Artist talk with Janet Echelman

Janet Echelman is a sculpture who reshapes urban airspace with her fluidity sculptures that can hold up to wind, water, sunlight and any other weather condition. She has done major sculpture commissions for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic winter games, a new civic icon for Phoenix and a 160 tall waterfront sculpture for Portugal. Also her art has been presented in Italy, Spain,India, Mexico, Hong Kong, Canada, US, Japan, Indonesia, Lithuania and Portugal. She went to Harvard and got her graduates degree in painting, phycology. After school she applied to seven different art schools and did not get into one.

Her career first started out she was a painter and paint batiks then she traveled to India and came across these locals who were weaving fish nets by hand. So she decided to learn the craft and it was then and there that she became inspired and made her first sculpture. Shortly after her career took off and she soon began to to loose her craft and her sculptures were soon no longer made by hand and were now being made machines.

It was interesting to know that its not her who is seeking out the funders for her projects. It's the funders that are seeking out a certain artist for their projects. She said that you will have visions of what you're going to do but your vision does not necessarily work out all the time. That sometimes she has to adjust her vision because of either the cost or the funders. Since her projects are now getting bigger and more complex she no longer makes her sculptures by hand. Her sculptures are now industrial made. However, she does miss being a lacemaker because of the experience and sense of time she feels when making her sculptures by hand. Lastly a majority of her sculptures are done in the cities because she feels that is where they are needed, thrive a get the most human interaction.

Janet Echelman

I wanted to play with having the figure slowly start to fade out the further I went down the page. The first figure starts out really strong and noticeable. By the time you get to the third figure all there is a couple of lines shaping the form. I did a couple of test runs on newsprint paper before I moved onto the big sheets of color paper. Lastly I played with watercolor and cante crayon.

Here I wanted to play with the color black and other colors. I wanted to play with figure and dress on the same page. By switching up charcoal with cante crayon. I also wanted to pair the movement of the figure and dress up together. Im not really sure if something is standing out to me or not. I do know I really like the results of using the cante crayon. There is something about that color that really stands out to me more so then the charcoal.

I stumbled upon a youtube video called danza della vergine suicdia. That played images of a women in this beautiful white dress dancing and I just had to gesture draw her. I soon began to realize that I was more drawn to the dress and her movement then anything else. So I decided to gesture draw it with cante crayon and loved the results.