Recycled and Other Unusual Art Material...

Last year in a time of frustration with art making, I took  a couple of months off  to allow the muse to show me a direction. Part of my "aha" moment came from the imaginations of those artist who found their inspiration in materials apart from the classical. In a way, you could consider today's blog as a retrospective.

The first artist touched me deeply. His name is Do-ho Suh and he's a sculptor. He made a powerful political statement using dog tags to create "The Emperor's Robe."

http://r-atencio.blogspot.com/2010/05/do-ho-suh-and-haunting-sculpture.html

In a much less social or political way, there was Alexander Caldwell, I love to play and he had a great sense of art as play. He used a wonderfully bright color palette. He also invented the mobile; thereby providing a never-ending source of movement and fascination .
http://r-atencio.blogspot.com/2010/06/calder-artist-who-made-art-fun.html

My last artist, who was featured in a blog, was Simon Rodia. In his own humble way and with found objects, he built the Watts Towers.
http://r-atencio.blogspot.com/2011/02/simon-rodias-vision.html

There is one more artist - someone I've yet to write about - named Eva Jospin. She sculpts in cardboard. I'll be featuring her in a future blog.

Adding the inspiration of these artists to the desires of my muse, I began a series titled, "Textures and Dimensions." They combine found objects, recycled cardboard, recycled wood, paper and foamcore,

"VERTICALS": (cardboard, cork, styrene)

"EROSION": (Recycled wood door)

"THE EQUINOXES": (Cardboard, clay, and recycled doors)

The processes proceed very slowly from finding the right materials, cutting, pasting, gluing, drying and painting. That's in a way of explaining why I've been absent from this art blog. Nice to be back!

Simon Rodia's Vision

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

It was while I was researching Gaudi, the famous Spanish architect, that my mind somehow associated Gaudi's work with Simon Rodia's (1875-1965) Watts Towers.

As with most people who live for 90 years, Rodia had a lengthy story to tell. It would include his birth in Italy , his immigration at age 15 to America, and his journey to settle in the West. He would tell us about how he came to a vision on the small triangular residential lot he bought in Watts - a district of Los Angeles.

The vision was to build something lasting - something for the people to enjoy. This vision would become the Watts Towers. Rodia built his dream from all types of recycled materials - pottery, glass, structural steel, and seashells. He would etch designs in the mortar that he used to enrobe the steel and to embed his found materials.

Rodia worked without scaffolds, welding equipment, or plans. He used a window washer’s belt to climb the towers, and pipe-fitting tools to connect the metal. Much of the work was done after he'd finished a very physical day job.

When he left the project some 34 years later at age 79, he had developed 17 structures including several towers. One is 99.5 feet tall - amazing what a passion to follow a vision can create.