Guest Artist Lecture: Vivian Beer 3/31/11

Vivian Beer, Slither.walk.fly, 2008

Leah (my professor for woodworking) really encouraged us to go to Vivian Beer's talk and I am so glad that I did!  Her stuff is just beautiful, and I can't imagine working with metal the way she does.  She makes it look so fluid and effortless.  

She began her talk by discussing how much her upbringing in rural Maine has influenced her work.  She described herself as being almost a feral child when she was younger, spending most of her time outside in gorgeous landscapes that she now draws inspiration from.  She showed us some samples from a collection of photographs she continuously adds to whenever she wants to record a new place or aspect of a landscape for future work.  

Vivian Beer, Current, 2008

She also discussed how we are all barraged by a multitude of images everyday, a lot of advertising and mass media, and how she is influenced by these as well.  As Leah said when she introduced Vivian, her work treads through and between different disciplines, being both craft and fine art, design, furniture, sculpture.  

Vivian works pretty much exclusively with metal.  She said she loves using sheet metal as a basis for much of her pieces.  She enjoys distorting the form of the sheet into unusual smooth shapes, altering the thickness and character of the sheet.  In finishing her work, she uses a lot of automobile paint which is where she gets many of the bright colors like in Current (at right).  

  

Vivian Beer, Filled with birds and beasts, 2004

I love all the works I have pictured here, but I enjoyed a particular aspect of Cloud Couch (below).  Vivian told us that she made it slightly higher than a normal bench so when someone would sit on it, only their toes would touch the ground, echoing the "cloud" part of its title.  Though this is seemingly simple, it just shows how much thought she puts into every one of her pieces and the particular concepts she tries to communicate with each one.  (Cloud Couch is installed in a park in Portland, ME).

Vivian Beer, Cloud Couch, 2008