Dale Chihuly is an American sculptor who does amazing and beautiful works in colored glass.

His works range from small pieces to large scale installations, both outdoor and indoor, often accompanied by the striking effects of dramatic lighting.

A large part of the appeal of his work, aside from the beautiful character of the material and the colors and patterns within it, is the inspiration he takes from natural forms. His graceful, fluid objects echo forms from plants, birds and even undersea life. The natural origins of his shapes are frequently emphasized by installations in which his sculptures are placed in natural settings, notably in botanical gardens.

Chihuly studied glass at the first program of its kind at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960′s. He had the opportunity to work at the famed Venini glass factory in Venice. He continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he later returned to establish and teach a glass program for 10 years, and cofounded the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State.

Chihuly’s work is in a number of museums, both small and large (I frequently get to see his installation at the Delaware Art Museum, above, second down) and has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, one of which is a major exhibition now running at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass, that is on view until August 2, 2011.

The museum has several videos and a slideshow feature on their website. Chihuly’s own website has several galleries, though the navigation is not as convenient as it might be. Take the trouble to drill down into subcategories like Exhibitions: Gardens or Glass Series: Fiori: Indoor to get to the actual galleries of work. There are also galleries of his preliminary drawings (above, 3rd down).

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer cuts into books, of which he which he has first sealed the edges, proceeding one page at a time, cutting around images and other areas of interest and exposing layers of pages beneath.

He does not remove or replace content, he works with the internal arrangement of each book, or grouping of books, as though it were his slab of marble, with wonders to be discovered within.

The resulting sculptures combine the found images, Dettmer’s choices about what to cut and what to feature, his arrangement of layers and depth and the overall arrangement of the books, sculptural forms in themselves, often with pages pulled into slanting waves of edges.

He is at once digging into and revealing history and rearranging its context, in a sense similar to Max Ernst’s collages, and creating something new, a form and relationship that didn’t exist in the original books.

On Dettmer’s website you can view the groupings of images by choosing a year from the top navigation.

There is a post on My Modern Metropolis with a quick overview of several works.

[Via Connie Handscomb by way of Escape Into Life on Twitter: @peepsqueak @escapeintolife]

On his blog Chris Ryniak describes himself as “monster & critter maker”.

On his website you will find galleries of his monsters & critters both as paintings (also here) and as small scale sculptures in epoxy, glass, vinyl and acrylic.

My timing is a little off with this post, in that his show at MyPlasticHeart in NYC, This Could Get Ugly, is wrapping up on October 24, but you can (at least for the time being) also see a gallery of his sculptures and paintings associated with the show.

Ryniak is a graduate and former instructor of the Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida, and is currently based in Ohio.

Ryniak’s beasties have a kind of oddball charm, with buggy eyes, fish-like parts and lots of teeth. His paintings, which I believe are primarily done in acrylic, have a decorative dimensional feeling to them, with backgrounds de-emphasized and the textural qualities of the, er… critters, emphasized..

[Via Drawn!]

Jordu Schell makes monsters; icky, scary, grotesque and hairy, monsters, aliens, creatures and beasties of all manner and configuration.

Schell is a sculptor and concept artist working in the film industry. His credits include Avatar, Leigon, War of the Worlds, Hellboy, Galaxy Quest and many other feature films.

Schell is primarily a sculptor, working in clay and other physical materials, not 3-D CGI sculpture. His studio creates masks, maquettes, busts, full size sculpture and other three dimensional visualizations of imaginary monsters, creatures and alien life forms for film concept design.

Like many sculptors, Schell also works in two dimensions, drawing sketches both as preliminaries for sculptures and as an end in themselves. His Monster of the Day seems to be primarily for his own amusement.

Schell’s site has galleries of his studio’s work in many areas. Be aware that most sections have multiple pages, accessed by a row of small numbers to the lower right. The Illustration and Monster of the Day sections in particular go on for many pages.

The sculpture sections often feature many images of the piece both preliminary and finished, in multiple positions. Some of his preliminary pieces have a nice “sketch like” quality, if you can apply that term to clay.

There is also a blog, on which he posts the Monster of the Day sketch as well as posting about more finished works.

Unfortunately, I just missed telling you about Schell while there was a show of his work at Gallery Nucleus, in California. The gallery still has pieces for sale, however.

If you like fun scary monsters, beautifully done with great attention to surface texture and color, as well as nicely imaginative sketches of wildly bizarre monster concepts, Schell’s work should keep you happily knee deep in monsters for hours.

Addendum: There is an article on Schell in issue #2 of Dan Zimmer’s HorrorShow Magazine.

I don’t normally feature photography on Lines and Colors, not that I don’t think of photography as an art form; I just feel that it’s dealt with better on many other sites, and seems different enough to be in a separate category from the art forms I feature.

But the photographs of Michael Paul Smith just charmed my socks off, and there is more to them then excellent photography. In the images you see above, the houses, cars and streets are 1/24th scale (1/2 inch = 1 foot; 1 m = 4.16 cm).

The cars are die-cast models; the buildings are built by Smith, constructed out of Gator board, plastics such as styrene and Sintra, and found objects (and it looks like the old model makers standby of lichen for shrubs).

The outdoor scenes are set up on a table and photographed against real backgrounds. The interior ones, lit very simply but cleverly, are photographed in Smith’s garage.

There is no digital manipulation, no GCI, no Photoshop compositing; it’s all in the models and the original shot from the camera.

My father, among his other skills, was a museum model maker, so this has a particular resonance for me. He, my brother and I spent many happy hours working on train layouts and even helping him construct his museum models; but we never managed photographs of them that had this kind of emotional depth.

Smith says: “What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It’s not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.’

There is a two page Flickr set of his photographs, (and here), many of the compositions have been photographed in both color and black and white, the latter looking uncannily like actual photos from the era Smith is recreating.

Luke Jerram is a UK artist who creates sculptures, installations and art events.

In his Glass Microbiology project he has created a series of glass sculptures of viral structures, to, in his words, “contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the doctoring of scientific imagery affects our visualisation of phenomena”.

The sculptures are of viruses that are associated with particularly virulent and well known diseases, Smallpox, HIV, SARS, Swine Flu and, in the case of the image above (with detail below), E. coli.

The fact that the virus sculptures are made of glass, a transparent substance which, in its most basic form, has no color of its own, is indicative of the second aspect of Jerram’s investigation, the suggestion that the coloring of scientific images carries implications beyond conveying information.

It’s common for scientific images to be given false colors for the purpose of clarity, or easy perception of information that may be hard to glean in the images’ “true” state. An example of this might be the application of false colors to astronomical images to display the structure of nebulae or the light from infrared or radio sources.

It is also common to color images of viruses; in fact a majority of illustrations and images of viruses that are not the original electron micrographs seem to be intensely colored. Jerram speculates that as a result, most non-scientists might assume that real viruses are actually brightly colored.

He further speculates that the practice can promote a sense of wonder and and make the images more impressive (possibly intentionally), as well as carrying an emotional tone, perhaps one of menace.

The glass sculptures neatly obviate the effect of color (except for one that was deliberately colored by a photographer, though it acts as a contrast), and reduce the viral shapes to just that: their shapes.

Jerram has another interest in removing the effects of color and judging the effect on perception; he himself is colorblind (an awkward term that might more accurately be called limited spectrum color vision), though I don’t know in what range his limitation extends.

The play of light on these sculptures, however, is still beautiful, and the perception of the shapes is heightened by the refractive characteristics of glass (something I respond to as strongly visually appealing); so I have to submit that Jerram has removed one source of intentional visual appeal only to substitute another.

However, as sculptures they work wonderfully. The shapes of viruses are particularly fascinating forms. I also find it compelling that microscopic structures capable of being deadly on a devastating scale can be represented with such beauty.

Jerram’s glass sculptures will be highlighted in a solo show at Smithfield Gallery, London from 22 September to 3 October, 2009.

[Via MetaFilter]

Assembled Artifacts, a show of sculptural objects that opened today at Device Gallery in San Diego, is aptly named.

The wonderfully odd and eclectic collections of mechanical parts, metal objects, leather and cloth, have assembled into sculptures of figures, vehicles, robots, devices and animals by the participating artists.

As is often the case with these kinds of assemblages, there is great attention given to the nature, appearance and surface qualities of the materials chosen. Color is often subdued, and texture plays a dominant role. Shape, however, is the main focus, with found objects given relationships that produce recognizable forms, sometimes with oddly unsettling resonance.

The group exhibit includes work by Stephane Halleux, who I wrote about previously.

Assembled Artifacts runs until August 29, 2009.

(Image above: Jud Turner, Oliver Pauwels, Christopher Conte, Michiro Matsuoka, Stephane Halleux, Lewis Tardy)

“Living rock” refers to sculptures, monuments and buildings that are sculpted in place, usually out of a mountainside or outcropping of rock, and intended to remain in place; as opposed to most sculptural or carved stone objects for which the stone is transported for carving and the finished work usually transported again and/or assembled in another location.

Some examples of living rock are quite familiar and among the most famous monuments in the world, Mount Rushmore and some of the great monuments of Egypt, for example.

R.J. Evens has assembled a collection of photos on Quazen of some lesser known examples of living rock, both ancient and contemporary: Living Rock: Massive Monuments Sculpted in Situ.

The image above is of a giant Buddha in Leshan, China that is over 70 meters (230ft) in height.

[Via Neatorama]