Frank Stella: Sculptural Painting

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0:02 who was going to um be speaking um and ultimately is actually we're going to swap him if you will or change the order of the talks and he is going to follow and this is a talk that we have been anticipating for a year and really really wanted to have and i'm not going to say anything except the title of his talk and his name because he can tell you and it will blow you away so we are but in our description we talked about modernity not being solely about techniques on the canvas etc including frame we also talked about technology and technology and artistry so that's

0:49 just a little hint the title golly is frank stella sculptural painting the gentleman is igolf kazan and we are so delighted to welcome him and very much looking forward to this talk thank you lisa i have no clue if i'll be able to deliver what you promised but i'll try can you hear me okay okay perfect so and it's it's gonna be strange then you can't put an israeli in one place and tell them to stand so i'm gonna i'm gonna try but that there is i don't wanna walk with the microphone uh i must admit i feel very much a fish

1:35 out of the out of the water being here because i'm not an artist and when i went to engineer i'm an engineer and when i went to an engineering school we used to make fun of the artists students and the architectural students we used to say well if you didn't get to engineering school you'll go become an architect or an artist they made fun of us saying if you're not creative enough you go become an engineer which is very true it took me many years to learn that they were very right because in engineering we are good in solving problems we're good in following instructions we're good in taking requirements and delivering functional products anything i think you can hear me anything i said now has nothing to do with art so i spent and we'll get to frank in a

2:20 second i'll just tell you a little bit of a story i spent the first 10 years of my life as an engineer designing automotive aerospace consumer products ship building and i spent the rest of the 15 years in my professional life frankie's a hobby in my professional life designing software and designing software for engineers so i've designed three of the leading softwares that are used by engineers and architects today like bentley systems solidworks uh korea from ptc but during all those times we're designing software for engineers i've done projects as well so i've been involved in designing products and actually what i've been doing the last three years is creating software that designs jewelry and

3:05 parts of the work with frank led me towards that and you learn more as we go and as much as jewelry is something which is artistic it's very engineering driven because there is a manufacturing process and there is a very very tedious manufacturing process to get something that looks nice but again engineering and something looks nice don't go well together so in about 2003 i was working with a company in in the uk to design yachts and i would go once every few months there spent few weeks with them and then one day a guy comes in and they introduced me to him which i had no clue who he was because again i'm not an artist i don't follow i follow artists and they said okay his name is frank very nice to meet you he i can hear you echo

3:52 is that okay you guys hear me okay okay cool it's fine if you hear me okay i know what i'm saying i just want you to know it and this is a sculpture frank did i think in the 60s or the 70s it's iron custard it was done in thailand they said i want to do it again i want to do it again but i want to change it i want to make it different i want to make it bigger and we started to work and some of you may recognize you'll see where this is going it's been in the metropolitan museum in 2006. and and by the way you'll see here as i go through it we have very funny internal names none of those names ever made made it public to the world frank all he he named his sculptures with a k and the number which i can never understand why but he has he has an explanation behind it

4:38 this is to me those are the leaves because if you look from the profile it looks like a tree leaf and we started playing with different versions and actually what i'll do today is i'll show you how some of the things have been created usually when you see a sculpture we never show you the process what you'll see here is this is the process of how this thing is being created and there is in engineering there is additive manufacturing and adapt and subtractive manufacturing so you can you will see different approaches that we are taking and the same thing is in sculpturing which now i know it's either you you add material or you remove material it's a very similar way we do things in cad the challenge is of course to do to make it appealing enough interesting enough and

5:23 then sustainable by itself because eventually it has to be built so this is just an example of how such a leaf is being created following that we started playing with different variations of how they will stand what cuts because if you if you're familiar with frank's work it's never solid there is always a look through and from a different point that you look through you need to see different things and the goal here is whenever you walk around the sculpture and you look through it we don't want you to try to understand how it was made the brain it should not be obvious it should be something that you'll say well i have no idea how this geometry was born i don't know how the shape was born what was the source you will find you will see through the through the presentation today how we start with very simple stuff and

6:08 how we get to those complicated geometries and we will do different variations and again i had no idea what he wanted to do with this again i'm an engineer meeting with him once every few months he'll come with some requirements let me do this i just follow instructions and once every few months as i said frank will come to the uk we will [Applause] see engineers won't laugh from that uh he will come to the uk we will do another week of session and we will work a little bit then one day he asks me so where do you live of course from my accent he couldn't figure out and i said i live in philadelphia so why are we meeting why are we meeting in london i said i don't know [Applause]

6:54 he says come to my studio in new york i said sure [Music] we meet in his studio in new york and this was 2003 and and the first time i walked into his studio it looks like a whole garbage jump to me i have no clue what it is to me if i look at the shape it has to have a meaning it has to have a function and when you walk in frank back then this was his studio which was moved now into new jersey he has an airplane hangar as a studio in new jersey this was a free building three store building in in manhattan on broadway street you walk through it and none of that makes sense but i said i don't ask questions he's he's the customer back then he was a customer i don't ask questions and we started to work and i will come again and this this very methodic war lasted for about two

7:40 years and we've we've developed what ended up being now before i came to this picture we ended up what ended up being frank stella on the roof and if you guys remember the show that was in the metropolitan museum and i'll get to that in a second the funny thing is because he needs a an artistic side as well to it to take all those designs so when i when we were working in the uk there was another girl by the name of veronica by the way if you see here they say the camera adds 10 pounds i had eight cameras on me here i lost weight since then [Music] so veronica she's the artistic one she's an architect she teaches here in colombia and so we have we have the team that works together with frank besides the

8:26 people that actually build those things and so it's a very it's a very close relationship of how we work together which is which is fun because we we have some intersection but each one of us has their own responsibilities and you can see so this is what used to be called painting into architecture or 3d architecture so the leaves the idea behind them was not to create a sculpture it was to create a museum and you can see here some renderings which veronica did of how such a building may look and i don't know if you can see inside but if you look inside here you see staircases and there are levels and floors of course this was never built as a building but and we experimented a lot and this is where we started to use 3d printing

9:12 now 3d printing is a hot topic today we've been using it since 2003. so we we evolved into it and you can see very different versions and there will be tens if not hundreds of different models that we still print today on on every project that we do and we sometimes we make them out of plastic sometimes they're made out of metal materials and again different cuts different shapes and that's what ended up in 2006 to be frank stella on the roof was probably some of the biggest sculptures he ever did now how do you manufacture something like this how do you build this again this is coming from computers so frank bought a six axis cnc machine

9:57 and the structure of this is something which is unbelievable there were 10 cameras on me here you see the scale of this behind us it's all foam inside which is cnc'd look at the size of this which was then covered with pvc which made it extremely strong but it's it's also being able to take it apart so it's sections and again this is in his hanger of an airplane inside ninja in new jersey following so when this was released we said okay let's experiment more and this is i don't know if it was because i had small kids or frank had grandkids back then but we started an

10:42 era that we call the toy era and toys that show up he had a dog that had some chewing games he played my kids playing we started taking toys and the toys were inspiration but it's never to this copy something because if it's it exists it's not interesting anymore it's it's starting to model those things and they're starting to form so from one shape they form to another shape and this is by the way called the batman intel is an internal name and you can see a little bit on how it may look i promise there are no words in my slides everything is 3d and images and this is the way we communicate so the first times i came to frank and he said okay rotate it a little bit i would give him the mouse and say the rotation no no you rotate i don't know how to use this thing

11:27 so frank frank totally stays away from the computers but he's he knows exactly what he wants and we but this is still in the under the structured relationship we had here is another toy now what you also see here there are different colors again i'm an engineer the colors to me mean nothing all they mean to me is so i can see how many parts are there so i can see where are the separation of the pieces but it means everything to frank and colors is not something that he goes lightly by here is another guy and then we'll make them out of different materials and there is a whole process of how this is being made this is actually a

12:14 hollow and the tubes that go on top of it this is how this is how big those guys are it's again it's the same it's in the same process of the cnc machine of cutting them and putting them together and now you can see if you remember in the first image i had a big big curved wall was painting on it that's exactly the thread part so we've incorporated incorporated pieces he's done before now if i stop at any point you will and you go go look at the pictures he did the paintings he did in the 50s and the 60s you will find areas that look same so and then at some point you said okay i can't understand your colors stop

12:59 sending me colors because it it makes me it's not it confuses me because then i have to go paint it so we change the whole the whole scheme of exchange and we either do like a monochrome in here this way he sees it he sees it as a black canvas or we even go wireframe and there are catalogs and catalogues of images like this right when i generate an image before i meet with frank i'll send him all the work i've done in the last few weeks and then he knows he prepares what he wants to do with them when we meet my mother was an artist uh she painted and my father although he was an obstetrician he was worked his way through medical school as a house painter so i was pretty much uh acquainted with

13:45 paint both wall painting and art painting so i was used to the material and uh so i had always been painting since you know i was 10 or 12 years old and i was interested in it and then i went away to school to a boarding school and there they had an art program and i just participated in the art program and uh but you know from the time i was really 14 until now i never stopped painting [Music] and it's the same piece we looked before

14:37 i don't know how everybody has a it's not exactly a style but i think there's an imprint it may not be exactly like the dna but there's a structural sense i think in my work which you would be able to identify right from the beginning to now because the way things fit together that's probably the way i always do it well color is new uh stay from the paintings of 1958 but i mean i used a lot of color between 1958 and uh and now 2010. the color comes actually quite easily i mean it's not it's not about anything special except what the work that you're working on seems to need so this one is uh uh in a way is an

15:22 earlier piece it's a a kind of putting together of basically a slightly more conventional geometries in other words we have these star shapes and we have these box shapes and we have these curved interlacing shapes and this actually at the angle maybe that it's coming through and the camera might look something like the protractor paintings and this could look like early shaped paintings so there is a relation uh to the earlier work but it's really the earlier work uh but it's really about the kind of fulfilling of the ideas in three uh in three dimensions so this is uh a really conventional three-dimensional uh polychrome sculpture really in

16:08 hanging off the wall it could be a polychrome relief or a polychrome sculpture and those cultures will keep growing and growing you can see some of the biggest one we've done here the 3d printer this thing took about two months to print and we've also made some jewelry and to experiment some prints as well and then one day frank comes and he has an orange peel he peels an orange he said let's see if you can model that and i actually have the orange i i glued it in the way that it preserves and we started to play with something which is called orange peels

16:53 and uh and then he will peel different oranges and mandarins and to get different shapes and thicknesses and then you bend it and and you just let it dry for that by itself a little bit and then it takes different shapes and but to try to convert an organic shape into a computer driven geometry it's not a trivial thing so there are a variety of different tools that we use and i developed a lot of different techniques to do that and that's one of the sculptures that is a result of the orange peels and now you can see on the bottom we've actually embedded this is one of the only few we've actually embedded frank's signature into the sculpture because he doesn't sign the sculptures they all have a number but this one actually it's in 3d and there are three different orange peels in here and you can see on the bottom this was done in 2007

17:40 and there is a frank stella embedded into the sculpture itself and then we can play with materials unfortunately we cannot print in glass yet but it looks great when you render something like this and you generate an image which is which was a transparent material and you'll see in a second why i keep mentioning glass this was the revolutionary piece that totally changed the way we work frank came with some requirement and said go do it and i couldn't do it but i he said show me the process and i've worked maybe a month to try to do it and i showed him the process says well the result is much better than i wanted so he opened up the gate he said okay go to mistakes

18:25 go don't try to follow the instructions i give you one to one have freedom and show me the mistakes and you can see and this is this is the piece that made it uh and we call it the hat because it has different hats different shapes there is no flat surface in here there is no even thickness it all comes into different shapes and let's spend a few minutes i'll actually show you how this piece is made [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

19:10 [Applause] [Music] ah the goal is when you look at it you should not know the process it's not a trivial thing that you can just figure out by looking at it but it all started from a disk [Laughter] [Music] foreign

19:58 [Applause] [Music] [Music] see how it will look we don't have it like this

20:56 [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] you get the idea and this piece we then printed it in different materials we made it out of different materials but again the word the glass keeps coming back and we said okay it will look great if we can make it out of glass and i started looking for someone that's going to make it out of glass for us and whoever i talked with said nah we can't make it out of class but you can tell an engineer something cannot be made because remember we solve problems so for two years i think i've looked for

21:41 someone to make it out of glass i talked to so many people nothing so i went and started to make class i said i did that it cannot there is no such thing as something cannot be made so i started how to make and you can see how it will look rendered in render mode so i started i went and started started to learn how to make glass it looks nice right i didn't make that it's too boring it's too similar hell it's too good i know the guy that makes it it's a good friend but it's this is this is not me remember the idea was now now i'm in the mode of go experiment go try see what happens with mistakes this i do make so not now and we've actually incorporated some of the some of glass pieces with frank's work as well and glass to me it's

22:26 exactly the same thing as just working with franklin it's to understand the physics of the mate i've been doing enough for 10 years to understand the physics of the material and to play with colors to play with shapes and if something is now to do something really symmetrical in thin glass you need to be really good but it's work for me it's boring i so i work very big those pieces are about this big they're very heavy and when you when you work with heavier glass it's easier to make mistakes but it's also easier to correct them and you get much way more interesting shapes because gravity plays and you can play with a variety of different things at some point and you can see now i've also embedded some wood in it so pieces that don't stand by itself they actually have to be embedded in another piece of wood and playing with textures and light so

23:12 when you play with this ball is about this big it weighs about 30 pounds which requires a whole team of people to work you can't do glass by yourself because it's a 2000 degree material that you don't want to make mistakes with and i have marks all over the body of mistakes i've made when i was learning and then you play with with light and you see this is meant exactly for light so when you put the light under because of the different texture it gives you a whole different dimension of how things can look [Applause]

24:01 that's hot [Music] glass is like honey when it's hot it's the same consistency if you don't rotate it it's going to be on the floor and the right end for me that's why all the sleeves and all the protective materials so this is how you apply the texture and then you inflate it [Applause] so where do ideas come from and ideas are always a challenge so ideas come from a variety of places i

24:46 i look at art now totally different so when i look at the shade i don't know i just don't walk by if i see an interesting shape i stop and i take pictures because instantly i'm thinking okay how can i how can i convert it into something on the computer and sorry you cannot questions oh no okay and so this is from the from the harvard museum in boston i live in boston now and again some sea creatures which became the octopus for us or the shell and you can see again it doesn't look exactly like the other one but you can see the beginning of how this was done again the beginning is always very simple

25:35 how am i doing on time lisa i'm okay i should have put some music in here it's it's funny the italian music i don't speak italian but when an italian guy saw that he said when i pull on something it actually says the word tools in the song so for him it was did you plan for it i said no idea it just sounds good so this this is exactly just i'll just fast forward it you get exactly the idea of we always start with something simple and those shapes go like crazy now several years ago now by the way

26:23 for me not knowing anything about art my daughter is an art major now so it's funny but i asked uh frank if we can videotape because she wanted to show something in school if we can videotape how do we interact how do we work oops so here is a small video where it works [Applause] um [Applause]

27:12 [Music] few weeks ago to the natural museum in boston oh yeah and i just brought you some pictures of some ideas and some of them i made one two i made a rock formation yeah yeah i've seen one like that that's pretty impressive yes you'll see the second a few more

28:00 there is no he asks questions it changes things and the unique part is i have full freedom in designing the individual pieces he of course will ask changes and so on but then he works magic of how to put them together because you you'll never see a sculpture that's only one individual piece it's always a combination of different pieces and this is something i'm still learning so i just come i just throw pieces together but then he'll make this one bigger this one's smaller this angle that angle and show me from this direction show me from this direction and then until he gets a pic a mental picture in his mind will say okay save this let's move on

28:45 that's that's the way we work and you usually it's an evolution it's never a one-time relationship it's a a piece can be alive for two years before we complete it and it's it keeps going on and this is how i work with frank now so i don't i can't read any of that maybe you can but that's he does sketches and actually now i have a tablet but so i come with a tablet these sketches on the top i don't need the paper anymore so i can i can keep it with me and take to take it back but this this part on here this is actually the there are a lot big chandeliers that are made this way and you can that was the inspiration behind that so here are some more pieces that we've done recently and you can see this is the snail so we just looked at

29:33 and as we go they become more and more complicated more and more advanced from the shape of the geometry to honestly because the softwares that we use keep getting better and better and our skills my skills keep getting better and better as well and so so far we've done three three for the last 13 years we've done 3d sculptures and i think about a year ago six months seven months ago frank came back with the 2d idea so taking a sculpture and because he wants to he wants to force the audience to see it from the angle he does and you can see from every angle you'll see the projection of on on the wall what you will see from this angle so see

30:18 this is from this angle so the sculpture can totally disappear it doesn't have to be there from this thing and it looks like three different sculptures because every and we can make endless amounts of them because every angle will generate a new result is another one which we've made in the same concept by the way the idea behind this one was something that's this it's it's spheres that are just hanging and kids can play with them but when you start making them out of different materials and again glass i can get away from glass now glass gives you the reflection of something that other materials don't necessarily do or see through so we can start playing with different

31:04 light so depending on the if you put the glass sculpture or acrylic sculpture transparent and we can 3d print acrylic materials today if you put an acrylic sculpt and you can see the sculptures are now extremely smaller the pictures are much bigger because the focuses are the 2d projections on the wall and you can put different light source with different colors on them you'll get a very different result since 2003 we've created over 7500 3d models okay 300 of them 332 actually made them become public there are many more kids that are in different stages of pregnancy again i have no clue how many of them will ever see the way of light

31:49 the day of life but there is a lot of of content that's that's hidden i'll be happy to answer any questions if there are [Applause] are you gonna put everyone else why just kidding i don't know i'd like to know what how maybe i can but no i don't think it's not you you can just see some of a few more than some those did actually did not see that they applied i don't think it's competing with anybody this is a very unique way of there are again now i'm learning more and more

32:36 about art but it's a very different way of looking at hard than other people yes please so when someone asks me how long it takes to make a piece i say about two hours and 10 years once a year i go up the corning new york the italian guys come there to give classes and youtube is my best friend i stay i i watch youtube on a daily basis to see new ideas and the difference about glass because for many years in morono they did not reveal the secrets they still don't tell everything and so it's it's enough to see a gesture a movement here to try to understand but it's a hobby to me

33:22 it's a serious hobby but it's still a hobby 10 years yes please so 10 years [Music]

34:10 [Music] it's not a problem thank you very much you