John Raimondi: Drawing to Sculpture - Hardcover

Adams, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1938086406 ISBN 13: 9781938086403

Publisher: George F Thompson Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

John Raimondi (b. 1948) is a contemporary American artist whose more than 100 monumental works of outdoor sculpture have earned him international distinction and acclaim. During his forty-five year career, he has experimented with a wide variety of styles, ranging from the simplicity of strong, angular lines and planes to the more graceful, curvilinear renditions of the natural world and human figure, to improvisational elements in his dignified series on American jazz greats and Indian chiefs.

A constant in every style and approach in Raimondi's sculpture is his classical sense of design and craftsmanship along with his keen appreciation for scale and a subject's social meaning. His sculptural works are also distinctive in how they are made not cast in bronze but formed, rolled, welded, and fabricated into shape from large sheets of bronze or Cor-Ten steel. The results are unforgettable pieces that are monumental yet elegant, solid yet ethereal.

Behind most of Raimondi's sculptural pieces are his conceptual drawings, which are works of art in their own right. These drawings—based on astute observations in the field and an immersion into scholarly readings—become fundamental, singular translations of the artist's feel for and understanding of a subject. The drawings are then rendered into cardboard models that become templates for larger-scale models for the eventual work of art. Raimondi then makes new drawings of the completed sculpture in order to provide a sense of closure and complete the artistic process.

John Raimondi: Drawing to Sculpture is a seminal new book that presents not only an unprecedented number of Raimondi's sculptures and drawings, but also a sense of his ever-evolving career and creative approach to making unforgettable art. The book also complements a forty-five-year retrospective of Raimondi's work at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

About this title

About the Author

Irvin Lippman is Executive Director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art who previously was Director of the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale (2003–2012), Executive Director of the Columbus (OH) Museum of Art (1994–2002), and Assistant Director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1988–1994) in Fort Worth, Texas. At each institution, he has spearheaded and developed innovative programs and critically acclaimed exhibitions, including Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, Cradle of Christianity: Jewish and Christian Treasures from the Holy Land, and Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge. Lippman received his B.F.A. from the University of Denver and his M.A. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Henry Adams is the Ruth Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. He earned his B.A. at Harvard University and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale University, where he received the Frances Blanshead Prize for best doctoral dissertation in art history. Other honors include the Arthur Kinglsey Porter Prize of the College Art Association, the first time the award was given to a museum curator or Americanist, and the Northern Ohio Live Visual Arts Award. Dr. Adams has been singled out by Art News as "one of the foremost experts" in American art, and he is the author of more than 300 scholarly and popular articles and more than fourteen books and book-length catalogs, including Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (Oxford, 2005), which the painter Andrew Wyeth described as "the most extraordinary biography I have ever read on an artist," and Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Edition details

• Publisher: George F Thompson Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1938086406
• ISBN 13: 9781938086403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 132