The history of the art of china painting is a long one. It is an art in which the application of paint and glazes was initially used to decorate ceramic vessels with patterns and eventually with images of varying degrees of representational detail and complexity.

Kurt Weiser is a contemporary ceramics artist and painter who creates unique pottery, both vessels and objects, that are painted with detailed representational imagery.

The paintings, inspired by the styles of old master paintings, depict allegories and scenes related to the relationship of man and nature. They are painted in a painstaking china painting technique that requires careful planning of the order and placement of colors, the application of overglazing and multiple firings.

The result is objects that are striking in their shape and physical characteristics as well as carrying the visual and emotional impact of representational imagery.

Some of his pieces are almost straightforward vessels — vases or jars that look as though they could be functional. Others are skewed away from functionality in a way that leaves no doubt that this object only exists as an art object.

Some of them seem to be the fusing of two separate vessels that inadvertently touched in some pan-dimensional way, and are now warped along with the distorted juncture of space-time in which they sit; a surreal effect that is heightened by the spacial sense within the representational paintings wrapped across their surfaces.

There are several series of globe-like objects, irregularly shaped, almost amorphous variations of spheres with paintings on their surface depicting continents, animals and people in juxtapositions that carry multi-leveled musings on the natural world. These are suspended in mountings that function like traditional globe-holders, but curved to match the unique non-speherical shapes of the ceramic object.

The Belleville Arts Museum in Belleville, Washington is currently presenting an exhibit of Weiser’s work: Eden Revisited: The Ceramic Art of Kurt Weiser that runs through April 20, 2008.

In it, you will see globes that span ephemeral worlds and vessels that are made as containers for ideas and emotions.

[Link via Art Knowledge News]

Kris Kuksi is an artist of seeming contradictions.

One moment he’ll be fascinating you with his grotesque, darkly themed “Mixed-media Assemblages”, or disconcerting you with his jarringly electric fantastic realist visions; and the next moment he’ll surprise you with classical portraiture, traditional figure drawing or a delicate, naturalistic rendering of a freshly opened orchid or a dew spattered iris.

I first encountered Kuski’s work at a gallery here in Philadelphia where one of his assemblages was attracting a lot of attention on a “First Friday” gallery walk in the Old City gallery district.

These sculptural objects (image at left top, with detail, below) are wonderfully intricate constructions of pop culture effluvia like plastic model kits, injection molded toys, dolls, plastic skulls, knick-knack figurines, miniature fencing, toy animals, mechanical parts and ornate frames or furniture parts; assembled into grotesque tableaux that look a bit like an explosion in Hieronymus Bosch’s attic or H.R. Giger’s dollar store.

These constructions are usually given a patina of light grey that pulls them together and gives them a nice fake antique look that makes them perfect for that alcove in the dark hallway in your Victorian mansion that leads to the Room that None Must Enter.

I can say from seeing these close up that the photos on Kuksi’s site (in the gallery section labeled “the grotesque”) don’t do them justice. There are better photos, with details, along with an interview, on Dark Roasted Blend. There is a short time-lapse video of the assembly of one of his constructions on MySpace.

When I looked up Kuksi’s web site on returning from the gallery walk, I found more of these assemblages, along with some of his “fantastic realism” paintings and drawings, that range from Art Nouveau meets H.P. Lovecraft to psychedelic visionary paintings that lean into Alex Grey territory (image at left, bottom left).

Continuing to the “portraiture” section, I was surprised to see a portrait that I had come across elsewhere and made mental note to look up, not realizing at all that it was by the same artist who did these constructions (Portrait of George Gillaume, image at left, middle with detail). I was further surprised to see, in Kuksi’s “naturalism” section, detailed, contemplative paintings of flowers and images of animals.

Kuksi paints in acrylic on Gessobord. Most of the images in his galleries are accompanied by highrer-resolution versions accessed from a link in the description text. Don’t miss the fact that many of his galleries have more than one page, accessed by small links at page bottom. There are numerous images from the many sides of this multi-faceted artist.

In my research I stumbled across this listing for a Drawing Workshop with Kuksi in Germany in the summer. Please note that I’m not certain if this is current.

On his deviantArt page, Kuksi lists some of his favorite artists as Alphonse Mucha, Ernst Fuchs, Robert Venosa, Alex Grey, and Andrew Gonzales. Hs also lists his “interests” as Art, Music, Science, Philosophy and Maritime Cannibalism.

Andy Paiko is a glass artist who creates glass sculpture as well as sculptural vesselware and traditional vesselware.

I suppose “gothic” might be a term applied to his fascinating constructions of ornately crafted glass that often incorporate the skulls of small animals, spine-like constructions and other natural elements in ways that are slightly creepy but also fascinating in a pre-20th Century bizarre-object-in-a-bell-jar kind of way.

Paiko does, in fact, create bell jars, among his other nouveau arcana, such as an absinthe fountain and the “Lube Rack“, meant to “enhance one’s friction-free environment” with art glass “spice jars” full of everything from motor oil to lard to burbon.

His glass sculptures are usually constructions that are a sculptural variation on some object that would normally not be composed of glass, like a seismograph, a hammer and nails, a balance, a picture frame, or a spinning wheel; and occasionally are odd takes on objects that are normally made of glass, like a five foot long syringe or his hourglass filled with black sand.

When viewing Paiko’s online galleries be sure to be aware of the options near the top, either text links of small squares, that allow you to click through multiple views of the object, or multiple objects in a series.

The piece shown here, simply titled “The Glass Chair“, is a collaboration with Douglas Little and is owned by Conde Nast Publications, which, inexplicably, didn’t use it in the final spread of the “Gothic Splendor” article in House and Garden for which it was photographed. The piece is chair-size, about 50″ (126cm) tall, and is composed of about 250 separate parts, including a piece of octopus coral, a murex spiny trumpet shell, the skeleton of a rat and the skulls of a rhesus monkey and a mountain lion. Just the thing for that empty alcove in the hall.

[Link and suggestion courtesy of Leah Palmer Preiss (see also my post on Leah Palmer Preiss)]

There are a number of illustration annuals, showcasing the editors’ choices for notable contemporary illustration. I look forward to several of them, The Society of Illustrator’s Annual, for example, but for many years (14 to be exact) my favorite illustration annual has been Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, edited by Cathy Fenner and Arine Fenner.

They are aided each year by a jury of top artists in the field, and, in addition to displaying the work chosen from hundreds of submissions, they bestow several awards, including a Grand Master Award, honoring a respected veteran who has made an outstanding contribution to the field, which this year goes to Syd Mead.

Submissions are open to anyone, though there is an entry fee ($20), and the selection is competitive. The Call for Entries for the next volume, Spectrum 15, is now open. The deadline is January 25, 2008.

There is a good article on Irene Gallo’s always informative blog The Art Department from almost exactly a year ago, in which she writes about the Call for Entries for the volume that just came out. In it she discusses why an artist would pay to have their work considered for entry in the collections. (See also my previous post on Irene Gallo.)

Originally concentrating on fantasy, science fiction and horror illustration, with a minor in comics, the selection of work for the Spectrum collections has widened in recent years to include film and gaming concept art, as well as more mainstream illustrators whose work can fit into those categories.

My first reaction when I encountered Spectrum 14 years ago and leafed through it’s pages full of gloriously imaginative and beautifully executed work was “Wow, cool!”, which has continued to be my reaction each subsequent year, as the editors show a remarkable tendency to showcase illustration, comics and fantasy art that I really like.

They have in fact, included work form a remarkable number of artists that I’ve featured for you here in lines and colors posts. There is a partial list of them in my post from last year on Spectrum 13.

Spectrum 14 just hit the stores yesterday, at least for those of us who buy their copy in bookstores that sell comics. Other bookstores should have it soon.

I’m second to none in my appreciation of artwork on the web, but there is one factor that is still lacking. Compared to print, computer monitors are low-resolution (maybe 100ppi tops for the most part; though advances in the Apple’s new Leopard operating system are laying the groundwork for true high resolution (200-300ppi) computer screens in the near future).

In the meantime, if you like the fantastic art that I’ve featured over the years on lines and colors, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll enjoy seeing the work in the Spectrum collections, in the high resolution print medium for which it was intended.

I don’t often devote a lot of attention to sculpture, but, as I noted in my recent post on Claes Oldenburg, one of the things art does at its finest is to shake up our preconceptions and show us the world with fresh eyes.

Ron Mueck’s astonishing sculptures of ordinary, non-heroic people do just that. Usually unclothed, his figures are strikingly realistic in terms of the physical appearance of flesh, hair, and the textures and colors of human beings; right down to finger and toenails, blemishes and moles, goosebumps, individual head and body hairs inserted one by one, and the appearance of superficial veins beneath the skin.

Life-like replicas of human beings, no matter how realistic, would not in themselves necessarily alter our perceptions. Mueck does that by ingenious manipulation of scale. His spookily human sculptures are not life size. Some are gargantuan, others slightly larger than life, like his eight foot high standing pregnant woman, some are quite small and others are about half life-size, like his startling sculpture of his dead father, which helped establish his reputation as a gallery artist.

Mueck’s sculptures are made of fiberglass and silicone and crafted with techniques Mueck acquired in his previous career as a special effects artist, working on such films as Labyrinth.

You may have seen mention on the web of his earlier, somewhat grotesque, giant babies, but I think his more recent and sophisticated work is much more interesting.

In 2006 the National Gallery in London invited Mueck to become an artist in residence and create sculptures inspired by works in the museum’s collection of old masters. There is a half-hour documentary that gives a brief overview of Mueck and his work and follows him through the extensive and painstaking process of creating his sculpture of the standing pregnant woman.

Mueck starts with the traditional sculptor’s path of sketches, preliminary clay sculptures, a small but detailed maquette and then a full size, fully realized clay sculpture. It is in the casting in fiberglass and modeling in silicone that the process diverges from the traditional methods of casting in bronze.

Even in photographs, the realism and the element of scale make Mueck’s work striking. I haven’t had the chance to see his sculptures “in the flesh”, so to speak, but the effect must be startling.

Note: Some may consider his realistic depictions of naked humans NSFW.

[Suggestion courtesy of Kevin Sparkman]

If you’ve been following lines and colors for the last month or so, you know I’ve been using the PBS broadcast on Monday nights of Simon Schama’s The Power of Art as a springboard for posts about related painters. Tonight’s show, however, is about Mark Rothko. Even though I occasionally like Rothko’s early Miro-like fantasies, and the later paintings of big, rough edged rectangles of color for which he is most known, I find it hard to generate any enthusiasm about him.

I’m resisting the temptation to write an entire post expressing my dumbfounded amazement at his inclusion with the great painters and sculptors that have been the other subjects of Schama’s series; which I’ve likened to doing a special on Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Brahams and tossing in Axl Rose.

I’ve also mercifully decided against one of my acerbic rants about post-war modernism. Instead I thought “Why not write about a post-war modernist that I actually do like?” Though that’s a small group, the first one to pop into my mind was Claes Oldenburg, a post-war modernist whose work puts a genuine smile on my face, not simply one of bemusement.

In the midst of a wave of modernist painters who took themselves way too seriously (e.g. Rothko), Oldenburg was a breath of fresh air. His giant renditions of ordinary objects are at once hilarious and thought-provoking.

Oldenburg is primarily known for his large scale outdoor sculptures, usually of mundane objects that have been recreated at many times their original size and placed out of context not only by proportion and by being displayed in public spaces, but also by arrangement in unique and fun ways; like a sculpture of giant handlebars, partially visible so as to suggest a Buried Bicycle, a giant Dropped Bowl that has spilled 6-foot long apple slices and peels, or a half sunken bowling ball and an arrangement of 24 ft long Flying Pins.

One of the best gifts an artist can bestow on the viewer is to make that miraculous connection in the brain that allows you to see the world, or some small part of it, with fresh eyes.

Have you really looked at that pencil eraser on your desk? Have you noticed what that button on your dresser really looks like? Did you pay attention to the way your garden hose curled when you last walked by it?

Art that takes things out of their ordinary context, from Marcel Duchamp’s signed urinal and upturned bicycle wheel in a stool, to the work of the pop artists of the sixties, with whom Oldenburg is loosely associated, utilizes the juxtaposition of ordinary objects with unusual settings, sizes or presentations to make us stop and shift our perceptions; and can often, particularly in the case of Oldenburg, be hilarious.

Oldenburg’s smaller scale indoor works are frequently of commonplace objects that appear to be melting or soft. You can see some of his large scale works on the web site he shares with his wife and collaborator, sculptor Coosje van Bruggen, and some preliminary drawings and concepts on Ciudad de la pintura.

There was a time when I was frequently on the University of Pennsylvania campus, and I would often walk by the University Library, outside of which was Oldenburg’s Split Button (also here), a 16 foot wide white enameled aluminum sculpture of a broken button, that never failed to make me smile. (In a hilarious send-up of the story behind Alexander Stirling Calder’s Swann Fountain in Logan Circle, Oldenberg said of the button: “The Split represents the Schuylkill. It divides the button into four parts–for William Penn’s original Philadelphia squares.” — For more on Calder, see my post on his son, Alexander Calder.)

The next year I had occasion to frequently walk down 15th Street in Philadelphia, near City Hall, and past Oldenburg’s Clothespin (also here and here), a stainless steel representation of the familiar object that is 45 feet high and has over the years acquired a patina of rust, making it even more interesting. Anyone who lives or works in Center City Philadelphia knows it as simply “The Clothespin”, whether they’re aware of Oldenburg or not.

It’s hard to look at something like that, poised against he beautiful tower of City Hall with its Alexander Milne Calder sculptures, and the oh-so-serious and businesslike skyscrapers of Center Square Plaza, and not want to chuckle, give a mental thumbs-up and think. “OK, Claes!”

In my mind there is a “short list” of great sculptors. In chronological order, it goes: Donatello, Michelangelo, Bernini.

There are others, of course, but these guys have the corner offices. If I were being generous, I might give an office to Rodin as well, but he would be a junior partner in the firm. Up in the penthouse, there are a couple of ancient Greek geniuses from whom these guys essentially learned everything, but we don’t know their names.

Even though Bernini didn’t get to have a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after him (quel dommage!), his place on my personal list is assured.

Donatello was the one who picked up the torch of of the classical Greek sculptors and made it blaze again; and Michelangelo was supremely dramatic, larger than life in more ways than one; but Bernini, ah… Bernini was the mage, the sorcerer, the Vermeer of sculpture (not a phrase I take lightly). If Vermeer was master of light and time, Bernini was master of space.

I didn’t come to that conclusion from photographs of his work. The portrayal of sculpture is one area where photographs, books and the web let us down, allowing only a glimpse at the reality of sculpture as a definition of space. You only truly experience sculpture when you physically inhabit the same space. Great sculpture reaches out, like invisible Einsteinian gravitational folds, and changes the space around it, making it alive with its presence.

Painters create by adding, stone sculptors by subtracting, taking away material that defines the space around the object. Yes, painters work with the yin and yang of space and object as well, but you generally can’t saunter around in the space of a painting.

You don’t simply look at sculpture, the way you might at a painting, immersing yourself in a scene through the portal of the picture frame, you dance with sculpture. You walk around it, first one way, then the other; you step up, you step back; you alamand left, dosey doe and bow to your partner. Great sculpture reveals itself as you change your relationship to it, modifying your view until the interrelated forms, and the space they define, are assembled complete, like a CGI model in your head.

So my take on Bernini doesn’t come from books or photographs, though I was familiar with him from those sources, but from my experiences during a trip to Rome of walking around his sculptures in the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, The Fountain of Triton in the Piazza Barberini, and in particular, his works in the Galleria Borghese. There are four of his amazing sculptures displayed prominently in the Borghese’s galleries, but I’ll focus on one of them.

Ironically, after I’ve made so much noise about viewing sculpture from all sides, Bernini meant for Apollo and Daphne (shown in two slightly different views, above) to be seen from a particular vantage point (which you never see in photographs), as though you were coming up behind Apollo, who has been struck with Eros’ famous arrow and, enraptured with love, is pursuing the nymph Daphne. Daphne has been hit with Eros’ lesser known other arrow, causing her to despise the very thought of love, and has called upon her father, the river god, to transform her into a tree to free her from Apollo’s grasp; a transformation we are witness to in the moment Bernini has cast his own magic spell, capturing them both in gleaming marble.

Daphne’s curled tresses, streaming out behind her, are morphing at their ends into leaves, intertwined with the branches of her delicate fingers. The areas where her flesh is turning to bark also serve to remind us that she is, in reality, emerging from stone, in the sculptural equivalent of a life-like painting or drawing that fades at its edges to reveal that it is actually marks on a surface and not a person, as in Ruben’s remarkable Portrait of Isabella Brandt.

Try to keep in your mind as you gaze at Bernini’s lithe and fluid figures (and other great sculptures of this kind) that this is stone we are looking at!

Compare Bernini’s David, in dramatic motion, his face contorted with intensity (and modeled after Bernini’s own), to Donatello’s beautifully modeled but weirdly effeminate version; and to Michelangelo’s famous and monumentally heroic, but statically posed, figure.

Bernini was also a painter, draftsman and architect, and designed the dramatic piazza and colonnades of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as well as several palaces, churches and facades for churches, altars and public fountains.

The PBS series, Power of Art, continues tonight with Brenini as it’s theme, and focuses on his amazing sculptural arrangement and painted wood construction, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. (I’m hoping this chapter of the program focuses more on the work and less on grimacing actors.)

Video is actually a much better vehicle for examining sculpture than photography, with its ability to move around the work. Short of seeing Bernini’s work in person (The Artcyclopedia lists museums where you can do that) it’s probably the best we can do, since there unfortunately is no large repository of Quicktime VR files of great sculpture on the web that I’m aware of (but what a great idea that would be)!

At some point in my impressionable youth, I was exposed to certain “corrupting influences” that twisted my little brain into a fevered pop culture pretzel and made me not only want draw comics and cartoons, but draw outrageous and weird comics and cartoons.

One was my discovery of paperback reprints of E.C. Mad comics from the 1950’s with the hilariously subversive art of Wally Wood, Will Elder and Jack Davis, and another was the outlandishly exaggerated, lurid and over the top monster and hot rod car art of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

Roth was one of the seminal figures in the “Kalifornia Kustom Kar Kulture” of the early 1960’s. Roth was into the creation of hot rods and customized show cars, particularly using the amazing new wonder material of fiberglass, that enabled him to design free form bodies for his cars instead of just cutting into existing metal bodies.

To support the investment necessary for his obsession, Roth would use an airbrush to draw outrageous cartoon monsters and grotesquely exaggerated cars on T-shirts at car shows and drag races. These were the drawings that turned my tender little 12 year old brain into glowing orange gook when I saw them.

Wonderfully grotesque monsters, extended tongues dripping saliva as they trailed in the wind, bloodshot eyes bulging from their distended craniums, usually with one ungainly arm extended to crank on an improbably long and weirdly curved gear shift lever, drove nitro-burning hot rods with gleaming chrome plated engines extending through their hoods, exhaust pipes spewing white hot flames and smoke pouring off of enormous tortured racing slicks as the cars lifted themselves in eternal wheelies, feverishly screaming down Hell’s drag strip to some kind of dramatic reward or explosive oblivion. Wow.

It’s hard to overstate how bizarre and anti-establishment this kind of stuff was at the time Roth was working, because all of this lowbrow art, outragrously grotesque creatures and characters in films and concept art, underground comics, 60’s psychedelic art and album covers, MTV-style in-your-face TV rock, grunge and punk culture, and general acceptance of wild, anti-authoritarian behavior as acceptably rembunctious, that we take for granted as part of modern pop culture, didn’t exist yet, with the exception of certain bastions of outrageous art like the aforementioned 1950’s Mad comics and E.C. horror comics, which were certainly an influence on Roth’s cartoons. Most of the country was still wrapped in the warm but rigidly controlled Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet delusions of the 1950’s up until 1964 or so, when “the 60’s” started to shake things apart.

Roth’s images became tremendously popular and one of his characters, the Rat Fink (image above, lower right), became a cultural icon. Roth was able to parlay his images into licensing deals for T-shirts and decals, along with merchandise like the Revell model kit versions of his show cars. He became successful enough to employ other artists, like Ed Newton and Robert Williams, to produce art for him.

For a fascinating glimpse into this Kustom Kar Kulture of the early 1960’s see Tom Wolfe’s wonderful essay The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. Though it features George Barris a bit more prominently than Roth, in it, Wolfe makes the insightful observation, with which I agree, that these custom cars were so radical and free form in their curvulinear molded fiberglass bodies and half inch thick hand-rubbed layers of translucent lacquer, that they transcended mere automotive customizing and ascended into the realm of modern sculpture.

Roth’s cars went well beyond the “normal” (if such a word can apply to the custom car culture at all) customs that had been hot rodded, painted and perhaps chopped and channeled (had their roof lines lowered and bodies set lower on their chassis). “Beatnik Bandit”, for example, didn’t mess around with a chopped top or cut-out roof panels, but sported instead a bubble top, a transparent hemispherical dome that looked like it had been plucked off of a cartoon flying saucer, and featured a joy stick steering control. The bubble top was carried on to some of Roth’s other Kustom Kreations, like the Mysterion, which looked like it might have been jointly designed by Syd Mead and Richard Powers (image of the Revell model kit box cover, illustrated by another artist, above, lower left).

These fantastic sculptured cars by Roth, George Barris, Bill Cushenberry and Darryl Starbird, along with the the pinstriping and car body airbrush art of Von Dutch, and Roth’s outrageous monster car T-shirt and decal art, were the beginnings of the modern lowbrow/outsider art phenomenon known as “pop surrealism”.

Roth is now talked of as the Andy Warhol of lowbrow art/pop surrealism (though I prefer Wolfe’s comparison to Dali), a banner held high by Robert Williams, who, after working for Roth for some time, went on to be one of the more influential underground comix artists of the mid-sixties (and one of my favorites), eventually founded Juxtapoz magazine and became a central figure in lowbrow art circles.

Along the way Roth’s influence helped establish a demand for car culture comics, notably CARtoons and Drag Cartoons from Peterson Publishing, in which Roth was occasionally a character, and which featured artists like Mark Millar, Gilbert Shelton, William Stout and Alex Toth (some of Toth’s car culture work is available in a book called One for the Road from Auad Publishing). You can add these to the list of comics that helped distort the part of my brain that takes demented glee in outrageous comic art.

Ed Roth is currently in the spotlight in the form of an exhibit of 17 of his original pen and ink drawings (some of which look like they have Williams’ touch) for T-shirts and decals at the La Luz de Jusus Gallery in Los Angeles, which runs from now to July 1, 2007. Juxtapoz has an article and photo essay on the show’s opening.

Unfortunately the “official” Big Daddy Roth site is less than cherry, but there are other resources available.

There is a collection of his art, Rat Fink: The Art of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth by Douglas Nason, Greg Escalante, Doug Harvey, and he is featured prominently in Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Robert Williams and Others.

You may also be able to find some older titles, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth: His Life, Times, Cars, and Art by Pat Ganahl, Confessions of a Rat Fink: The Life and Times of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and “Hot Rods by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth by Ed Roth and Tony Thacker. I’ve tried to pull together some online resources below.

There is a documentary film about Roth, Tales of the Rat Fink (official site here), by Ron Mann (who also made Comic Book Confidential).

You can see my own little tribute to “Big Daddy” Roth in this page and this page from Argon Zark!, my webcomic; which carries more than than a little of his influence.

Link to gallery exhibit via BoingBoing

A number of sculpture related links have come up as a result of my post about Lawrence Northey last Thursday.

Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures are particularly fascinating because they walk back and forth (literally) across the supposedly fixed line between art and engineering. These amazing artifacts are built of ultralight materials and constructed of levers and gears so that they become wind-driven and walk across the flat wet sand on beaches.

This video posted on glumbert.com probably shows them to best advantage. Their graceful, cantilevered legs and wing-like transparent films give them the appearance of animated skeletons of ghostly alien grazing animals.

He also has fabric-covered variations that look like anime robots come to life. Amazing.

Link courtesy of Karl Kofoed

Another artist whose work crosses boundaries between disciplines, kinetic sculptor Tim Prentice was trained in architecture at Yale, founded a successful architectural firm, and went on to establish a studio to create kinetic sculpture.

Prentice creates beautifully balanced and intricate mobile-like sculptures, flying out from the aerial paths first pioneered by Alexander Calder. His pieces, spin, turn, hover, glisten and dazzle, all the while performing a delicate act of balance with the forces of wind and gravity.