inspiration

Local Color. /  by Mark Leichliter

Delivered my latest public art piece to the City of Little Rock, Arkansas. I won a national competition to design a sculpture, with the criteria being wide open; they wanted the artists submitting to have free reign to create whatever they could dream up. I’m honored and humbled to have once again worked with the fine folks out there to build something cool to enhance the community.

"Local Color" came about after my discovery of the State Butterfly of Arkansas, the Diana Fritillary. I was intrigued by the startling contrast between the male and female of the species, and the complimentary hues of each. The Diana displays marked Sexual Dimorphism, wherein the sexes have dramatically different size or coloration. The sculpture consists of both forms of the Diana, realized in multiple metals with differing finishes, on opposite sides of a low relief–like a coin with heads and tails. The striking differences give the sculpture a built-in Eureka moment, as well providing a platform for discovering the beauty of Arkansas' natural world.

Below are some shots of the design and proposal for the project.

…and a bunch of photos from the actual fabrication:

Local Color finished - male side

Local Color finished - the female side

Trying something new(ish). /  by markleichliter

I have been utilizing the welding process in making my sculptures for 30 years.  It is a straightforward, effective method for joining metal together—but there are some downsides. Biggest of these is the warping that occurs from the adding of heat; second is the aesthetic requirement of dressing the welds. Grinding and finishing out the weld beads and the associated discoloration around them (chasing) is time-consuming and, frankly, painful. I've experimented in the past with alternative methods of joining parts, like here:

“Breakfast with Tiffany” - rivets!

“Breakfast with Tiffany” - rivets!

Interwoven

I thought I'd try using rivets to assemble a larger piece, and "Interwoven" seemed like a great candidate, as warping and chasing out the welds on this beast would be bad. Very bad.

This did end up translating into many, many more hours of tedious design time on the computer—but that's the price for ART!!! I placed over 2000 paired holes into the model and designed a simple tab to span the seam where two parts meet.

A note for the geeks: this shape was generated parametrically with code in the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhinoceros, and is based on the famous strip of Mr. Moebius. The chief challenge here is determining just how to go about realizing this mathematical form; there is no "front" or "back" and the the inner edge becomes the outer, and vice versa. Add to that the way the "faces" weave through each other, and you have a real head-scratcher on your hands/brain.

Making Terralogue Totems: Sidebar, Counselor. /  by markleichliter

Huh. Looks like I've forgotten to clue you in on just what the heck a "Terralogue Totem" is.

“ Terralogue Totems” are a set of sculptural designs based on the concept of the land speaking; these messages being symbolized through metal emblems. The designs are executed in three distinct formats: large sculptural Monoliths, Bike Racks, and Bollards.

Maybe these little explanations we included on the plaques will help:

On inspiration /  by Mark Leichliter

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

Chuck Close

Retrace your steps. /  by Mark Leichliter

I've been spinning in place a bit. On a whim, I tried dipping into Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies for a little inpiration, and the message was "Retrace your steps." I wandered back through the timeline of my experiences as an artist, and arrived at the time when I had first fallen in love with the computer as a creative tool. I was using my Apple Macintosh LC, and had installed a program called "Canvas" that had an unbelievable set of both vector and pixel tools. I remember the clean, infinitely-tweakable lines (command-Z, how I love thee!) that I could use to make drawings. I wish I'd managed to save some of that stuff so we could have a good laugh.

Anyway, like any proper geek, I have a dual-boot system with Vista and Ubuntu. Part of my inertia has been related to frustration with the constant pull of new and newly-upgraded software, especially the heaps of cash involved. Thus the appeal of Ubuntu - and of Inkscape thereon. Inkscape is, IMO, the best Open Source software available. I own a license of Adobe Illustrator, and DREAD opening that bloated behemoth - Inkscape doesn't have the depth of tools, but that's the point. It is a streamlined Illustrator driven by the needs of the user rather than the need of a corporation to sell licenses and upgrades. Another contrast comes from my involvement in 3d modeling - it just starts to feel like the means are so involved that the ends often seem off in the foggy distance. Vector drawing brings the immediacy of making marks on paper to the computer, while still allowing amazing control over the process.

Here's what I did in Inkscape:
FemHead

Environmental responsibility and the artist. /  by Mark Leichliter

Gormley_waste_man
This picture, of Antony Gormley's "Waste Man" burning - filling the air with the noxious smoke of tons of discarded wood - set me thinking. Uh oh.

I understand that part of the point of this piece was to call attention to the massive amounts of waste we in the developed world produce, and to highlight the ephemeral essence of all the "stuff" we strive so hard to acquire. Gormley is one of my favorite sculptors - but this kind of condescending spectacle has definitely lowered his esteem in my eyes. Why exacerbate the very problems you are hoping to solve?

This brings up a point that bugs me no end regarding my own choice of method and material: how to reconcile the obvious environmental crisis-in-progress and my part in it with my (and our culture's) need to create and express. Is Gormley's monstrous cloud of smoke any worse in the end than the unseen multiple such clouds emanating from the iron mine, the steel mill, the tractor-trailer delivering the raw material for MY sculptures? Finding a point of equilibrium that allows one to be in the world without accelerating it's destruction is probably the most profound and important question we all must ask ourselves as we venture into a new millennium.

What do you think?