Art on Sunday #6
Swannanoa/Swannanoa II, Painted and chromium-plated steel with wood and metal base, 1959/1974, John Chamberlain, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, August 1, 2015
Assembled from crushed car parts, Swannanoa/Swannanoa II seems to open its wings in whirling movement. In its free-flowing style and large scale, the sculpture shows the influence of the expressive, abstract paintings John Chamberlain saw in New York, similar to the paintings in this gallery. His ongoing exploration of incorporating unusual “found” materials into his work extended beyond car parts: he also used steel, paper bags, and foam rubber in his sculpture. Chamberlain loved expressive titles that sometimes referenced his life. This title refers to the Swannanoa River near Asheville, North Carolina, which flows near Black Mountain College. In 1955 and ‘56, Chamberlain attended Black Mountain, where he met a group of similarly inspired artists and poets. (Crystal Bridges)
Born in Rochester, Indiana as the son of a saloonkeeper, John Chamberlain was raised mostly by his grandmother after his parents divorced. He spent much of his youth in Chicago. After serving in the U.S Navy from 1943 to 1946, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago (1951–52) and Black Mountain College (1955–56). At Black Mountain, he studied with the poets Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, who were teaching there that semester. The following year, he moved to New York, where for the first time he created sculpture that included scrap-metal auto parts. Over the course of his prolific career, he had studios in New York, New Mexico, Florida, Connecticut, and finally Shelter Island. (Wikipedia)
I adjusted depth of field and color of the background for this image to make the sculpture stand out from its surrounding – Mike.
