A Copper Alliance Member
Copper in the Arts
Issue #61: May '12 - Cont'd
When Innovative Processes Combine, The Result Is Breathtaking
Inhale featured above with artist
Photograph courtesy of Linda Leviton
Leviton blends several techniques to create her signature style, including etching, blacksmithing, sheet metal construction, welding, silversmithing and printmaking. She then blends dyes, patinas and paints to add color to her sculptures.
"I love copper for its malleability and availability,” she says. “It is physically easier to work with than other metals so tools are lighter. My first project came from a roof tear-off when I found some at a recycling center. I comb junkyards for motor windings, tubing, electrical cable, sheets and wire. I locate materials then source them from industrial suppliers. I am always looking for new fabrication processes.”
Heart of Nature for Ohio State Hospital.
Photograph courtesy of Linda Leviton
"Many of my woven forms are created with wire used in electrical motors,” Leviton reports. “Manufacturers color-code the copper to distinguish between different motor windings. Copper, brown, red and green are most common. I love weaving the copper onto dress and shoe frames for my Eve series. Another piece, Going in Circles, is made with copper tubing, copper wire, patina and paint.
Many of her projects are done for healthcare. A 5' by 5' sculpture made from heart-shaped copper leaves woven onto a copper wire adorns the Ross Heart Hospital at Ohio State University. For the Adena Hospital in Chillicothe, she designed and fabricated a cancer ribbon from curled copper wire painted and formed into a 7’ ribbon armature. This is so visitors can add various colored ribbons for patients in the hospital.
"These days commissions keep me busy," Leviton admits. Her studio has evolved into a fully furnished 2,400 square foot. workplace across from her Ohio home. She acquired tools and equipment from auctions at public schools where computer rooms had replaced traditional wood and metal shops.
Tilted Windows
Photograph courtesy of Linda Leviton
Leviton enjoys mixing media with fine details.
“Inhale uses many more than 1,000 copper circle cones woven into a steel armature and colored with vivid metal dyes,” she says. “I fashioned copper flowers for the Disneyworld Hotel with each flower and leaf replicating the flora of the area. Using copper sheet and wire colored with oils, dyes and patinas, I fabricated a 5’ flower sculpture for the main lobby.”
After graduating Summa Cum Laude from the University of Cincinnati, Leviton worked as a graphic artist for corporations, design firms and magazines. Her creations are installed in more than 130 hospitals, universities, Fortune 500 companies, libraries, public and private settings nationwide. She has received numerous honors and awards. Her 22’ wall sculpture, Tilted Windows, is in Michigan State's National Super Conducting Laboratory. She is currently working on three Circle Quilts for the New Hilton Hotel in Columbus, OH, as well as several wall constructions for "So Others Might Eat," at the Griffin House in Washington, D.C.
Resources:
Linda Leviton, Lewis Center, OH, (614) 433-7486
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Weaving His Way Through Copper: David Paul Bacharach
Deconstructed Quilt. Woven copper and steel panels, colored with patination and polychrome, Powder coated steel frames.
Photograph courtesy of David Paul Bacharach
“I always worked with nonferrous materials,” Bacharach says about sculptures he crafted many decades ago. After glimpsing thinned scraps of copper at a slitting facility, he delved into the idea of weaving it with the edge pieces cut away from the sheets running through the machines.
As a metalsmith in Baltimore County, Maryland, Bacharach’s works have appeared in galleries and shows across the United States and in a number of foreign countries.
Bacharach uses basketry techniques to weave copper strips into wall pieces that carry an unexpected yet powerful lure for the eyes.
“In the first 10 years, I just worked on weaving using the natural color of the copper, and then I slowly began to use heat for very specific colors,” Bacharach explains. After that, he began testing out a variety of patinas to mix up the possibilities of hues even more.
“I stuck with copper specifically because it’s a very reactive metal,” Bacharach says. To him, colors are always capable of conveying and becoming more, which is evident in his pieces. Most of the themes he stirs into his wall works are based on what clients request. One commissioned piece involved maps, for people who owned a travel agency. Bacharach has added plastic toy soldiers into quilted metal for those who are civil war buffs. And he doesn’t limit his talents to just what perches on walls. He melds his affection for copper into furniture pieces like tables, chairs and cabinets, too.
Most copper he uses is sourced from a variety of suppliers in Philadelphia and New York. Interestingly enough, he has more collectors around the Philadelphia region than anywhere else. In his lifetime, Bacharach estimates that he’s completed more than 5,000 woven copper works.
Bacharach’s next appearance is in July during a fundraiser for early childhood education and care, at the Nantucket Folk Art and Artisan Show at Bartlett’s Farm in Massachusetts.
“I’ve worked with copper for so long that I’m very comfortable working with it at this point, and I’ve joined it in every possible way you can put it together, from riveting to welding,” he says.
“For the most part, my work is very colorful, and a lot of metalwork isn’t. Copper allows me to develop a really interesting range of colors,” Bacharach says. “That’s why I come back to it, I suppose.”
Circle Suite IV. Copper panels.
Photograph courtesy of David Paul Bacharach
Resources:
David Paul Bacharach, Cockeysville, MD, (410) 252-0546
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Renee Lammers: Plein Air Copper Painter
Golden Hour at Wekiwa Springs
Photograph courtesy of Renee Lammers
En route to Maine, the couple stopped at the Boston Museum of Art. There, Lammers saw Frans Snyder’s Still Life with Fruit, Wan-Li Porcelain, and Squirrel, a copper panel painting from 1616. She was startled to find the surface smooth, void of cracks, like other older canvas paintings. She admired the glow of the copper beneath the oil paint. The colors seemed unusually luminous and radiant.
That’s when she decided – she would become a plein air copper painter.
Lammers had started painting with oil at four years old. She sold her first painting when she was only ten, for fifty dollars. At sixteen, Lammers studied Sumi, an oriental style of watercolor in Okinawa, Japan. There, professors saw her talent with oils and convinced her to stick with them. Years later, she grew into a plein air painter, and braved the elements to capture the perfect painting. In Florida, plein air painting was dangerous. Wild boars ran through the woods where Lammers painted. Rabid raccoons chased her. Copperhead snakes lurked nearby. Scorching temperatures left her with heat stroke twice.
In Maine, Lammers found herself surrounded by other plein air painters and respected by art collectors.
Today, Lammers keeps her process simple. She uses oil paints without any medium or turpenoid. Although she does rinse her brushes with turpenoid, wiping off any excess. To prepare a copper panel for painting, she first sands it down, then secures the copper panel to an easel with Gorilla tape.
Dirty Girl
Photograph courtesy of Renee Lammers
When perfectly dry, she seals paintings with Gamblin’s Cold Wax. This seals the copper from oxygen and provides a mat finish, a look preferred by gallery owners. This wax doesn’t turn brown over time. It can be removed and reapplied.
Location is key to becoming a successful plein air painter. Lammers calls it “the hunt.” Rather than look for objects to paint, she notices the quality of sunlight. Colors and paths draw her in. She likes to paint flowers, white hens, and white boats - all bathed in sun. Currently, she is experimenting with animals again, and attempting to create much larger 36’ x 48’ copper paintings.
When painting outdoors, she can move and delete objects. Painting from a photo, she says, causes her to become a slave, trying to replicate it flawlessly.
“There is a transfer of energy from me into the painting when I paint on location,” she says. “I don’t feel any energy surge from painting a photo. Plein air painting is very important to my growth and success as an artist.”
For the past few years, Lammers has been invited to plein air shows in Florida, Georgia, California, South Carolina, and Maine. From May 15 to May 19, her paintings will be juried in the Wayne’s Plein Air Event in Pennsylvania. Lammers will be juried into the Bar Harbor Art Show and is showing a body of work at the Coco Vivo Fine Art Gallery, Charlestown, South Carolina, in June.
Money has never been the driving force of Lammers’ artistic endeavors. The real value of these events, Lammers finds, is meeting other painters, learning from them how to paint better and sell more.
“I’ve never thought of not painting,” says Lammers. “Painting is a part of me. To be a professional artist is another thing. I only want to paint.”
Resources:
Renee Lammers, Bucksport, ME, (207)479-9553
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Copper in the Arts: NEWS
First Look at Antico's Rare Renaissance Sculpture on View at The Frick Collection - May 01, 2012
Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi, called Antico (c. 1455–1528), Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra, c. 1496. Bronze with gilding, 12 7/8 inches. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.
Photograph courtesy of Domingie & Rabatti Firenze
The acclaimed exhibition is on view through July 29, featuring 46 works of art that comprise almost three-quarters of the master’s rare surviving oeuvre. Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with The Frick Collection, New York.
“Following the critical acclaim of the 2008 exhibition Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of bronze, we were delighted to join the National Gallery of Art and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in studying another remarkable Northern Italian artist whose oeuvre deserved better recognition in America,” comments co-curator Denise Allen. As with Riccio, Antico is represented in the Frick’s holdings, and we have come to appreciate our work better by placing it in the context of these loans from major public and private collections worldwide.”
Antico was the first Renaissance master to perfect the ancient art of indirect casting, which allows an artist to make many bronze versions of his sculptures using molds taken from a single wax model, Antico’s bronzes always seem to have been as rare as exceptional antiquities. Few works that were cast during Antico’s lifetime exist in multiple examples. Some, like the Meleager, are unique. The Hercules is known in four versions, the Apollo in only three. Comparison of Antico’s two Seated Nymphs reveals some of the small, but significant, differences that can exist between bronzes that derive from the same wax model. The hair of one is pulled into a knot above her brow, and each curl is gracefully articulated. The other wears a plain diadem. She is simpler overall and was probably less highly worked in the wax casting model than her more elaborate counterpart. Such differences may also reflect the fact that Antico often entrusted other masters to cast his bronzes. Although Antico’s replicative casting technique might have generated a lucrative income, he apparently did not undertake the serial production of his works.
Resources:
The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th St., New York, NY, (212) 288-0700
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