Weekly inspiration No. 2

I'm a bit late this week, but I'll get into a better routine eventually.  This past week I looked into the artist Chris Gilmour.  I was going to do Wassily Kandinsky, but I thought that might get a bit boring.  I was going to piggy back artists that were friends or inspirations of the artist I did the previous week.  But I decided to go a different route.  At first I thought I'd share my favorite artists, but that wasn't really the goal of this project.  It was to learn about new artists and the need to be inspired artistically again.

Strongbox, 2006

I'll start with probably my favorite that I've seen of his work.  As you can see, his medium is cardboard.  He uses cardboard and glue.  This is one of his later works and you can kind of tell if you look at the right side and on the pieces on the open door that you can still see the print on the original cardboard.  There's an interview on his website where he said that he started out by using cardboard in it's purist form.  Meaning he would use pieces that didn't have tape, print, or labels on it.  But in his later work he enjoys seeing the cardboard for what it is.  People discard it everyday and he wanted to use it in a way that everyone knows it, even it's more unappealing sides.  I enjoy that he changed his perspective in that way.

Aston Martin, 2006

This is another piece I enjoy.  It's life size and he did all the interior and the inner workings of the engine as well.  I read that a lot of people who viewed this work wanted to get inside and try everything on the car.  It's incredibly detailed.  He also did a Fiat car too that was life size, and detailed as well.  I think it's so cool he wanted to recreate these cars to the "t."  Seems like he did a lot of research and sketches to make these come to life.  That is something I don't tend to do.  If I'm making something, painting, or drawing something I tend to just go and enjoy the mistakes and layers that end up happening.

The Triumph of Good and Evil, 2010

It's crazy to me that he does everything out of cardboard and glue.  Everything is so detailed.  He has done a few statues like this.  I mean he's done a few busts a few human formed statues as well.  This one is my favorite of his human figures.  It's so fantastical and it looks huge!  I'd love to see his work in person.  Just to see all the detail of his work.  The dragon is so cool looking.

Chris Gilmour grew up in the UK and now lives and works in Italy.  He has a wikipedia page if you'd like to read more on him there.  His biography on his website and the wikipedia page are pretty similar.  I didn't find too much on him, but I was really glad to learn about him.  When I was thinking of an artists to do this past week, I wanted to find the grad student that was student teaching with one of my professors in art school.  I think it was my second year of art school.  He like to work with cardboard as well.  He showed us his portfolio one day in class and told us about why he liked to work with cardboard.  I couldn't remember his name and he wasn't listed in a Google search, that I could tell anyway.  From my memory he liked to do sculptures of everyday scenes, like a kitchen or something along those lines.  I was bummed I didn't find him, so I settled on Gilmour instead.  

I'll leave you with this last piece and what he said about it.  He said in that interview I read that he felt that his most important piece was the wheelchair.  It created the most reaction, emotion, an/or feeling from his viewers.  Most people didn't go near it or want to touch it.  It made a lot of people uncomfortable it seemed.  I thought it was interesting that he chose to do a few wheelchairs.  But now it makes sense.  It's intriguing for artists to hear the reactions of their viewers.  Most of the time it's nothing like what you would expect them to think of the piece.  I find it incredibly fun to hear what viewers think of my artwork, so it's cool to hear that an accomplished artist feels similar to me on that point.  

Wheelchair, 2003