Sculpture – Ornamento

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The Art of Steel in Kensington

By: ornamento.blog November 8, 2018November 7, 2018

Art, Kensington, Materials, Sculpture, steelArt, Boston Street Gallery, Jeff Harris, Philadelphia, SculptureLeave a Comment

I wrote last week about Wayne Cambern’s show at the Boston Street Gallery. While I was there, I got a tour of the building that houses the gallery and met the owners, Jeff Harris and his wife Maria who are artists themselves.

Jeff works in wood and steel stock. His massive sculptures fill half the gallery and his studio and workshop are in the rear. The building itself has an interesting history. Built in the 1880’s, it housed a coffee roasting factory that supplied the US armed forces during both world wars. Kensington used to be full of factories Now, many of those former factories are finding new lives as art galleries and artist studios.

Jeff started out as a photographer but soon moved on to other mediums. He told me that his first love was wood and he still works with the material. But he found it too limiting for what he wanted to do, so he started working with steel stock.

When I saw Jeff’s work I assumed that I’d find torches in his workshop. How else could he get those bends and shapes?

The answer? A big vise and some simple tools. No heat except to weld pieces together.

UpstairsClassroom

Jeff and Maria also give painting classes on the second floor of the building although they are more for fun that for “serious” art. For more information, go to the web site, to http://www.artwithspirits.com.

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Take some time to visit the Boston Street Gallery And for updates, follow the Twitter Feed

Sculpting a Cat Figurine

By: ornamento.blog November 10, 2016October 30, 2016

Art, Boris, Cats, Ceramics, crafts, creativityArt, Cats, ceramics, inspiration, Sculpture3 Comments

Boris was not the inspiration for this figurine although I have been taking a figure drawing class and drawing Boris for practice. No, he does not pose for me. What cat would? But he is good for ten nanosecond poses and gesture drawing. Sculpting a cat figurine sounded like a a fun idea. I have sculpted two cats before, but both were in polymer. Now that I have access to a pottery studio, I decided to try my hand at making a terra cotta cat which is a horse of a totally different hue.

Here are the preliminary stages of the figurine. You have to be careful not to leave any air bubbles in the clay. Small ones will probably dry closed but big ones can explode in the kiln. And unless all the clay is thoroughly dry inside and out, there is a danger of explosion in the kiln.

Here is where I started adding character. You will note that the cat looks well fed. In fact, I had to make his tummy hollow to insure that the clay would dry and that the figurine would not weigh a ton. I made an air hole underneath the figurine, wrapped it in plastic, and when the clay was hard enough, I put the puss on two sticks so air would reach the hole and dry inside. I put the figurine aside and forgot about it for a few weeks as it dried out slowly-the best way to prevent cracking. I did some painting with underglaze before putting the cat in the kiln. When he came out in one piece, the hard part was over,

I glazed the cat with matte clear glaze for the final firing. the white, orange, blue and other colors you see are the underglaze.

And here is the finished cat! His I.D tag, which is hard to see, says “Tiny.”

The resident art critic seems to approve.

Ars Medendi

Ars medendi is Latin for medical arts. Is medicine an art or a science? Some say it’s both; medical knowledge is gathered through scientific study, but the application of that knowledge is an art . That’s why they call it practicing medicine, and it is not coincidental that practicing is also the same way you get to Carnegie Hall.

But seriously folks-I live in Philadelphia and walk past a couple of fascinating sculptures almost every day. One is a tall weathered metal cylinder in which mysterious looking symbols and foreign words in several alphabets-Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese-are punched out of the metal as if the creator wanted to make a giant stencil. The other sculpture is a long trapezoid-shaped screen with the same design motif. They intrigued me from the first time I saw them, but there are no plaques indicating what they are, who the sculptor is, or why they sit on opposite ends of the plaza of Thomas Jefferson University Medical College.

People must have been asking the Jefferson administration the same questions because it appears that Jefferson recently added information to its web site about the sculptures. They are entitled Ars Medende and the artist is Jim Sanborn, known for his Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia. You can read more about Sanborn and his work here.

And now for the sculptures

The Medical Arts cylinder was installed on the corner of 9th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia in 2009. It interesting by day but captivating at night.

When the cylinder is lit up at night it reflects cryptic symbols and foreign words onto the walkway and an adjacent building. What do they mean?

I got a clue one night as my husband and I walked across the plaza. He pointed to the top of the cylinder and asked me, “Do you recognize that? It’s a DNA sequence.” He should know, because he wrote a book called Corporate DNA: Learning from Life and did a lot of thinking about DNA and how it works while he was writing that book. I admitted that the letters bore a strange familiarity even though I would be hard pressed to remember anything about DNA from high school biology.

Another look at the cylinder by day. See the DNA sequence at near the top? Can you recognize anything else?

The Medical Arts screen on the other side of the plaza on 10th Street was placed there in 2008. The first time I saw it, I was transfixed. When I finally looked down, I found two rusty X shapes from the stamped out metal that lying on the sidewalk.

There is other beautiful art on the Jefferson Campus and I wish they would let the public know more about it. You might remember the controversy that ensued after TJU decided to sell Thomas Eakins’ painting “The Gross Clinic” to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007. American surgeon Samuel Gross taught at Jefferson Medical College and the story is that Eakins took one of his anatomy classes.

There is a statue of Gross in the courtyard by Alexander Sterling Calder who was the father of Alexander Calder, known for his jewelry and better known for his mobiles. There is so much history at TJU both artistic and scientific. But that is a topic for another post.

Enjoy the video about Jim Sanborn