Creating Sculptural Art Using Steel, Used Furniture and Found Objects
"To be fully present while making art often feels like being set adrift from my moorings and allowing the currents to take me here and there"
"To be fully present while making art often feels like being set adrift from my moorings and allowing the currents to take me here and there"
Making That Masterpiece Is An Illusion
Check out this featured news article about Allen and his artwork from
the 2018 Flying Horse Sculpture Exhibit!
http://jewishjournal.org/2018/10/18/artists-road-leads-to-flying-horse
One of the unexpected by-products of devoting myself full-time to art is meeting other artists. I always ask them about when they discovered they wanted to become an artist and when they realized they had become a legitimate practitioner. Some I’ve met attended a formal art school and pursued a Masters in Fine Arts. Others have taken courses and workshops to hone their skills. And others, like me, had no formal training to speak of. Almost all of them, it seems, had other careers so they could make a living, raise a family, care for aging parents, or actively engage with their communities-what you might call the ‘stuff of life.’ For many, becoming an artist was a dream deferred.
Eventually they found a way to practice making art. Let’s make a distinction here between art making as a hobby and art as a way of experiencing the world. A hobby is a pastime, something we dabble in, an activity that satisfies a passing interest. Art has become a devotional practice for me. I now spend virtually every day engaging with my art:
in the studio, writing, reading, thinking, talking, dreaming. The process of making a work of art happens over the course of years. Often, the actually construction of a piece of sculpture is the easiest part of the process.
The art making process means I’ve sufficiently struggled and wrestled with a concept or idea for enough time that I now am ready to create it in three dimensions. For sure, there are often technical problems to resolve in executing a work of art, but figuring out how to ‘materialize’ what I’m thinking and feeling about the world around me is, by far, the greatest challenge. That said, while each piece of art I make advances my conceptual work as an artist, each piece is, by no means, a ‘masterpiece.’ When you study the lives of artists, the priority for them was simply making art and than more art. Immersing themselves day in and day out in this creative process is what really mattered to them, not an intention of creating ‘great’ art all the time.
I’ve had a productive year. I’ve shown my work in a number of shows, sold a piece and was honored to have my sculpture about my mussar practice (13 Qualities-2016) in a wonderful outdoor sculpture show at the Pingree School (Hamilton, MA) called the Flying Horse Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit. I also participated in Jamaica Plain Open Studios for my 4th year. Additionally, a big part of this year’s work for me involved scrapping five pieces of sculpture I made during the past four years. I realized that some of my sculpture had a ‘shelf life’ and had outlived its usefulness. Making these pieces enabled me to experiment with ideas and materials and techniques, but keeping them indefinitely for the sake of preserving my so-called legacy was foolhardy and counterproductive. I hope you enjoy viewing and reading about my new work.
Allen M.Spivack
OMOS* Studios
*My moniker- the Other Man Of Steel
Check out this featured news article about Allen and his artwork from
the 2018 Flying Horse Sculpture Exhibit!
http://jewishjournal.org/2018/10/18/artists-road-leads-to-flying-horse
One of the unexpected by-products of devoting myself full-time to art is meeting other artists. I always ask them about when they discovered they wanted to become an artist and when they realized they had become a legitimate practitioner. Some I’ve met attended a formal art school and pursued a Masters in Fine Arts. Others have taken courses and workshops to hone their skills. And others, like me, had no formal training to speak of. Almost all of them, it seems, had other careers so they could make a living, raise a family, care for aging parents, or actively engage with their communities-what you might call the ‘stuff of life.’ For many, becoming an artist was a dream deferred.
Eventually they found a way to practice making art. Let’s make a distinction here between art making as a hobby and art as a way of experiencing the world. A hobby is a pastime, something we dabble in, an activity that satisfies a passing interest. Art has become a devotional practice for me. I now spend virtually every day engaging with my art:
in the studio, writing, reading, thinking, talking, dreaming. The process of making a work of art happens over the course of years. Often, the actually construction of a piece of sculpture is the easiest part of the process.
The art making process means I’ve sufficiently struggled and wrestled with a concept or idea for enough time that I now am ready to create it in three dimensions. For sure, there are often technical problems to resolve in executing a work of art, but figuring out how to ‘materialize’ what I’m thinking and feeling about the world around me is, by far, the greatest challenge. That said, while each piece of art I make advances my conceptual work as an artist, each piece is, by no means, a ‘masterpiece.’ When you study the lives of artists, the priority for them was simply making art and than more art. Immersing themselves day in and day out in this creative process is what really mattered to them, not an intention of creating ‘great’ art all the time.
I’ve had a productive year. I’ve shown my work in a number of shows, sold a piece and was honored to have my sculpture about my mussar practice (13 Qualities-2016) in a wonderful outdoor sculpture show at the Pingree School (Hamilton, MA) called the Flying Horse Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit. I also participated in Jamaica Plain Open Studios for my 4th year. Additionally, a big part of this year’s work for me involved scrapping five pieces of sculpture I made during the past four years. I realized that some of my sculpture had a ‘shelf life’ and had outlived its usefulness. Making these pieces enabled me to experiment with ideas and materials and techniques, but keeping them indefinitely for the sake of preserving my so-called legacy was foolhardy and counterproductive. I hope you enjoy viewing and reading about my new work.
Allen M.Spivack
OMOS* Studios
*My moniker- the Other Man Of Steel