Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Sculpture and Wonder of Bruce Beasley”.
Hey everyone something a little bit different this week. A few weeks ago i got to visit the studio and workshop of an artist living right here in west oakland named bruce, beasley he’s had a really long career, something like around 50 years and over this career he’s approached pretty much. Every problem he’s had in his work with a real maker, problem-solving aspect. It was fascinating to listen to anyhow check it out.
Well, actually, i consider my path to be a sculpture started in 1951 in seventh grade in the los angeles school system. Now, my friends all liked woodshop, because it smelled nice and wood was a friendly material. I loved metal shop. It was my first experience was working in metal and i just loved it uh the was uh. The schools were crowded from the war babies and be if i gave up lunch, i could take a second uh have two sessions of metal shop and i learned to weld i learned to abuse a lathe cutting shaping and it was just just great um. It was really an epiphany for me. I come from came from a white collar background, so there was no history in the family of that kind of thing. But to me it was just a natural that turned into pretty serious hot rodding in high school and when i went um to college i actually i knew i guess i knew the word sculpture, but i don’t think it ever passed. My lips in the 1950s, the world was pretty much separated into the people that used their hands and got dirty and worked for other people and the people that were smart and went to college and they didn’t get their hands dirty or get their clothes dirty.
And they were the ones that are supposed to tell other the people who made things what to do and the people who made things weren’t really supposed to use their brains. And that was i thought that was a lousy view of the world. But i i was just a kid and i didn’t see a place for myself in that.
Well in college, i discovered, sculpture and sculpture was the first time for me that anything put together the head, the hands and the heart, those three elements, and it was an epiphany for me and uh. Then myself and a fellow student, stephen de stabler, wonderful sculptor himself. We decided we wanted to see if we could do bronze casting and we went to the department and said you know we want to build a foundry and they said well, you you can’t build a foundry and i remember saying well why not um and – and i Saw sid gordon, who was a wonderful teacher, but he he was a new yorker and um. He. You could see him trying to think of the hardest part and he said well because it takes a crane to lift the molten pot of metal out of the furnace, and i said, is that the hard part – and he said yeah, that’s the hard part – and i Said well, that’s going to be easy because i had built a little little lift hoist to lift the motor blocks out of when i was hot rodding, and it’s not really that complicated to make to make a hoist.
And you know we threw some stuff together for a few dollars and oh at first the things fell apart and didn’t work and and uh, but you know trial and error. Within a couple of months. We were milton bronze, but that that launched me on a career of being engaged with um with technique throughout my throughout my career, i think sculpture is very interesting in the sense that there’s there’s three or four elements that go into it that all have to work Together and that’s, of course, the shape or design of the sculpture, the material, the scale and the surface and color, and when all of those elements are really working together, then the sculpture really sings. And so i found myself over my career, struggling with different materials and and different techniques, because they gave me a different range of emotional expression through the work. Then i got interested in um sort of more cubic forms like your scent you’ll, see here in the shop and the dilemma with them was what interested me was when intersecting cubic shapes form new shapes at the intersections, and you can only see those intersections when they Really cross each other, so it was very difficult to make models because the model had to be very accurate to see it, and i wanted to see a whole lot of of changes. So i needed to be able to play with cubic like shapes and see different arrangements and intersections and a lot of them and spontaneously, and that’s what got me into computers that was in the late 80s. Very solid computer solids modeling was very early at that time, but that got me into that and that’s what led me to the ability to to do these kind of shapes. The danger of working on the computer is that the work tends to stay in the computer because it’s very flexible and and easy there and then it’s like. Oh, how am i going to get this out, but that’s what then led me into early adopting of 3d printing, because i wanted to be able to see and make evaluation models before i would make it in large shape. So i had to get away to see these shapes, so 3d printing was very interesting.
It had many problems, mainly it’s the limitation of scale. It was too small build envelopes, lousy, material and expensive, but eventually i ended up having a very large 3d printer made with a four by six by four foot build envelope and that led me make be able to work on 3d printing with larger pieces, and that Led to some bronze casting for the 3d printing, the liberty that you had inside the computer to make all kinds of shapes could come out into the real world and that’s sort of where i’m at now, i’m actually working with some virtual reality. What interests me, though, is if i can work in visual in virtual reality, an environment where there’s no gravity – and i can make shapes that actually come out of movements in my own body – is quite exciting. I was thrilled to see the maker movement arise, because what i saw happening was in the 80s, the conceptualists were kind of taking over and the arts, the the sculptures studios were, and the schools, the sculpture departments were getting rid of the shops and the and the Metal making cutting tools – and i was dismayed to see that happening for me that connection with the physical world and the fact that i could make things and change, metal and cut holes and put threads in things, gave me a sense of freedom in the world that I think that the people that didn’t have missed – and so i want to have other people – have that connection – that we’re not victims of the physical world, that we can affect things and make things ourselves and – and it’s also it’s a lot of fun uh.
But i, but i think it’s a has deeper meaning than just that it may it’s a connection with our placement vis-a-vis the world in a more solid place. I think i hope you enjoyed that as much as i did. If you’re interested in learning more about bruce beasley’s work check out the links in the description below and if you are here in the bay area, you can see his latest work unveiled at bay area maker faire in just a few short weeks. Thanks. So much for watching be sure to give this video a thumbs up and hit subscribe for more content from make you .