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''Trough'', 1982
''Trough'', 1982


His first public sculpture was [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/Trough_Billings_1982.htm Trough (1980-82)], commissioned by the city of [[Billings,_Montana|Billings, Montana]] to commemorate the 100th anniversary of its founding. Trough consists of two mammoth leaning slabs of granite, connected and supported by linear steel members, and could be considered as the monumental culmination of his Nature of Stone series with its references to [[Geology|geologic]] place, time and motion. But Trough exists as something more. Its title and the relative positions of its stones refer directly to the steep [[Yellowstone_River|Yellowstone River]] valley into which Billings is wedged. The sculpture echoes the local rural sublimity of place in a downtown urban space<ref name="Bones of the Earth" />
His first public sculpture was [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/Trough_Billings_1982.htm Trough (1980-82)], commissioned by the city of [[Billings,_Montana|Billings, Montana]] to commemorate the 100th anniversary of its founding. Trough consists of two mammoth leaning slabs of granite, connected and supported by linear steel members, and could be considered as the monumental culmination of his Nature of Stone series with its references to [[Geology|geologic]] place, time and motion. But Trough exists as something more. Its title and the relative positions of its stones refer directly to the steep [[Yellowstone_River|Yellowstone River]] valley into which Billings is wedged. The sculpture echoes the local rural sublimity of place in a downtown urban space.<ref name="Bones of the Earth" />


''Solstice Calendar'', 1985-6
''Solstice Calendar'', 1985-6


Van Alstine's next commission, [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/portfolio/public_austin/austin.html ''Solstice Calendar''] (1985-1986), for [[Austin College]] in [[Sherman, Texas]] introduced a new and enduring theme to his public work: stone as a physical and conceptual mediator between earth and the heavens. Solstice Calendar is a pair of colossal rough Texas granite [[pylons]] that straddle a long horizontal stone member. Every day at noon the sun passes between the pylons, and a steel bar located high up between the pylons casts its shadow on the stone below. This stone is marked to indicate the annual [[solstices]] and [[equinox]]. This simple calendar was influenced by Van Alstine's study of ancient [[Archaeoastronomical|archaeoastronomic]] architecture in the [[British Isles]] and [[Meso-America]], and by the work of [[Land art|contemporary land artists]] who also created monumental yet basic solar calendars. ''Solstice Calendar'' not only locates the Austin College campus in space and time, it also bridges academic disciplines often deemed mutually exclusive by inhabiting a site directly between the school's arts and sciences buildings.<ref name="Bones of the Earth">{{cite book|last=Capasso|first=Nicholas|title=Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land: the Sculpture of John Van Alstine|year=2001|publisher=Editions Ariel|location=Washington,DC|isbn=0-9679143-0-2|pages=96|coauthors=VanAlstine, John; Harper,Glenn|editor=James Truelove|accessdate=23 January 2013|page=56-8|language=English}}</ref>
Van Alstine's next commission, [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/portfolio/public_austin/austin.html ''Solstice Calendar''] (1985-1986), for [[Austin College]] in [[Sherman, Texas]] introduced a new and enduring theme to his public work: stone as a physical and conceptual mediator between earth and the heavens. Solstice Calendar is a pair of colossal rough Texas granite [[pylons]] that straddle a long horizontal stone member. Every day at noon the sun passes between the pylons, and a steel bar located high up between the pylons casts its shadow on the stone below. This stone is marked to indicate the annual [[solstices]] and [[equinox]]. This simple calendar was influenced by Van Alstine's study of ancient [[Archaeoastronomical|archaeoastronomic]] architecture in the [[British Isles]] and [[Meso-America]], and by the work of [[Land art|contemporary land artists]] who also created monumental yet basic solar calendars. ''Solstice Calendar'' not only locates the Austin College campus in space and time, it also bridges academic disciplines often deemed mutually exclusive by inhabiting a site directly between the school's arts and sciences buildings. <ref name="Bones of the Earth">{{cite book|last=Capasso|first=Nicholas|title=Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land: the Sculpture of John Van Alstine|year=2001|publisher=Editions Ariel|location=Washington,DC|isbn=0-9679143-0-2|pages=96|coauthors=VanAlstine, John; Harper,Glenn|editor=James Truelove|accessdate=23 January 2013|page=56-8|language=English}}</ref>


''SRC Sunwork'' 1989-92
''SRC Sunwork'' 1989-92
Line 34: Line 34:
''Artery Sunwork,'' 1993
''Artery Sunwork,'' 1993


SCR Sunwork was followed in 1993 by [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/portfolio/public_artery/artery.html ''Artery Sunwork''], in [[Bethesda, Maryland]]. This sculpture combines the formal and conceptual concerns of its two calendrical predecessors. Sited in a plaza along a heavily trafficked urban avenue, Artery Sunwork consists again of an anchoring stone that supports a soaring vertical element: an aspiring bronze arc surmounted by a stainless steel gnomon. The shadow of the [[gnomon]], as it touches a precisely demarcated face of the bronze element, indicates [[solstices]] and [[equinox]]. The sculpture thus carries a consciousness of the relationships of place to earth to sky into the hustle and bustle of downtown where such grounding truths are often ignored or forgotten in a welter of streets, signs, lights, advertisements, and architecture.<ref name="Bones of the Earth" />
SCR Sunwork was followed in 1993 by [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/portfolio/public_artery/artery.html ''Artery Sunwork''], in [[Bethesda, Maryland]]. This sculpture combines the formal and conceptual concerns of its two calendrical predecessors. Sited in a plaza along a heavily trafficked urban avenue, Artery Sunwork consists again of an anchoring stone that supports a soaring vertical element: an aspiring bronze arc surmounted by a stainless steel gnomon. The shadow of the [[gnomon]], as it touches a precisely demarcated face of the bronze element, indicates [[solstices]] and [[equinox]]. The sculpture thus carries a consciousness of the relationships of place to earth to sky into the hustle and bustle of downtown where such grounding truths are often ignored or forgotten in a welter of streets, signs, lights, advertisements, and architecture. <ref name="Bones of the Earth" />




;WORKS ON PAPER
;WORKS ON PAPER


'''Drawings'''
'''Drawings'''
Throughout the history of art, sculptors have created drawings that relate to their three-dimensional work, and John Van Alstine is no exception. [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/wikipediadrawingpage.html His drawings] are large, richly colored [[pastels]] that are neither working drawings for sculptures in process, nor two-dimensional representations of finished works. They exist as separate and distinct works of art, informed by and informing, but not necessarily tied to, specific sculptures. Van Alstine uses drawing to further explore his interest in the potential of imagery for expression. When images occur in his sculptures - of tools, of vessels, of figures, of places - the sheer physicality of objects imposes certain limits. But in the [[illusionistic]] world of the [[two-dimensional]], objects and images are freed from the laws of nature. Without [[gravity]], [[density]], [[weight]], or [[friction]], new and more dynamic [[juxtaposition|juxtapositions]] and compositions are possible, and [[narratives]] become more dramatic. [[Potential energy]] explodes into [[kinetic energy]]. Objects teeter, swirl, loom, lurch, and lean. The landscape comes alive, dances, runs, leaps, and turns itself inside-out in [[paroxysms]] of joy and terror.<ref name="Bones p64">{{cite book|last=Capasso|first=Nicholas|title=Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land; The Sculpture of John Van Alstine|year=2001|publisher=Editions Ariel|location=Washington, DC|isbn=0-9679143-0-2|pages=96|coauthors=VanAlstine, John, Harper, Glenn|editor=James Truelove|accessdate=23 January 2013|page=64|language=English}}</ref>
Throughout the history of art, sculptors have created drawings that relate to their three-dimensional work, and John Van Alstine is no exception. [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/wikipediadrawingpage.html His drawings] are large, richly colored [[pastels]] that are neither working drawings for sculptures in process, nor two-dimensional representations of finished works. They exist as separate and distinct works of art, informed by and informing, but not necessarily tied to, specific sculptures. Van Alstine uses drawing to further explore his interest in the potential of imagery for expression. When images occur in his sculptures - of tools, of vessels, of figures, of places - the sheer physicality of objects imposes certain limits. But in the [[illusionistic]] world of the [[two-dimensional]], objects and images are freed from the laws of nature. Without [[gravity]], [[density]], [[weight]], or [[friction]], new and more dynamic [[juxtaposition|juxtapositions]] and compositions are possible, and [[narratives]] become more dramatic. [[Potential energy]] explodes into [[kinetic energy]]. Objects teeter, swirl, loom, lurch, and lean. The landscape comes alive, dances, runs, leaps, and turns itself inside-out in [[paroxysms]] of joy and terror.<ref name="Bones p64">{{cite book|last=Capasso|first=Nicholas|title=Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land; The Sculpture of John Van Alstine|year=2001|publisher=Editions Ariel|location=Washington, DC|isbn=0-9679143-0-2|pages=96|coauthors=VanAlstine, John, Harper, Glenn|editor=James Truelove|accessdate=23 January 2013|page=64|language=English}}</ref>

'''Photographs'''<br />

Between 1976 and 1980, when Van Alstine was experiencing and expressing the powers within the American Western landscape in sculpture, he created a portfolio of photographs: the [http://www.johnvanalstine.com/docs/easelphotos1977-81-7th.htm Easel Landscapes]. These 18 x 24-inch color [[Chromogenic_color_print|C-type prints]] are united by the presence in each image of a flat and centered sculpted steel easel that frames particular features within larger compositions. Made in and en route to and from [[Wyoming]], the Easel Landscapes provided the artist with a disciplined process for literally focusing on the landscape, and they contain some of his favorite landforms that reappear in his sculpture. As works of art in their own right, however, they deal with multiple issues germane to the intersections of photography and the landscape. Their multiple nested frames (easel, photograph, paper mat, frame) play tricks with [[perspective]] cues, and collapse or telescope perceived distances, calling into question how the eye and mind perceptually process the landscape via photography. The Easel Landscapes also wryly comment on how the landscape is figuratively framed by photography, experience, memory, art history, and [[popular culture]]. <ref name="Bones of the Earth">{{cite book|last=Capasso|first=Nicholas|title=Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land: the Sculpture of John Van Alstine|year=2001|publisher=Editions Ariel|location=Washington,DC|isbn=0-9679143-0-2|pages=96|coauthors=VanAlstine, John; Harper,Glenn|editor=James Truelove|accessdate=23 January 2013|page=56-8|language=English}}</ref>


==Notable works==
==Notable works==

Revision as of 02:03, 24 January 2013

File:File:John Van Alstine protrait 250 pixels.jpg thumb John Van Alstine protrait 250 pixels
John Van Alstine 2012

John Van Alstine (born 1952) is an American contemporary art sculptor and former assistant professor of fine arts. He taught drawing and sculpture at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and the University of Maryland in College Park. He works primarily in stone and metal, creating abstract sculptures. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the US, as well as Europe and Asia.

Personal life and education

John Van Alstine was born in 1952 in New York and raised in the Adirondack region of the state.[1] He attended St. Lawrence University from 1970–1971. In 1973, he received a scholarship to attend the Blossom Festival School, where he studied sculpture with Richard Stankiewicz and Richard Hunt.[2] In 1974, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Kent State University. In 1976, he earned a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University.[3]

Academia

In 1976, Van Alstine was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where he taught drawing and sculpture through 1980. He moved to Washington, DC and joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in College Park in 1980, where he taught in the art department through 1986.[2] In 1986 he left teaching and moved to the NYC area to pursue studio work full time. The following year he purchased a 19th century industrial complex on the banks of the Sacandaga River and in 1991 returned to the Adirondacks where he now lives and works in the restored historic structure and continues to give lectures on his work at colleges and universities through out the United States and abroad.[3] As of 2013, Van Alstine lives in Wells, New York, alongside the Sacandaga River.[3]

Awards

Van Alstine has been awarded numerous fellowships, grants and citations including from the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Yaddo Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New Jersey Council of the Arts and most recently the Merit Award in Beijing for his construction of a large-scale public sculpture in the Olympic Park Garden.[2]

Work

Sculpture

Van Alstine works primarily with granite and steel mediums in a large scale format. His work has touched on themes of Greek mythology, specifically the myth of Sisyphus.[4] In 2008, Van Alstine was one of 50 artists to have his work chosen to be display at the 2008 Summer Olympics. The piece displayed, Rings of Unity – Circles of Inclusion, was based on the Sisyphus myth, consisting of a large piece of stone suspended in the middle of a 16-foot ring made of bronze. The piece took two weeks to create in a foundry.[5] As of 2008, Van Alstine was represented by David Floria Gallery, in Aspen, Colorado. Prominent solo gallery exhibitions have included Gerald Peters in Santa Fe, Nohra Haime in New York and C. Grimaldis in Baltimore. His work is held in the collection of the National Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Carnegie Institute.[6]

Public Art

John Van Alstine's long involvement with placing sculpture in the outdoors has led him on a number of occasions to accept commissions for works of public art. These sculptures, chosen through competitions and sited in public places, extend the artist's concerns with the landscape by introducing site-specificity and conceptually linking terrestrial place with cosmological space.[7]

Trough, 1982

His first public sculpture was Trough (1980-82), commissioned by the city of Billings, Montana to commemorate the 100th anniversary of its founding. Trough consists of two mammoth leaning slabs of granite, connected and supported by linear steel members, and could be considered as the monumental culmination of his Nature of Stone series with its references to geologic place, time and motion. But Trough exists as something more. Its title and the relative positions of its stones refer directly to the steep Yellowstone River valley into which Billings is wedged. The sculpture echoes the local rural sublimity of place in a downtown urban space.[7]

Solstice Calendar, 1985-6

Van Alstine's next commission, Solstice Calendar (1985-1986), for Austin College in Sherman, Texas introduced a new and enduring theme to his public work: stone as a physical and conceptual mediator between earth and the heavens. Solstice Calendar is a pair of colossal rough Texas granite pylons that straddle a long horizontal stone member. Every day at noon the sun passes between the pylons, and a steel bar located high up between the pylons casts its shadow on the stone below. This stone is marked to indicate the annual solstices and equinox. This simple calendar was influenced by Van Alstine's study of ancient archaeoastronomic architecture in the British Isles and Meso-America, and by the work of contemporary land artists who also created monumental yet basic solar calendars. Solstice Calendar not only locates the Austin College campus in space and time, it also bridges academic disciplines often deemed mutually exclusive by inhabiting a site directly between the school's arts and sciences buildings. [7]

SRC Sunwork 1989-92

In 1992 the SCR Sunwork (1989-1992), was created for the Institute of Defense Supercomputer Research Center in Bowie, Maryland, a soaring stainless steel gnomon projects from a massive chunk of earthbound granite. Here Van Alstine created another sculpture that acts as a scientific instrument, but in keeping with its high-tech site, Sunwork is more advanced and precise. It acts as a clock as well as a calendar. In stone pavement around the sculpture, lines mark out the hours of the day like a conventional sundial. Moreover, on a long horizontal surface, an analemma is inscribed. This diagram, shaped like an elongated figure 8, shows the declination of the sun and equation of time for each day of the year, corrected for the precise longitude of the site. When the shadow of the tip of the gnomon strikes the analemma, it registers noon on any given day. Van Alstine's primitive mathematical/cosmological computer helps locate this place in cultural history, as well as within the landscape and the cosmos.[7]

Artery Sunwork, 1993

SCR Sunwork was followed in 1993 by Artery Sunwork, in Bethesda, Maryland. This sculpture combines the formal and conceptual concerns of its two calendrical predecessors. Sited in a plaza along a heavily trafficked urban avenue, Artery Sunwork consists again of an anchoring stone that supports a soaring vertical element: an aspiring bronze arc surmounted by a stainless steel gnomon. The shadow of the gnomon, as it touches a precisely demarcated face of the bronze element, indicates solstices and equinox. The sculpture thus carries a consciousness of the relationships of place to earth to sky into the hustle and bustle of downtown where such grounding truths are often ignored or forgotten in a welter of streets, signs, lights, advertisements, and architecture. [7]


WORKS ON PAPER

Drawings

Throughout the history of art, sculptors have created drawings that relate to their three-dimensional work, and John Van Alstine is no exception. His drawings are large, richly colored pastels that are neither working drawings for sculptures in process, nor two-dimensional representations of finished works. They exist as separate and distinct works of art, informed by and informing, but not necessarily tied to, specific sculptures. Van Alstine uses drawing to further explore his interest in the potential of imagery for expression. When images occur in his sculptures - of tools, of vessels, of figures, of places - the sheer physicality of objects imposes certain limits. But in the illusionistic world of the two-dimensional, objects and images are freed from the laws of nature. Without gravity, density, weight, or friction, new and more dynamic juxtapositions and compositions are possible, and narratives become more dramatic. Potential energy explodes into kinetic energy. Objects teeter, swirl, loom, lurch, and lean. The landscape comes alive, dances, runs, leaps, and turns itself inside-out in paroxysms of joy and terror.[8]

Photographs

Between 1976 and 1980, when Van Alstine was experiencing and expressing the powers within the American Western landscape in sculpture, he created a portfolio of photographs: the Easel Landscapes. These 18 x 24-inch color C-type prints are united by the presence in each image of a flat and centered sculpted steel easel that frames particular features within larger compositions. Made in and en route to and from Wyoming, the Easel Landscapes provided the artist with a disciplined process for literally focusing on the landscape, and they contain some of his favorite landforms that reappear in his sculpture. As works of art in their own right, however, they deal with multiple issues germane to the intersections of photography and the landscape. Their multiple nested frames (easel, photograph, paper mat, frame) play tricks with perspective cues, and collapse or telescope perceived distances, calling into question how the eye and mind perceptually process the landscape via photography. The Easel Landscapes also wryly comment on how the landscape is figuratively framed by photography, experience, memory, art history, and popular culture. [7]

Notable works

References

  1. ^ "John Van Alstine". Salwazeidangallery.com. Retrieved 2013-01-11.
  2. ^ a b c "John Van Alstine resume" (PDF). John Van Alstine. Retrieved 2013-01-11. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. ^ a b c "John Van Alstine". John Van Alstine. Retrieved 2013-01-11.
  4. ^ Kane, Tim (15 October 2009). "Van Alstine brings Sisyphus down a notch". Times Union. Retrieved 25 December 2012.
  5. ^ Shea, Jessica (2008). "Olympic Metal". Adirondack Life. Retrieved 25 December 2012. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  6. ^ Cowan, Jay (2008). "The Symbiotic Sculptures of Laura Thorne & John Van Alstine". Mountain Homestyle: 95–98. Retrieved 25 December 2012. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  7. ^ a b c d e f Capasso, Nicholas (2001). James Truelove (ed.). Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land: the Sculpture of John Van Alstine. Washington,DC: Editions Ariel. p. 56-8. ISBN 0-9679143-0-2. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ Capasso, Nicholas (2001). James Truelove (ed.). Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land; The Sculpture of John Van Alstine. Washington, DC: Editions Ariel. p. 64. ISBN 0-9679143-0-2. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  9. ^ "Trough, (sculpture) | Collections Search Center, Smithsonian Institution". Collections.si.edu. 1982-03-06. Retrieved 2013-01-18.
  10. ^ "The Council of Independent Colleges: Historic Campus Architecture Project". Hcap.artstor.org. Retrieved 2013-01-18.
  11. ^ "Bethesda Public Art | Bethesda Urban Partnership | Bethesda Maryland 20814 Restaurant Dining Guide Directory Shopping". Bethesda.org. Retrieved 2013-01-18.
  12. ^ "NASS". Sundials.org. Retrieved 2013-01-18.
  13. ^ http://www.indianapolisairport.com/admin/uploads/134/04.02.08VanAlstine.pdf
  14. ^ Downey, Kirstin (26 June 2008). "New Art for Old Town Breaks With Tradition". Washington Post. Retrieved 25 December 2012.
  15. ^ "Adirondack_Life_6-2008". Johnvanalstine.com. Retrieved 2013-01-18.
  16. ^ Michigan State University (2010-06-04). "RCAH installs 'Funambulist' | MSUToday | Michigan State University". Msutoday.msu.edu. Retrieved 2013-01-18.
  17. ^ "TU_9-11-11". Johnvanalstine.com. Retrieved 2013-01-18.
  18. ^ "Tsinghua Univ Centennial". Johnvanalstine.com. Retrieved 2013-01-18.

Further reading

  • Capasso, Nicholas; Van Alstine, John; Harper, Glenn; and James Grayson Trulove (editor). Bones of the Earth, Spirit of the Land: the Sculpture of John Van Alstine, Editions Ariel, 96 pages, 2001.
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