A lot of Graves work is based off of Picasso for instance, Griddleman, 1985 was inspired by Picasso’s Pregnant Women of 1949, she used a iron cooking griddle and an iron eel spear, both from the nineteenth century American antiques, and positioned them at right angles to create a face. In Looping 1985, it’s flattened like a Picasso cubist picture, defiant of gravity, flat and frontal plane, covered in color, very modern and three dimensional. Le Sourire 1985 was inspired by Head of a Women 1929 from Picasso’s surrealist period. Le Sourire has a movable part, cast iron sphere that was part of a lawn mower. It has eight-inch nails that form the hair at the top. A shaker rake that was casted in bronze in the middle to form a mid section of a body. Ensor 1986 was made with casts, sand casting, and baked enamels. It was based on Picasso’s 1948 sculpture Feniml and it also reminds me of Edward Munch’s The Scream because of the wood face in the middle of the piece and all the lines that are moving in the background pulling away from the figure.

The majority of her work is brightly colored. She uses polychrome patinas, polyurethane paint for outdoor sculptures, and baked enamel patinas. “The polychrome represents another aspect of the artists virtuosity, since it is a patination rather than paint (149). She reminds me of Jackson Pollock because of the bright bold colors and the drip paint and spills. The use of bold colors made her work look light rather than heavy metal. She uses paint for focal points and applies them by brushing, skeining, and dripping. She painted “…in vivid, synthetic colors, selecting and applying them with freedom and fantasy she exercised in combining the wildly alienated forms. With unabating wit and surprise, a work leads the viewer from slow recognition of the familiar to astonishment at how much the given has been made to yield something quite behind itself”(Hunter 386). Her sculptures seem to do the unexpected. The matter of balance, weight, and counter balance push the elements into illogical positions. She created images that from a distance, seemed natural and perfectly normal, but after a closer look they were just a pile of household equipment.

Nancy Graves is an interesting sculptor that has perfected the bronze casting technique allowing her to capture the world surrounding her and reveals the details, much like the scientists in the Berkshire Museum from her youth. I really enjoy the fact that she bronzed objects to keep there original identities but welds them together and gives them a patina of bold colors, putting them in unusual arrangements where they are less visible, until the sculpture is looked at in de

Some topics in this essay:
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