A few weekends ago, I finally made my way out to DC to the National Portrait Gallery. I really enjoyed the trip and thought all of the artwork was amazing! In particular, I really liked Alexander Calder's portraits. He uses wire to create 3-D portraits. He somehow twists the wires to construct portraits with facial expressions and emotion. Calder began his career in portraiture in the 1930s and has been extremely successful with his art. Throughout his life, he has been most renowned for his wire mobiles and stabiles. His mobile figures incorporate suspended that move in space within the sculpture. I was amazed by his unique sculpture portraits as I had never seen anything like it before! I came back and did some research on him. He was born into a family of artists and showed great talent in art as a child, however he did not originally intend on making a career of it. He went to school for engineering and worked in the field for several years. Eventually he decided to try out the art career and thrived. He started creating figures of wire and found that he really enjoyed the material. He started his career in portraiture by creating wire portraits of friends and family. He eventually began creative some kinetic mobile sculptures.
I was very intrigued by his artwork. It looks as if he made a sketch of a person or thing and then magically turned it into a 3-D piece. Walking around each sculpture, I could see through the sculpture and view it from all different angles. No matter what angle that I viewed the portraits from, they always looked like portraits. Looking at the wire portrait face to face wasn't the only way to view it and understand what it was supposed to look like. Some portraits also had a fair amount of detail, which I was impressed by because it seems to me that incorporating detail into a figure made all of wire would be difficult. Non-theless, Calder made it work. I think the meanings of his work are that people can be seen and thought of in different ways by different people. People also have different emotions at different times. I believe Calder tries to incorporate emotion and a bit of personality into each of his unique portraits. I believe he does so magnificently.
In my opinion, Calder's artwork is amazing. There wasn't a single piece that I saw and didn't like. Every portrait was unique and exciting in it's own way. I honestly can't think of any way he could improve his artwork. He is a master of crafting wires into objects of beauty with meaning.
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