Sculpture Making: July 2012

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Bar Sculpture

This is just cool....kinda like a kinetic sculpture:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=XfwqZgShVpQ

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Magnificent Sculptures at 62nd Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan

Posted by Kaushik at 8:08 AM

The Sapporo Snow Festival is one of Japan's largest and most distinctive winter events, and taken part by artist from various regions of the world. This year, around 250 ice sculptures, created by teams from over a dozen countries around the world including Finland, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Thailand, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and U.S will be on display as long as the freezing temperatures do. The subject of the statues cover a broad range of subjects from cartoon characters and Japanese sports icons to complex architectural feats.

It took over 6,000 truck-loads of snow to create the sculptures but the temporary art works will only remain on display until Sunday, Feb 13.

Pictures: Yuriko Nakao / Reuters, Flickr

Harbin Ice Festival -China

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival 2011

Posted by Kaushik at 11:27 PM

The 28th Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival opened on January 5 in China, featuring works of some of the country's best ice sculptors. The festival's amazing sculptures are seen illuminated from the inside after night has fallen - with visitors meandering in between the impressive works. Those who attend the event can navigate the ice cities on foot or via the festival's horse and carriage rides, zip down snowy slides or climb up the staircases of ice castles.

Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province of China, is one of the sources of ice and snow culture in the world. Geographically, it is located in Northeast China under the direct influence of the cold winter wind from Siberia. The average temperature in summer is 21.2 degrees Celsius and winters can be bitterly cold with temperatures plummeting to -16.8 degrees Celsius and more.

The annual Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival has been held since 1963. It had been interrupted for a number of years during the Cultural Revolution until it was resumed in 1985.

Officially, the festival starts January 5th and lasts one month. However the exhibits often open earlier and stay longer if weather permits. Ice sculpture decoration technology ranges from the modern (using lasers) to traditional (with ice lanterns). There are ice lantern park touring activities held in many parks in the city. Winter activities in the festival include Yabuli alpine skiing, winter-swimming in the Songhua River, and the ice-lantern exhibition in Zhaolin Garden.

The Harbin festival is one of the world's four largest ice and snow festivals, along with Japan's Sapporo Snow Festival, Canada's Quebec City Winter Carnival, and Norway's Ski Festival.

Sources: 1, 2, 3

Akira Yoshizawa: Origami Master

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Akira Yoshizawa: The Master of Origami

Posted by Kaushik at 10:34 AM

Akira Yoshizawa was a Japanese origamist, considered to be the grandmaster of origami. He is widely recognized for his work in raising origami from a craft to a living art form. Yoshizawa devised many new folding techniques during his lifetime. According to his own estimation made in 1989, he created more than 50,000 models, of which only a few hundred designs were presented as diagrams in his 18 books. Yoshizawa acted as an international cultural ambassador for Japan throughout his career. In 1983, Japanese emperor Hirohito named him to the Order of the Rising Sun, one of the highest honors that can be given to a Japanese citizen.

Yoshizawa was born on 14 March 1911, in Kaminokawa, Japan, to the family of a dairy farmer. When he was a child, he took pleasure in teaching himself origami. He moved into a factory job in Tokyo when he was 13 years old. His passion for origami was rekindled in his early 20s, when he was promoted from factory worker to technical draftsman. His new job was to teach junior employees geometry. Yoshizawa used the traditional art of origami to understand and communicate geometrical problems.

In 1937 he left factory work to pursue origami full-time. During the next 20 years, he lived in total poverty, earning his living by door-to-door selling of tsukudani (a Japanese preserved condiment that is usually made of seaweed). During World War II, Akira Yoshizawa served in the army medical corps in Hong Kong. He made origami models to cheer up the sick patients, but eventually fell ill himself and was sent back to Japan. His origami work was creative enough to be included in the 1944 book Origami Shuko, by Isao Honda. However, it was his work for a 1951 issue of the magazine Asahi Graph that launched his career, although, according to another account, his first step on the professional road was a set of 12 zodiac signs commissioned by a magazine in 1954.

In 1954 his first monograph, Atarashii Origami Geijutsu (New Origami Art) was published. In this work he established the Yoshizawa–Randlett system of notation for origami folds (a system of symbols, arrows and diagrams, which has become the standard for most paperfolders. The publishing of this book helped Yoshizawa out of his poverty. It was followed closely by his founding of the International Origami Centre in Tokyo in 1954, when he was 43.

Although Akira Yoshizawa pioneered many different origami techniques, wet-folding is one of his most significant contributions. This technique involves slightly dampening the paper before making a fold. Wet-folding allows the paper to be manipulated more easily, resulting in finished origami models that have a rounder and more sculpted look.

Akira Yoshizawa died on 14 March 2005.

[via Wikipedia]

Friday, July 13, 2012

Palace Ideal: France...lifetime sculpture

Sunday, May 22, 2011

The Postman Who Built a Palace With Stones Collected Over 33 Years

Posted by Kaushik at 12:19 AM

The story begins in 1879. Joseph-Ferdinand Cheval (1836 - 1924) , then 43 years old, had been working as a rural mail carrier in the southeast of France for 12 years. Because his daily routine involved walking about 20 miles (32km), mostly in solitude, he did a lot of daydreaming. One day he tripped over a small limestone rock. Astonished by its shape and form, he took the stone home. Soon he started to collect stones during his walks to deliver letters and brought them home in his pockets. Collecting stones became an addiction. When his wife became tired of mending his pockets, he changed the mode of transportation and took a basked with him, and later when the stones became bigger he took a wheelbarrow.

Over the next 33 years he and his wife constructed, from the stones, one of the oddest monuments of all time, the ideal palace or Palais Idéal. By his count it took more than 9,000 days or 65,000 hours and it still brings about 100,000 visitors a year to the otherwise forgettable village of Hauterives north of Valence. "I wanted to prove what willpower can achieve," Facteur Cheval wrote.

The completed work was 26 meters, or 85 feet, long, with a height that varied from 8 to 10 meters. The Palais is a mix of different styles with inspirations from Christianity to Hinduism. A version of a Hindu temple stood next to a Swiss chalet which stood next to the Maison Carrée in Algiers which stood next to a medieval castle, and somewhere in between there was an Arab mosque. The tutelary spirits of the place, the facteur declared, were Julius Caesar, Archimedes and Vercingétorix.

Image credit

By the time the palace was complete, it had begun to draw international attention. Famous artists visited and drew inspiration from it. It was featured in media from postcards to magazines and people came from far and wide to see this astonishing building. Public opinion about the work and its creator eventually shifted, and Cheval himself came to be regarded as an artist of some renown.

However, even though Cheval had essentially put the town of Hauterives on the map, the city government denied his request to be buried, along with his wife, in the palace. Not to be deterred, he went back to work in 1914 on a second, smaller structure in the local cemetery. He spent eight years building what he called the Tomb of Silence and Eternal Rest. Two years after its completion—and just days after he finished writing his autobiography—Cheval died and was interred in this new structure.