ties into what Jung called projection, where a person sees a quality of himself in another, this psychologically turns Gormleys works from a subjective experience to a collective view of humanity within inanimate forms. He also creates individual sculptures, whole true form is hidden within a mesh of unbelievable complexity, it’s doing my head in just thinking about it.

He has steadily been producing art outside the galleries so that he may engage the public in active participation. His work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK with solo shows at the Whitechapel, Serpentine, Tate, Hayward Gallery, British Museum and White Cube. He does travel quite a bit because of his frequent exhibits internationally, being featured at many museums such as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Malmö Konsthall (Sweden), Kunsthalle zu Kiel (Germany), National Museum of Modern Chinese History (Beijing), Antiguo Colegio deSan Ildefonso (Mexico City) and Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria), Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Venice Biennale and Documenta 8 (Kassel, Germany).

He’s got some prestige points as well; winning the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007. Not to mention becoming an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997 and also a Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Trinity College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge.

Antony is a British chap, birth in London in the 1950′s, quite a few moons ago but as you can see he did something with his life and went places. If you enjoy his works, check out more of his stuff below and on his online portfolio!

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Brian Dettmer

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Dettmer is a book surgeon; he removes the unnecessary clutter of words and reveals the hidden beauty of lost art, hidden within the neglected book. He transforms old media whose roll in society has deceased, into a novel way of creating fine art. He uses old dated maps, encyclopedias, dictionaries, science, engineering, art and medical books whose beautiful art has been lost in a sea of irrelevance.

Dettmer seals the books with glue, creating a solid piece of knowledge to which he can carve and expose selected images and text to create a new alternative 3-dimensional interpretation of the book. Fascinating stuff! Recently he’s augmented his style by folding, bending, rolling, or stacking one or more books before glazing them with glue, or in some cases even sanding them down to create new forms.

Dettmer is originally from Chicago, where he studied at Columbia College, but is now currently living and working in Atlanta, GA. His works have been  Exhibited around the world and are currently being shown at a number of art galleries including Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago, SALTWORKS in Atlanta, MiTO in Barcelona, Toomey Tourell in San Francisco, and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art in New York; if your around these places i highly recommend you check them out in person! If your not around his exhibitions or just too lazy to go see them then check out his site!

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Jung Kwang Sik

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Sik is a South Korean artist who is internationally recognized for his alchemical-like wizardry of fusing painting and sculpting. He uses granite which he chisels away at, carving and scratching a landscape which he later paints, making it look as though someone took shot from an aerial perspective.

He creates an architectural feel to some of his work as well since he does at times create hexagonal shapes which he caps with paint to look like a cityscape or a village with winding roads. His work is seen to bring “a visual tension and an induced tranquility brought on by the undulations of seeming waves of density and dispersion of high-low pitch.”

The works he makes are nets to” capture the ebb and flow, the eternal and the universal rhythm of the relationship between man and our world.”Sik graduated in 1992 with a stage design major from Carara Academy, Italy then later in 1996 revived his B.F.A from Hong-lk University. He currently lives somewhere in South Korea. If your interested in more of his work click on the link!

Michael Murphy

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Having a sophisticated conceptual approach to artistic creation is hard to come by, but i found one such fellow today. Michael is always on the search for innovative methods to which he can execute his works, this is a quality that makes him bubble up from the sea of talent to the sunlight of attention. Some of his works have been featured on TIME magazine, just check out the December 2008 issue!  He is fascinated with tricking the minds eye, often trying to blur the boundaries between the second and third dimension, and i’m pretty sure he gets his idea’s from the fourth.  TIME was just one of many, many magazines his works been featured in, some of them include New York Magazine, ARK Magazine, American Artist’s Drawing Magazine, Uptown Magazine, Washington Life, Art for Obama, and Designing Obama. His artsy pieces are held in private collections in Munich, London, Zurich, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York City, Chicago, Cleveland and Washington DC, talk about attention. He currently resides in Milledgeville, GA working at GCSU. If your interested in more of his works click on the link!

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Jason deCaires Taylor

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This is spectacular, my artsy friend just showed me this and I’m awestruck! Jason is a man whose collected many experiences in his life, as a child he lived in various places, one of those being Malaysia where he discovered his passion for the underwater microcosms of the coral reefs. This passion was fostered in his later years leading him to become a scuba diving instructor in various parts of the globe, from this work outlook he became interested in underwater conservation, naturalism and photography.

 

Story doesn’t end there, as a teen he realized the relationship between the environment and art as he spent his days tagging the city walls with his graffiti, the made him focus his art onto public spaces. In 1998 he graduated from the London Institute of Arts, with a B.A. Honours in Sculpture and Ceramics.

He later learned traditional stone carving techniques from the Canterbury Cathedral located in the UK. He worked on set designs and concert installations which gave him go know how on the functioning of cranes, logistics, and major projects on a grand scale.

It seems as though he followed his bliss and discovered this amazing trail to follow, which ultimately lead to the creations you see below. Sculptured mesocosms which depict human interactions. Bravo. If you want to see more, and i assure you there is so so much more, check out his site!

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Calvin Nicholls

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God endowed some great talent onto Canadian artist Calvin Nicholls, who creates stunning sculptures using sheets of paper, yes paper! I can’t even fathom how much patience you need to form these amazing pieces. “Calvin has been creating his paper sculptures since 1986 from his studio north of Toronto Ontario, Canada. Working with sheets of paper and a scalpel, he cuts the component pieces to fit the final drawing and assembles the low relief artwork under studio lighting. When the sculpture is complete the lighting is adjusted to bring out the subtle form and texture. A large format camera is used to capture the detail on 8×10 film prior to scanning for print applications or art prints.” Check out his site online!

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