Online art conversations

My favourite online conversations take place on the ISC Sculpture Community site. It's an American forum, and has the best organised site, most helpful contributors, and a lot of very fine sculptors too.

A recent conversation on the Florence 2007 Bienale offered some great images, including this one.

The second image is by a Russian sculptor, working in a kind of modern classicism.

Christophe Gordon-Brown

Sometimes you come across work that strikes home as absolutely complete within itself. It's work that has its own life. Gordon-Brown's work gets to me because of this, and also because of its minimalist grace and completeness of form. There are many sculptors around whose work lacks this quality, this grace (and sometimes is the better for it), but this work is almost metaphysical in its rejection of the particular, this rejection of the messyness of the real visual field. This I like....

A new find! Marino di Teana

There are a couple of threads to my artistic personality. One is a love of architectural sculpture. This goes back, I think, to my formative artistic period - the late 1960s, when I fell in love with Brutalist architecture in London. You know, the South Bank centre, and other such buildings, much fumed at by Prince Charles. It is perhaps the impersonality of the buildings I love most - they don't shout 'Me! Me! Me!' like so much art. The architects were also, I feel, frustrated sculptors, seeking to turn functional buildings in art. They also loved the materials they used. The concrete is given a role in the aesthetic of the buildings, not hidden away beneath a benevolent facade. Great art, then.

So, imagine the intake of breath when I came across the work of Marino di Teana the other day. Well, no need to imagine. Try the website: http://www.diteana.com/. (It's not Brutalism, of course, but it's architecture and it's not obsessed with itself).